Emory was a lot bigger than I previously thought. I'm not very sold on the idea that leaving home was supposed to be hard. I went to school here for 4 years as an undergraduate in the northern part of the state. I thought those previous four years of life in Georgia would carry over. I expected ti be what I could more or less label "picking up where I left off". In some ways it is and in the ways I needed to be that sort of continuation of my virtues, however biased I am in saying that, it isn't. My arrogance and brashness and pride, for no better and all the worse, isn't here. Uncertainty and fear have quickly replaced it and I'd rather my contrived arrogance and brashness be there. That's how I know to be. That's how I like to be. Rather, I've never been so willing to go with the flow and back when I was in undergrad, even during the year I took off before coming to Emory for seminary, I rode into each day recalcitrant and unapologetic about it. I had a plan and I stuck to it and I was able to be that way as much as I saw fit. Now if I search in my head for that obstinacy and pompousness it pulls up "Error 404: File Not Found" and I refuse to be okay with that.
It doesn't even feel like grad school yet. My roommate and I went to undergrad together, I'm closely connected to most of my friends from that time period, so the feeling of "grad school" is more like "Bachelors+". Which can't be good. This is Emory. A world-renown university that somehow looked at my application and went "Yeah sure we need someone to fill this seat". I'm pretty sure I'm not even in a high enough tax bracket to wipe my ass here. To be on Emory's campus itself as a student means, for you fans of the movie The Prince of Egypt, you're playing with the big boys now. This isn't small time college anymore. Messing up or succeeding here can really take a toll, for good and bad, on your future career aspirations. However, it's no more pressure than I was already putting on myself back in undergraduate only with the difference being one of actualization. My fear is that I'll run myself too thin at all the worst possible times.
Currently, if the registrar can update my student page, I'll be doing the first semester of seminary part-time. My biggest scare here is biting off more than I can chew. While I think it's valiant for anyone to do that (it's the academic equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot and I always admire anyone who does that for some odd reason I have yet to figure out), doing that here and now is a great way for me to drop out of school with failing grades because of the stress that I let get to me. Biting off more than I can chew, in school and at work, ends with me being jaded and bitter at everything. Back at home I took a job at the airport in Raleigh that I decided to take with me to Atlanta to assure myself that I'd have some form of steady income. This is the same job that had me up at 2:30am to get me to work at 3:30am, the amount of coffee I consumed could give a horse a heart attack and be measured in terms of tonnes, and the amount of money that the government has taken out of my paycheck (if anything, going out and working has turned me more liberal than ever before, rather than the "When you get a job and start seeing the government take out taxes from your paycheck, you'll turn into a conservative" I've heard and read as if it were some unwritten gospel floating around in its receiving communities) could probably lift a tiny Singaporean village out of poverty for at least six months. Seven months if they want to avoid paying for sanitation services. This is the same exact job that I will be doing at the airport and will have homework to do on top of that. I've never been one to turn down a challenge and this is the biggest one I've ever faced and will be facing for the next year.
I know I'll survive and be the best damn thing anyone here has ever seen. I just want to know how I'll do it. But let me give you two things I've taken away from the past few days here so reading this will have salient points.
I. Peace of mind is a luxury.
Even parking my car in front of my apartment complex leaves me worried that I'll wake up to find it on the blocks. I don't think Lawrenceville, GA is going to be that deprived of basic human decency and respect for other people's property but I don't know my neighbors. I don't know who these people are so therefore I don't trust them. The lease is only for a year, and while a year really isn't understood to be a long time anymore, it doesn't mean that it can't be a busy time. This is the first time I've ever had to do anything like this before and have the added pressure of making it look like I have it all together (when I'm clearly admitting that I don't here, if you haven't been paying attention). While some people are skilled at rolling with the punches, I'm terrible at it. I can take a hard punch but even Jericho fell. I would love guaranteed stability and consistency in my daily life between now and when I die but the moment I left home to move to GA for school was when I saw my peace of mind, created in the form of the parents I love and the home I grew up in and the social circles I helped create and thoroughly enjoyed, stay back in NC. Right now I'm in the process of finding peace of mind again and trying to create it and I'm not doing so great with it right now.
II. Blue Collar Jesus.
I work for a shipping company whose logo is purple and orange and whose services are entirely too expensive for you to be shipping your clothing and college textbooks with but that's just me. Now this is a difficult thing for me to say because I don't really know how to structure it but let me be as clear as I can: "I grew up around enough money to consider Emory an option whether it is an option that is realized through student loans or grants and scholarships" is the way I've characterized this school. Now I grew up with Hispanic parents and they are the two people that gave me the work ethic I have today. I don't like working hard but I dislike even more how it feels to be lazy. Even not exhausting myself with working as much as I was at home makes me feel lazy now. But working at the airport gave me a blue collar Jesus. Now that's not to say that my fellow students don't know how to work hard. Some will and some won't and I think the first year of seminary will weed out those with a crap work ethic. Seminary comes off as a monetary enterprise to me. The people that Jesus reached out to wouldn't be able to afford feeding their families for the day, let alone consider going to school for something as low-paying as seminary, let's be honest with ourselves. This blue collar Jesus isn't the Jesus I want. White collar Jesus is much more appealing to me. White collar Jesus is "I have enough money to afford reading 'give us this day our daily bread' as metaphorical rather than 'if you don't provide my literal food today then my family and I will starve'. I have a Jesus that is the latter. It's not the Jesus I want but it's the Jesus that I probably need and, whether I like it or not, this Jesus isn't going anywhere.
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