You a College Boy or Somethin'?

Traipsing down the hall clutching my shower caddy from Bed Bath N' Beyond

Oh dear, it’s been a month since I last wrote here and I have so many things to say that I hardly know where to begin. For starters, I still want to finish my list of incredible books I’ve enjoyed recently (I told you I had six more to recommend, but then I finished Demon Copperhead a few weeks ago, despite being passively-aggressively sure I would not enjoy it, even though literally everyone else did, and now I have seven!)

But I guess the thing that’s top of mind for me at the moment is a fun/terrifying thing I am doing eight days from now, which is attending the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where I will live for a week, in the dorms, basically cos-playing an American college student, something I have always wanted to do my entire life.

I went to university in London, you see, where there was no “campus” to speak of, just a series of buildings planted right in the middle of all the other things going on in London. On the one hand, as a 19-year-old, this was amazing! I mean, imagine: you’re just, like, living by yourself in the middle of one of the greatest cities in the world! On the other hand, I was always broke as a joke and I never got to do anything like “walk across a leafy quad.” My god, the number of times I am going to walk across a leafy quad when I am at Kenyon College next week! I assume I will be carrying a precariously tall stack of books at all times and saying things like “what time should we pre-game before the toga party at Chi Alpha Lambda Epsilon Omega tonight?” I see the week stretching out before me as a crossover between “The Sex Lives of College Girls” and the movie where Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum go back to college as undercover cops, is what I am saying. Except, of course, that I am happily married and also not a police officer. Plus I don’t even know if Kenyon College has a leafy quad.

Is this a leafy quad? This has gotta be a leafy quad, right?

Also, and this is not sarcasm because I understand people are sometimes needlessly rude about this sort of thing, but I am very excited to go to Ohio. I have always wanted to go to Ohio! I love the Midwest so much, and Ohio is one of the few Midwestern states I have not been to before (the only remaining ones after this on my Midwestern bucket list are Iowa and the Dakotas.) Later in the summer, Sean and I are taking the kids to Greece, also a place I have always wanted to go and never visited, and honestly I am hard-pressed to say which I am more excited about, Ohio or Greece. I contain multitudes! Luckily, my closet also contains multitudes, because these trips seem like they will require very different wardrobes.

Regarding next week, the only thing I am worried about—I mean, aside from the part where the other writers and I will scrutinize each other’s work for three hours every morning in workshop—is the part where I will actually have to, well, live like a college student. I have been watching a lot of YouTube videos of the dorms—totally normal behavior—and while a large portion of me is excited about how wonderful it will be to have little to do but write for a week and to have a quiet, private, dedicated place in which to do it, a separate, equally large portion of me is like “wow, I do not want to think about what’s happened on those mattresses.” I mean, I assume, like, teenage boys have happened on those mattresses?

I have therefore been thinking recently about what kind of things I could bring to make the dorm feel less dormy. I mean, I still want the unparalleled intellectual stimulation that I assume will be passed to me, via osmosis, by immersing myself in the same space as the youngest, sharpest minds in America etcetera etcetera, but also I am 43 and I really like nice sheets.

So I could bring my own sheets, obviously! Except I have watched enough Undeclared (amazingly underrated show) to know that the beds in college dorms are for some reason Twin XL-sized, not normal Twin-sized (maybe to accommodate all the teenage boys?), although Google tells me that some Twin-sized sheets will also fit Twin XL beds. This means that some part of my weekend will be spent measuring my children’s sheets with a tape measure and also that I may spend my one week as a cool college student sleeping on pirouetting ballerinas from Pottery Barn Kids.

Also my own towels, right? Can I stop off between the airport and the campus to buy myself a bunch of Trader Joe’s peonies? Is that weird? I assume a candle will violate every fire hazard code in the book, but will I be ceaselessly made fun of if I bring my own travel diffuser to make the room smell nice? (Yes.) Is it a little much to check a bag so I can bring my own pillow? (Also yes, but I’m probably gonna do that one anyway.) My own slippers and my own favorite water bottle feel like pretty normal, low-stakes things to ensure a smidge of physical and mental comfort while away from home, but, like, where’s the line? Is it emailing the program coordinator (which I did) to ask if I may ship myself a package and then perusing Twin-XL-sized mattress toppers (which I also did) just to see how much they are? Yeah, I think that might be the line.

My bourgeoisie princess tendencies aside, I am extremely excited about spending the week immersed in writing, with other writers, on a college campus renowned for its writing program. My professor has already sent me an assignment! (It was not “measure your children’s sheets to see if they will fit.”) In the meantime, I have been practicing my keg stands so that I’m ready as can be for the toga party at Chi Alpha Lambda Epsilon Omega tonight. Ah don’t worry, I’m only joking, of course. I don’t need to practice.