By Kaylee Johnson
Campus News
There seems to be a sense of camaraderie at my small Catholic college that is financially falling apart. The people who go there are head over heels about the greasy dining hall onion rings, sleazebag professors who may or may not moonlight as bookies or mistresses or ice cream truck drivers. Our one notable graduate is Jimmy Fallon, which says a lot about the seriousness of my little college that neighbors a Subway and city basketball court lovingly.
Fallon may or may not have been a member of the improv comedy group I was a member of in undergrad. I really liked the idea of being a lady comedian, saying stuff that would make my mother faint with sheer repulsion and disbelief. I carried Payless high heels in my embroidered teaching bag, quickly switching from trousers to sparkly slip on dresses in the basement of the art building, that has now been turned into a nursing building, as most art and music programs have been dismantled.
It has been about a year since I finished my bachelor’s degree, and I start my Clinical Mental Health Counseling graduate program at the same school I started at five years ago in August. This year between undergraduate and graduate school has been glazed with iodine and burned with the force of trick birthday candles.
This age, my age, 22, is so peculiar because it varies greatly for all who wear it. Some of my friends are leading southern type lifestyles, straight out of sororities with rings on their fingers and buns in their ovens. Others are dying their hair purple and lying in the grass, experimenting with all types of things that ultimately numb any sort of ringing in their ears telling them to purse. I have friends who are moving to Manhattan to study acting and film, living frivolously with a parent provided credit card.
Yesterday, I saw a young person pulled over on the side of the road cursing out their smoking 2002 car with sauce from the gas station chicken parmesan sandwich they probably ate on their way to the most important job interview of their life. I can’t stop fixating on the realism in that image, and how my theatre professor closed most classes by saying “realism is more marketable than surrealism these days.”
This year I have found myself at an Albany laundromat with my partner. The seat is high, so my feet dangle, and there is always a VHS tape of “The Flintstones” playing on the tube television near the Super Jumbo Dryer. The laundry is my least favorite thing to do. For the most part, we encapsulate the definition of spontaneity, going on road trips on a moment’s notice with a T-shirt and a tight budget, eating pizza on fire escapes and whatnot. That is what young people in those artsy, overdone films do, right?
This transitional period has given me some vertigo though, as tender as it has been. There are still pieces of me clawing at my childhood – asking my partner what his favorite Matchbox car is when we pass through toy aisles while grocery shopping.
I teach at an urban school, dealing with students with severe behavioral needs. I talk about the incidents and politics within the district as I stir the pasta and add salt to the water to prevent sticking. I remember the days I ate the $3.99 Chinese food special on Madison Ave. in Albany for lunch before every theatre rehearsal; for “luck” as I booked a candlelit gentle yoga class next door.
There are hundreds of developed photos of me exploring the world this past year. Here I am, standing next to graffiti walls in Boston, dancing balconies in Cooperstown, petting miniature ponies standing lonesome on country roads with a look similar to my own in their eyes and then my favorite, a photograph of me sitting cross-legged, sketching in the park I used to wander in as an undergrad, wearing overalls and pigtails. In the photo, there is small baby behind me, giggling and waving with such unbridled innocence. In one photo, I see the sweetness of my past and future.
My performing arts rehearsal lounge was next to the Lima Dorm Building laundry room, where I would sometimes sit on the high chairs, dangle my feet and wait for my fellow thespians to make grand entrances.
My biggest take away from this year has, without a doubt, been “always check your pockets before putting clothes in washing machines.”
Kaylee Johnson is a 2020 graduate of the College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y.
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