What is it that I loved about college? I’ve been trying to figure it out because I’ve been thinking about grad school again. I think about grad school about once a year (I think it’s the school-supply air of fall that does it), and wonder if I ought to revive my collegiate goal of becoming a professor. It still appeals to me, and my latest variation includes a marriage of my two fantasies – adjunct professor and business owner.

But really, I think I just want to be in college again, to be a student again. I was a good student. I mean, I was really good at it. I’d really like to give my senior year another shot though. I used to brag about the fact that I was drunk when I wrote the majority of my 83-page thesis in just one month. I got an A-. Imagine what I could’ve done sober.

I did love being a student. I loved to read and extract the ideas, put them in a historical context, spin them together with something new. I could write a 12-to-15-page paper on almost anything in 3.4 hours and consistently earn high marks. One professor like my ideas on Kurt Vonnegut and Thorstein Veblen so much, he invited me to do an independent study with him.

None of that matters in my job, and it doesn’t matter in the majority of the business world. I’m sure there are companies and positions where it does matter, but the reality is that once you leave college, nobody is asking you to make a business of having an informed mind, questioning the way your mind works, or finding an outlet for your creativity. That’s been the truth I’ve found anyway.

And that’s fine for a lot of people. But four years after graduation, I find myself craving it again. I’d left college with the idea that I needed a year or two of “life” before going to grad school, so I didn’t burn out, so I could be sure. I sure have lived, that’s certain.

All day they’ve been playing Marlon Brando movies. I can’t believe how hot he was. I can’t believe I’ve never noticed him before. It’s not just that he’s attractive – it’s that he’s my ideal. My type to say the least. Hotter even than Paul Newman, because he’s got brown eyes. No, if I’m honest it’s because he looks just like him, like Paul.

Before happening upon “Julius Caesar” as I channel-surfed, it’d been months since I thought of Paul. It’d been ages since I uttered the name of the man I judged all other men against. Until he was there. On the screen, except it was Marlon Brando. Is he objectively my ideal or is it that he’s the spitting image of my first love, my first romantic admiration?

Paul was the embodiment of everything I thought I could ever want in a man. I was 17 maybe, when I first walked into his bookstore. He was so cute that my shy bookworm self could barely lift my eyes to meet his whenever I came in to buy whatever Truman Capote book I hadn’t yet read. I became a regular and he finally drew me out. At some point, I even stopped blushing the entire time I was around him.

He had big warm brown eyes (I’ve been a sucker for them ever since) and short, blond hair that had a bit of a curl, not unlike Brando as Mark Antony. And though he had a small fame, he had an athletic build from years of soccer. He wore V-neck sweaters with a white T-shirt peeking out from underneath, something I’ve also been a sucker for ever since. (For some odd, odd reason every guy I’ve ever dated since has refused to wear a V-neck sweater. I wonder if they knew how much play it would get them, if that would make a difference. But I digress…)

He wrote, on an old Underwood typewriter no less, painted, and played wonderful records. He is responsible for cultivating my love for Chet Baker, jazz, and various indie pop bands. Best of all, he owned a bookstore, his dream… a dream he’s left a six-figure accounting job for in Atlanta. That made him almost untouchable in my 17-year-old lexicon.

When I visited home from college, his shop was one of the first places I went and I was always guaranteed a cup of coffee and great conversation. At some point, I think I was in my junior year, we hooked up. It was like fornicating with a god. Whenever I was between relationships, I knew I could hook up with Paul. Really it only happened a handful of times, but how many people get to do it with someone they idolized? I’m not sure there’s been a more perfect morning in my life than one cool Florida winter morning, air streaming through the window, in Paul’s bed, having coffee. He touched me the way I always wanted to be touched, and saw me the way I’d always wanted to be seen. He had a way of stripping everything away.

I’ve never dated a man who could hold a candle to Paul, and most people would probably say they couldn’t because of the pedestal I placed him on. There’s truth in that, and five or six years later, I can see his faults. He was emotionally unavailable and closed off, unable to commit. And let’s face it: he was willing to sleep with a 20-year-old when he himself was 32.

