Dear Geneseo Alumni
by Ichabod

 

An unusually thick envelope came in the mail last week, from my alma mater.

Dear Geneseo Alumni,

We know you took pride in Geneseo’s high admissions standards when you were an undergrad. Those standards have climbed even higher since you graduated. Geneseo accepted 23% fewer freshman applications this year than we did for your graduating class, and the students we did accept scored an average of 122 points higher on the SATs than you and your classmates.

To ensure that a Geneseo degree remains the gold standard of public liberal arts education, we’re asking that all alumni re-apply and be re-accepted to Geneseo under the new, higher standards. Alumni who do not re-apply, or are not re-accepted, will have their degrees officially rescinded.

Your re-application packet is enclosed. It includes information on re-taking the SATs and ACTs as well as a selection of re-admission essay questions. Please include an essay (under 2,000 words), based on the question of your choice, along with your reapplication.

I sent the packet to the far corner of my desk as if I was making it think about what it had done. Eventually I picked question number three:

Our records show you fulfilled all graduation requirements and paid your tuition in full. Setting aside those facts, why do you deserve to keep your degree?

I feared this day would come. Not in the particular form it has—this is overdone—but insofar as someone would catch on that I hadn’t completed college.

This might be confusing to you. You sent me this letter because your records show I graduated. And, in the sense of being only a half-hearted class-skipper and avoiding the five-year plan, I did. Is that the gold-standard definition of “complete liberal arts education” we’re going with though?

In four years I read one book I was not specifically assigned to read. I read it in my airless, paisley dorm single. Not ruminatively, under a tree, in the fading October sunlight—as admissions brochure iconography might lead you to believe. I knew I was missing The College Experience. Sporadically I’d go looking for it. Freshman year I went to three meetings of the History Club. At the beginning of every semester I evaluated each new class and professor. Was this going to be The Life Changing Course? Was he going to be The Visionary Adjunct Who Sees Something in Me I Never Would Have Seen in Myself? When I went to office hours to follow up, the potential seers would chat amiably for a few minutes about the last class assignment, then resume grading papers.

After four years had elapsed I got a diploma in the mail. I don’t take any impish pride here. Nor do I think Geneseo didn’t hold up its end of any implied bargain. Grad school was exactly the same.

If I arrange my still memories of higher ed into a flipbook and speed through, I see something—it’s too metaphysical to call an explanation—emerge. I see myself putting in 75% of the effort a given task requires, over and over, and yet gliding over the bar every time. A force is at work in my life. There is an excellent physics metaphor somewhere in here that I cannot make, because physics would have been an awful lot of work for an elective. The force is akin to anti-gravity. I call it cush.

Cush is in action when a convenience store clerk sees you drop a commendable number of coins in the March of Dimes jar on his counter and smiles at you, even though if you knew how much you were going to put in (you were just trying to get rid of change) you would have held back. Cush can be hard to identify because it so closely resembles luck. The two are distinct: luck is the bold force of a winning lottery ticket. Cush is the forgiving presence of a snooze button. In the form of compliments that are solely polite, glances from women way outside your league and the deference of interns who don’t know you hardly make more than they do, cush makes the crushing weight of human social life bearable. And wherever actors are raking in millions for phoned-in performances, wherever line workers are going for drinks at four and having their buddy punch them out, cush is greasing the wheels of the global economy.

I don’t know why or how cush works. I can’t prove it applies to anyone else but me, though I suspect. I do know that cush attracts more cush. I was sitting in a law office, across an assertively-sized desk from a lawyer who’d just hired me as part-time office help, when I noticed it.

“You’re a grad student—,” he said, searching for a paper.

I was. In a creative writing program. The only thing this said about my employability was that I can, with a single act, delay all important decisions for two years. He saw it differently.

“—and I’d like to pay you at a level commensurate with your education.”

To him it was a generous afterthought. I felt like I found a dollar while cleaning my ears. I had been assuming that after Geneseo I would careen into the real world any minute and after that, no more sliding. Apparently not. Apparently these pieces of paper with Old English font were taken seriously. The lawyer gave me $12 an hour and I shook his hand like someone getting away with something. Though I expected the feeling would fade once I started doing work.

