review--COLLEGE ALUMNI MAGAZINES

So today I received in the mail a copy of the current Alumni Magazine from my undergrad alma mater. This is the equivalent of a literary car wreck: I don't want to look but I have to, and when I'm finished I find myself going much slower than I was before I saw the accident.

Here's the deal...you may or may not be able to empathize. But I think the hoary truth is that we all occasionally run head-first smack into a wall of our perceived failures and flailings. I just hate that mine shows up periodically in my mailbox at work. Because work is not a place where I like to be reminded of what I feel is my dismal showing in life.
Just a bit of back story: I went to a small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere. Before that, I was a willing slave to the public school system. I loved my mas'ser. Praised him as he beat me down. I was also a huge nerd, and I was too smart for my own good, and I was terrified of boys. So high school really, really sucked. I swear to you I will NEVER ever go to a reunion so long as I live, unless I become Bestest Friends with Keanu or Vince Vaughn or someone of that caliber and they acquiesced to go with me purely to cause jealously. Because that would kick ass.
Anyway, I'm digressing. So with dreams of internationally recognized journalism excellence in my head I left for the aforementioned small liberal arts college, where I proceeded to have a nervous breakdown. My senior year of high school, I was in at least seven different student organziations; two of them, I was in charge. When I got to college I attended one, maybe two yearbook committee meetings and then promptly disappeared. I tried to keep up the crazy schedule, but a life of sleeping until all hours was too tempting. Yet there was that little over-achieving Kelmeister who'd sit on my shoulder and say, You know your father's going into the poor house to pay for you to stay up until two watching cable, and I'd get back on track and go nuts with the work. But then I'd come to realize that college is exactly like high school except for longer books, and then the next thing you know I've started smoking and cutting myself, and I stop eating except for those times that I'm pigging out, and then I'm taking the semester off for "a much needed break." When I come back, I develop a love of dollar a bottle 40s at the market. (You know, They don't like it when you consume alcohol while on anti-depressants. It makes you much drunker, much faster, much more cheaply than drinking alone. That'll be our little secret.) I lose one of my best friends because I'm an asshole when I'm drunk, skip a lot of classes, and spend the final two days of my college career thanking the gods that I got mono so that I have an excuse to make up all the papers and exams I never finished that last sememster. I write the entirety of my senior thesis in 14 hours.
To top it all off, I would have graduated Magna Cum Laude if I hadn't double majored in art.
This is not meant to be an indictment of my college. It's a great school. It's just to point out that I was a complete nutcase while I was there, and to this date regret that I wasted my time while I was there. I just didn't know how totally fucked in the head I was until after I got there.
So where'm I headed with this? Here's the thing: I graduated a decade ago, and I'm getting the Alumni Magazine from my school. This school is really fucking expensive. So much so that if I were to get in today, there'd be no way I could afford to go. My kids, brain surgeons-to-be that they'll probably be, will not be able to go. This means that many--I'd dare say a good 75% of the student body--HAVE MONEY AND CONNECTIONS. So the Alumni Magazine comes in the mail and it's chocked full of stories about this girl in my class and her Tony-award winning play. Or that guy that graduated after me who has his own television show. Or the books that people have written, the government grants to study cold fusion people have won. And that's not including all the tidbits in the back about the successes not notable enough to warrant full-page articles. Partnerships, movie deals, safaris.
My one and only mention in the Alumni magazine was for when I married The Husband. It's on the refrigerator. The Best Friend was in my wedding party, or else he'd probably not have gotten a mention in the Alumni Magazine, either.
The Best Friend and I are total slackers. We recognize this, and embrace it with all our strength. We enabled much of each other's slacker behavior in college. Nowadays, we commiserate about our current slacker behavior, although real life necessity has forced us to curb our most slackerly tendencies.
And I think this is what upsets me most about College Alumni Magazines. They don't do enough to celebrate the little people who're just getting by. I haven't discovered a new species of anything, but here's what I have done:
I pulled myself up out of a debilitating mental illness; I married a really awesome guy whom I love more than Duran Duran and Hugh Laurie and pie; I own a house and a car that I paid for out of my own pocket that was filled with loan money from banks that gave me the money because I pulled my own ass out of credit default; I got my Masters that I paid for out of my own pocket with no loans and as soon as I got my diploma in my hand I enrolled in art school; I have three fish that are still alive against all odds after eight months; I love my job and my co-workers and my friends and my family and for the first time in my life I feel truly, deep-into-the-bones happy.
I'm totally not at all where I thought I'd be when I envisioned myself way back in study hall in high school, but I can't complain. I have my health and my limbs and two cats who adore me and a husband who doesn't mind that that I can't scold said cats and sound like I mean it.
But it never fails that reading the Alumni Magazine makes me feel like a total, unadulterated failure.
So, Kelmeister, I hear you saying, why bother reading it if you know how upset it makes you?
Simple.
It's because I'm obsessed with finding out if anyone I know has died since the last magazine.