The Grad School Diaries: The Atlanta Transition

Here I am, locked in a life-or-death struggle with the doctoral program in Management at Michigan State University, surviving by the skin of my teeth, the good will of a few professors, and possibly by the grace of God, if one believes in a deity who looks out for secular humanists with very confused ideas about organized religion. By the closing weeks of the year 2008 I knew I had passed all of my classes, but that was about the best you could say for me; the first semester of the doctoral program is generally considered to be your best chance to impress your professors, and my performance had very clearly impressed no one. As I remarked at the time, I was very glad to be one of the 12 people who passed our all-important Methods class – I just wasn’t that crazy about being #12. The sane thing to do would have been to spend as many hours as possible in my office (or my study at home) between the semesters, divide my time between frantically trying to get ahead on the reading for the new semester and compulsively trying to memorize as much of the past term’s information as possible, and hope for the best. So of course, I’m spending the last week of the year in Atlanta, Georgia, hanging out with gamers half my age and helping to throw a really good New Year’s Eve party…

In fairness, I have spent a lot of time during this break working. I’m trying to get ready for an Independent Study project in Entrepreneurship for the new semester, and my advisor has me putting together readings from courses on this subject from all over the country. And there’s no question I need a break; anyone reading these posts probably already knows that my stress level has been ranging between “really bad” and “suicidal depression” for much of the fall, with occasional spikes into the “jumping around yelling ‘Ya-HA! Ya-HA!’ and pelting people with chunks of rump steak insane” level. I need a vacation, and this is more than just a trip back to the South; it’s a trip back in time, as well…

Twenty-five years ago I was in college for the first time, in what even I have to admit were unfocused and generally unproductive years. Much of the time I had no idea of what I wanted to do with my life, or even what the horizon of years beyond my bright college days would bring. Days passed when my biggest concerns were what kind of pizza to order for dinner, what role-playing game systems to invest my meager income on, and whether I’d get a date before the Big Crunch at the end of the Universe made the whole question academic…

It was glorious.

As much as I loved going to school in Santa Barbara, living on campus in dorm room that featured a view of the ocean, and being just “on my own” enough that no one ever told me to clean up my room, some of the best times in that period where when I returned to Los Angeles to hang out with my friends and game, and some of the best of those days were in a multi-generational game where the players included the young woman who would one day become my wife, and the (slightly) older gentleman who would one day become my father-in-law. It was impossible to imagine my own parents hanging out with a bunch of college-age gamers; they’d have been shocked (and bewildered) by the suggestion. I remember thinking, back in those days, that if my turn ever came, if I ever wound up being somebody’s parent, that this was the kind of person I wanted to be, and this was the role I wanted to take…

And now time has come full circle, and it IS my turn to be the older generation of gamer, still playing, still telling collaborative stories with nothing more than a few rule books and some polyhedral dice, still cool enough to actually be the kind of person you’d like to hang out with at a gaming party and maybe share a few tall stories with, both in and out of character. They say you can’t go home again, and undoubtedly it’s true; there is no way for me to return to my single dorm room in Santa Barbara, even if it’s still there, and even supposing that I wanted to go. But if you try hard enough, you might just be blessed enough to return a place and time that everyone else would have told you was gone forever – even if you have to do it as one of the old-school gamers with grey in his beard and jackscrews in his neck…

I’ll have to return to the present day, and all of the anger, frustration, desperation, fear, despair, rage and endless days and nights of effort soon enough. But for the next couple of days, at least, I’m going to hang out in the past. The year 1983 is a nice place to visit – even if you can’t actually go and live there…