That never happened. I went in and sat upright at my desk for 20 hours a week, as agreed. But there were only five hours of work for me, in a busy week. I did everything I was asked, responding with every zealous affectation short of “golly sir, I’ll have that for you right away!” And still, every day I backstroked through an ocean of empty time, tentatively at first, furtively checking my e-mail, then voluptuously, reading nytimes.com until I got to the Style section and cruising the w4m sections of every Craigslist on the West Coast. Occasionally a panic would grip me, and I’d rush to be seen scribbling meaningless notes on a yellow pad, or dialing numbers I knew would not pick up. On some level I thought the entire office knew my game but let it slide because I was a nice guy. A couple months after I left I heard the lawyer had been sorry to see me go.

Here’s a possibility that terrifies me: after a while, cush settles in your subconscious and when you finally will yourself onto the high road every turn takes you back to a plush place.

My next gig was at a knockoff WebMD. It was run out of two dingy bedrooms in a peeling beige bungalow. The boss was an erratic, expressionless Korean doctor who’d lost all interest in running the company years ago. I was the in-house writer. My beat was acne and low-carb diets. And I was psyched. I’d been thinking of myself as a writer for some time and being paid to write made me more plausible.

The one, 1,500 word article I was expected to produce per week could have taken me three hours to research and write if I worked straight through. Then I’d have 17 solid hours of paid relaxation per week. But why rush? I spread my meager load out: 10 minutes of work an hour, four hours a day, five days a week. Usually, after 50 minutes had elapsed I’d be in the middle of reading something. So I’d push that ten minutes back to the next hour. I’d repeat the process until, late in the afternoon, I’d flip back to the blank Word document and realize a solid 40-minute block of work stood between me and the end of the day. I’d slam all my browser windows shut and stare at the blankness for 20 minutes. Then I’d panic. Then I’d wish I had any other job in the world but this one. Then there were only a few minutes left, and what was the point of starting anything? So I’d open Explorer again.

At this point one of my co-workers might come in with a simple question and I would answer in a poisonous tone. I wasn’t angry at them. I just wanted to see how far I could push them, and by extension, this insolent little job.

Little jobs, that’s all these were. That’s what I told myself when my eons of downtime curdled into a churlish sense of missed opportunity. All of it was beside the point now. I’d graduated and now I was starting my career. The future was clear: I was going to be a magazine editor. I had no particular magazine in mind. I didn’t really read magazines. But it was a field and I was going to rise in it. I applied to dozens of places. After sleeping on my friend’s living room floor in Queens for four nights, I became acutely afraid I would never have any money again, and took the first offer I got.

A subconscious cush reflex must be at work. I could not have chosen a workplace any more randomly than I did. And here† the cush-to-work ratio was so high I couldn’t stay awake. Consciousness started slipping out of my grip at ten to two. So I would open a trusty blank Word document, place my elbow firmly on the desk in front of the monitor, arm up, and rest my head in my hand. With my fingers curled around my cheek, it looked—to any passer—like I was staring down an intractable problem. Then I closed my eyes.

I put my arm too far forward on the desk, so that my face looked eye-numbingly close to the screen. I didn’t know that then. I figured my big challenge would be preventing the screen saver from flipping on while I was under. So I rested my free hand on a random keyboard letter. If I really went out, my forearm would relax, my finger would fall on a key and exposure would be staved off. And, with Rube Goldberg beauty, the involuntary drop of my hand onto the keyboard would bump me back awake. I could have just disabled the screen saver from the control panel. But my feeling was, if you can’t have fun falling asleep on the job, what’s the point?

It worked. Until I poked out of the woozy darkness and felt my boss’ face hovering inches over my shoulder. Out the fogged over corner of my right eye I saw he was concerned. He was looking at the monitor. My finger had fallen on a key. It hadn’t woken me. In the white void of the otherwise empty document, it had dashed off an unspaced and unexplainable trail of 187 v’s.

He clapped me on the shoulder. “You might need new glasses,” he said. There was no mockery in his voice. When I quit a few months later they offered me a raise to stay.