Still, I’m not so sure that’s all of it. I wonder now, though, whether I more admired him so much as I wanted to be him. I myself was an artist, a book lover, a dreamer, a soccer player, and later, I could find, a writer. I admired the courage it took to leave that kind of security, knowing that he came from the same alcoholic, working class background as I had, to pursue his dream of owning his own business.

I identified with his vivacity and openness in thought. He was so much stronger than me it seemed. He was so confident in who he was, and he seemed genuinely at ease in his solitude. I guess I still do admire Paul, though he’s closed his bookstore and moved on. While I say that I judge all men against him, perhaps it’s really myself that I’m measuring.

One of my favorite childhood memories is of my parents’ record collection. I would sit in front of our stereo with the records spread over the living room carpet, balancing the much-too-large headphones over my ears. I would close my eyes and listen with delight, awe and sadness to The Kinks, Peter Frampton, Janis Joplin, Cream, Chicago, and the Allman Brothers. What I heard affected me.

It’s a wonder my parents didn’t guess I would be a DJ and run a radio station one day.

Music can move me in a way nothing else can. When people ask me about my spirituality, I tell them that it’s one part music, one part night sky and one part ocean (gawd, I sound like a hippie). Nothing gets at my soul as quickly and profoundly as music does. I can still spend an evening happily with my headphones on lying on my own living room floor, just in front of my computer now instead of a hi-fi.

After spending this past Saturday night hanging out with GIWS listening to music and talking for a few hours, he pointed out a habit I’ve known about for a while. “You and your kicks,” he said. “You get on these kicks with certain albums.” It’s true. I tend to take an album, whether it just came out or I suddenly get the urge to revisit it, and I listen to it over and over and over. For like weeks, usually months at a time, until I’m absolutely sick of it and can’t stand to hear it for another 6 months or so.

The really amazing thing about my little habit, which has annoyed the crap out of almost every boyfriend I’ve had who doesn’t understand my relationship to music, is that it creates an aural memory-inducer. In layman’s terms, later in life when I hear a song from that “kick” it takes me instantly back to that few weeks or months of my life.

It’s fantastic.

When I hear Death Cab For Cutie’s “The Photo Album,” I am swept instantly back to my sophomore year of college. I was playing it non-stop in the fall of that year, and it reminds me of my best friend Amanda, trying to repress my shouted requests when they toured through Orlando that year, and making out with a cute, cute boy to track #3.

When I hear Coldplay’s “Parachutes,” I am instantly sitting on the shared upstairs porch with my dorm mate Heeral, drunkenly shouting the lyrics after sauntering back to campus as a freshman who somehow didn’t get carded at a British pub. It always reminds me of the way you could tell she was drunk because she’d start speaking with a British accent.

When I hear Neil Halstead’s “Sleeping on Roads,” I can vividly remember my first apartment in Orlando and how gorgeous the spring was that year, my junior year of college. I would put it on while doing little things, like putting clean, hot pink sheets on my bed or sitting in my favorite chair (a hideous green wool La-Z-Boy I bought for $5 at a garage sale) overlooking second-story trees in bloom while reading. It reminds me of much simpler times.

What I’ve done with my play-the-crap-out-of-it habit is create a soundtrack to my life. The Verve is what I listened to my first month of sobriety, and “Lucky Man” is the official song of my sober life. Pete Yorn is what I listened to as I fell for GIWS. And now, as I go through what I can only describe as a new painful period of growth, I am stuck on Radiohead’s “The Bends.”

I don’t fight it because I know that it will help me get through today and that one day in the future I’ll hear it and be swept back to these days, fondly remembering how I didn’t know yet what was in store for me. Maybe that’s the fun part of making the memory – realizing that this will be the past one day and that I might as well enjoy where I’m at.

I’ve been cursed my whole life with being both right- and left-brained. Not a lot of people can go from designing a new website to working with raw demographic data tables for an unrelated project. I loved logic and trig while being a total art kid in high school. In college, I double-majored in philosophy and art, though I have to admit I could see no use for aesthetic theory – I couldn’t handle philosophy of art.

