Katherine

Saturday afternoon, I got a text from my dad saying that I got a letter from one of the colleges I applied to as a transfer. He asked if I wanted him to open it right then and there. After an internal debate that lasted longer than it would have taken me to drive over to the house, read the letter, steal some potato chips, and drive back, I said yes, then stared at my phone for an excruciatingly long five minutes. He finally texted me back: I had been accepted. I was so excited that I took a celebratory nap (suspense wears me out), then offered to buy my brother dinner. Later that night I brought some food to my parents’ house and told my brother the news. He screamed, ran around, and then tackled me.

SO, I got into a college and can transfer this fall (provided my final grades are good). The college I’m at now is a short drive from the house I grew up in. It feels more like an extra year of high school than like a whole new adventure or whatever college is supposed to be. It’s a conservative and vaguely Christian school; talking about anything the slightest bit risqué, even if it’s just sexual euphemisms in a poem, is frowned upon by faculty and students alike. And even though I was raised in the South, I’m having a hard time relating with most of these people, because all conversation and behavior down here is ruled by an obligation to be polite above anything else. Also, the school I go to now doesn’t offer or allow me to participate in a lot of extracurricular activities that I’m interested in; the new one does. I’m ready to be a real human who interacts with other humans outside of class again. But the thing I’m looking forward to most of all is not having to act like I’ve seen The Matrix.

The freshman class at my school had to watch The Matrix in this class you’re required to take your first semester, but I missed the second half of the movie in order to sleep in. Since then I’ve willingly lied about having seen it to SO MANY of my instructors and peers. Basically everyone I talk to wants to talk about, or at least references in some way, The Matrix. Many of my teachers bring it up regularly in class discussions. I know it’s a popular movie, but, like, there are other movies.

Anyway, I get to transfer this fall, and if I discover that everything around me is an illusion created by robots that took over the world and I have to spend the rest of my life playing video games in a spaceship (that’s as far as I got in the movie), I’m going to scream. ♦