There's nothing quite like the look in someone's face when I utter those horrifying words:
"No, I'm not graduating this year."
"WHHHAAAA...?" they ask, desperately hoping I hadn't actually just said what I had actually just said. Maybe they had confused my words with other words - less sensical words - like, "That Kathie Lee, I miss her," or "Maybe communism can work."
"I'm taking a fifth year," I'd shoot back, the 100th time that day, 1,000th time that week and the 1,000,000th time that ... well, I'm not really counting.
"Oh, well ..." they pause, trying to make sense of my apparent crime against cultured civilization.
"... that's ... okay. You'll be okay," they reassure themselves.
Yes, of course I'll be okay. I'm not moving to Reykjavik, I'm just taking a fifth year to complete my degree. (They may follow these wise words with "Does your mother know?" A cheap shot if I ever I did hear one. "Well you must be doing grad school?" is another one I just love.)
The second part to this conversation can go in any one of three directions.
One, I'll be comforted like a pathetic little toddler, told that it's nothing I should worry about or be concerned with. As long as I get my act together this fall, I'll be on track to wrap things up in the spring. After all, it turns out, "Why, I was just reading something in Woman's Day or USA Today or on The Today Show about how more and more kids today are taking more than four years! How d'ya like that?"
That conversation will just trail off until it reaches a dead end, and I'll be on my way down the cereal aisle.
Option two is my favorite, and I mean it. Love it like a cold sore.
When you have the conversation du jour with a parent who remembers and appreciates what it was like to be a college student, the second act is far less stressful and can at times be fun.
"Oh! You're taking a fifth year? That's wonderful! I took five years also - it was a great time," they elude to my beaming grin. (At this point, dialogue could splinter off into the regretfully awkward, "... that's wonderful! I took seven years, it's no big deal," at which point you both hopefully realize that neither their advice nor your paying attention to it are all that healthy.)
But if you're lucky, it will conclude with: "Listen, I envy you. You're making college happen for you and it looks like you're enjoying it!" (Exclamation points are never in excess in option two. In fact, they're required.)
And, of course, there's option three. It surprisingly comes up more often than you think, though you'd swear it only happens in your nightmares.
She (it's usually a mother) tells me what Nth degree her son is receiving this May, followed breathlessly by the Fortune 500 internship or fellowship or buttkissship he'll be starting in the fall. Undoubtedly, he got the whatevership from his Uncle Steve in Manhattan, who not only lives the corporate high-tech, hi-fi, Miller-high-life, but is offering to share his TriBeCa loft with his bright and strapping young nephew. Surely, then, the young lad will be able to meet some pretty young socialite (though we'll say she's a law student or something) and become engaged by Christmas, toting around 2.5 kids by the following autumn, and off to the island (not "the island" but "the island" - their island) to build their brand new multi-kabillion-dollar estate.
How darling.
Though option two brings far less to deal with in therapy (a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your shrink), I'd be fibbing if I said that three isn't just as much fun. Yes, you get an emotional beating by the mother of Mr. Future Bill Gates, but you also get to snipe back with a quirky remark about how you remember their son peed his pants in the middle of eighth-grade gym class or you witnesses him eat a booger in kindergarten.
So when you ask me if I'm graduating this year. The answer is no. I've joined the ranks of fifth-year seniority, and I'm proud of it. I'm super, thanks for asking.