Thus far, it’s been really useful in my career. When I worked at a non-profit start-up straight out of college, I needed to wear a lot of hats. I recruited, I mentored, I edited news articles, I did research, I designed web pages, I coded, and I took bids on jobs. I had to be able to turn my attention from page design one moment to researching interviewees the next. As a marketing research analyst in a small department, part of the job description was that the candidate should be able to turn on a dime, and I do, from logo design to demographics mapping.

However, I’ve recently realized that my wonderful little gift is also my curse. There are a lot of things I’m good at. I’m not being an egoist; I’m really pretty good at all sorts of stuff. I like trying new things, and enthusiasm will take you far. I’ve been a DJ at a radio station and a nightclub, artist, barista, magazine editor, proofreader, new media director, special events coordinator, bartender, research analyst, blogger, IT consultant. At some point, I was even a pre-med major. I’ve rock-climbed, knitted, done ethnic cooking, trained for marathons, played softball, volleyball and soccer, been a vegetarian, and done some motivational speaking.

The problem? I’m all over the place.

When recently thinking about my career, I realized that I had no specialty. I’ve always had to twist my résumé credentials to fit the requirements (philosophy degree = critical thinking skills + analytical skills + thesis research = market researcher!). Don’t get me a wrong – I’m a great hire. However, I’d really like to be great at something.

I’d like to be great at something.

Not just good. Not okay. Not just ‘oh, yeah, I did that, too.’

I look at the people I admire, and they are either the giants of their fields or they’ve got a particular niche cornered. I’d like to really have my head wrapped around something, not just have a surface understanding or street knowledge about it. I’m tired of being OK at a lot of things.

I’m ready to be great at something. And not just to be Great, but to put the work into it to really understand it, to be an authority on it. When I was a philosophy major, I dreamed of being the Heidegger scholar studied enough to get a glimpse of his unpublished, untranslated papers tucked away in a small German library. As a new media director, I dreamed of taking our little start-up site nationwide, even global.

Now, I dream other dreams… dreams of a research analyst (believe it or not), dreams of a blogger, dreams of an entrepreneur. There are so many things I could do though; how do I choose? How do you know which one you have the potential to be great at?

This is part one in a two-part series.

I hadn’t written a blog post in a few days, almost a week actually. I was fresh out of ideas and inspiration. Granted, I had blogged for a good four or five days in a row, but still. Sitting at my desk at work, my eyes had glazed over in computer screen hypnosis. I skipped lunch and needed to get out, empty gas tank be damned.

As I drove, they started coming to me – ideas for blog posts. By the time I got to the café, I’d thought of and developed four solid articles in my head. I realized as I grabbed my coffee and settled at a table that I’d been completely lost the entire drive over. It came together – I hadn’t been driving as much as I normally do because gas prices were (are) ridiculously high. I stayed at Date #4’s place all week, which is 5 minutes from work as opposed to the 25 minutes it takes from my place. Sure, I saved a bundle on gas, but at what cost?

In my life, I don’t get a lot of alone time. Nothing compared to people with kids, but in comparison to being single, alone time is scarce these days. As I was telling Date #4 just yesterday, there are some things I’ll only do when I’m bored. Mainly, cleaning and tidying up in general, but I would lump “getting blog ideas” in there as well.

The high cost of gas has me thinking about a scene in “Singles” (one of my all-time favorite movies… I still heart you, Cameron Crowe, even though you made “Elizabethtown”). The main character is telling his love interest about a light rail transit project he’s proposing to his city. As he’s explaining all of the benefits, she says, “Yeah, but I love my car.” 

Perhaps we love our cars because it’s the one place where we don’t have to deal with people. Or maybe it’s because it can become our one-man karaoke machine. Or perhaps it’s just the place were we get our best ideas.

Either way, our dependence on oil might make the long car trip a thing of the past. Instead of thoughtfully losing ourselves in the highway, we’re watching our odometers and our gas gauges, calculating times between stop lights on our daily routes so that we don’t have to brake or come to a full stop (hey, it saves gas).

I’m not saying we shouldn’t save on gas, I’m just saying that unless we get some sort of alternative fuel, our old ways will die. And with them goes an untold number of little streams of creativity and peace.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons user freeparking.