I will say nothing of my current employment, other than that certain trends look probable to continue indefinitely. And—I could live with this. The ten years since I started at Geneseo have made me a reflexively comfortable person. Mondays are the same to me as Fridays. There have been side effects, mostly minor. I can’t sit up straight in an office chair anymore. I become suspicious of my colleagues when I see them working earnestly, and when they don’t get my bon mots to the effect that work is a big joke we’re all in on. And the self-doubt. I still assume that deep down I am an intelligent and diligent person who, one day, will be an indispensable asset to the right company. But I don’t actually have any evidence of this. If I never did, could I live with that?

Now you come along waving the bolshevik proposition that a decade of cush can and should be eliminated.

What if your proposition was broadly implemented across society? First the economy would collapse. Hundreds of millions of us—all of us: well-paid CEOs of tanking companies, janitors who steal naps in mop closets they rigged to lock from the inside—would swamp unemployment offices. Factor in the follow-on disintegration of consumer spending, factory production and investment, and we’re looking at a scenario which would find a plurality of Americans in flat-screen-TV-box huts, hungrily masturbating to the erotically tinged overtones of superabundance in Dorothea Lange photos.

At least economically we’d have some sense of direction as we fell. Cushless social life is terra incognita. It’s easy enough to imagine a single, dour convenience store clerk who would never smile at you for donating to the jar. But try a world where no convenience store clerk ever smiled at you, ever‡. Or, a world where letting a less-than-sincere “thanks” or “you're welcome” slip out in conversation with an acquaintance would be as awkward as a dropping an “I love you.”

Thus, I find the prospect of being shaved of my college degree…exciting. If you took it back I would sequentially lose my master’s. Then I’d lose my job. I’d send out hundreds of slapped-together resumes trying to reach anyone who would employ me without a degree, smoldering through my savings in the process. Whatever I landed would require actual work, and pay much less. I could lose my condo. My personality would almost certainly warp under a decade’s worth of deferred effort. My wife—who I met while I was working at the law office—could leave. The only way forward would be back: to school, really graduate this time, and really work. I could, in another 10 years, probably claw my way back to the bourgeois perch I occupy today. Or not. I don’t fundamentally care. Either way, I would be pushing against the cool, complete surface of the real world as I went.

The only knot in the plan is that I have enjoyed writing this essay. Some I wrote at work, in my me-time, maximizing an old spreadsheet over it the few times I sensed my boss was about to pass behind my cubicle. The rest I wrote at home, in my study, on my 19” Dell monitor—all made possible by my cushy salary. As my real name isn’t on this, I’m not so embarrassed to confess that I thought about this essay when I was not working on it, and that I enjoyed the act of polishing it, draft after draft. Completed, it feels like a silvery shard of the real person I would be if it weren’t for cush.

An abrupt paradox: without the benefits of cush, I could not have developed this mirror that reflects who I would be without cush. In an alternate, cushless reality, I would be so consumed by honest work, or so successful at whatever I ended up doing, that I would have neither the time nor inclination to write contrived re-admissions essays. Is this really a conundrum though? If I have something that seems to be a small part of my more-perfect self, shouldn’t I trade it for a complete, cushless more-perfect self? I should. But I can’t bring myself to make the transaction.

My hope is that you’ll have had to re-read the above paragraph several times and, either bored or impressed with my depth, you’ll have stopped reading there: because I still don’t deserve my degree. The best I can do is a prediction. If you let me keep my degree, I’ll quietly stay at the same job—or a series of very similar ones—wrapped in a featherbed of unearned regard for the rest of my life. If you take the degree, in my subsequent job search I’ll have to tell my interviewers that I am, at least in a poetical way, the product of a Geneseo education.

 

Footnotes:
†It wasn’t a magazine, or even close. We’re getting closer to the present now and, as I dig steady income, details are going to fade.

‡Because even if you said “I’m feeling generous today, I think I’ll donate,” as you made your deposit—how could he ever really know your motivations? How could anyone?

 

Ichabod is the pseudonym of a New York area writer who is given to understand that employers are now googling potential new hires.

© 2008 prickofthespindle.com