a big production

From The Everywhere Girl Diaries – a work of fiction
The third week of May, year one

Dear Diary,

I can’t believe I’m graduating. It’s not that there was a danger that I wouldn’t. The digits in my GPA add up to 11 and even my SAT scores indicate that very little taxpayer money was wasted. It is just that it is unbelievable that the time has finally come. The last twelve years are pretty much a blur of progressively sharper scissors punctuated by No. 2 pencils, learning the color wheel, Shel Silverstein poems, outdoor school, reading A Tale of Two Cities, and my now infamous report on Isadora Duncan.

This year, of course, will be the most memorable – not because of the obligatory senior activities and hype, but because of the disproportionate amount of time I have spent deciding on where to go to college. I don’t know why I had to make a big PRODUCTION out of it. None of my friends had that problem.

Angie surprised her parents when she was nine by announcing one Sunday afternoon that they really shouldn’t be buying expensive cuts of meat because she would be attending Arizona State and there was the issue of out-of-state tuition. Where or how she heard about ASU, let alone out-of-state tuition was never determined. However, Angie stuck with her plan and when this year rolled around that was the only school she applied to. Unfortunately, her parents had never taken her seriously and, as they continued to buy steak rather than hamburger, could only afford to send her to a state school. Fortunately Angie had, over the years, kept a watchful eye on her family’s meat choices and knew that this would probably be the case. She applied for multiple scholarships (even mentioning the “sirloin” issue in some of her essays) and was awarded enough of them to pay for her tuition for all four years.

Peter, on the other hand, did not have the opportunity to make his own choice. His parents brought him home from the hospital in a Duck sweatshirt and I think he had one on in each and every one of his school pictures. Some would call it brainwashing, his father calls it a “grand family tradition”. Go Ducks.

And Ally? Well we all knew she’d end up at Julliard. They knew about her before she had ever heard about them. It is a perfect match.

It just wasn’t that easy for me. I wanted to go everywhere and study everything. I wanted to go to a small women’s college and a big university. I wanted to stay close to home and move far away. I wanted to be in the middle of a city and in the rolling hills. Glossy catalogs, seductive “we want you” letters, interactive websites, student testimonials, Best and Worst Colleges lists, and campus tours only made it harder to decide. They all contributed to the hours upon hours of research, analysis, and soul searching it took for me to finally make my decision.

But I did it. I finally decided. I accepted today and school starts the last week of August!