text: Jail Bait
  
  The deprived college years: Surprisingly, people didn't invite the sixteen-year-old violin prodigy to keggers.
  
  My mother got me into playing the violin at age two and a half because she was watching a morning talk show and saw a bunch of small children playing the instrument together in a perfectly straight line, like creepy toddler robots. They were showing off a technique called Suzuki that teaches kids to play really young, even before they learn how to walk without stumbling around, looking all drunk and stuff. In a startling not-so-coincidence, I was born with a congenitally shortened ligament in my left thumb (I like to think it's a romantic birth defect, like Anne Boleyn's sixth finger), and in my mom's mind, "crooked thumb + violin neck" added up to destiny.
  
  My music studies were a big excuse for my being homeschooled, so I would theoretically have more time to practice and become a world-renowned soloist, traveling around the world in a red velvet coach. Unfortunately, I didn't take it seriously enough to earn the coach, and my parents didn't force me to try. Which I'm thankful for. I've met a lot of those kids whose parents crammed something down their throats trying to make baby geniuses. Even by my maladjusted standards, those kids were maladjusted.
  
  No, the most my mom ever did to pressure me about my violin was scream, "YUCK!" really loudly from the other room if I hit a bad note while practicing.
  
  Laziest stage mom EVER.
  
  I did practice when I was bored, and I was bored a lot, so around the age of eight I started to be able to play without sounding like I was throttling a cat. After that, my mom decided to upgrade me to the best teacher we could get in the haute-cultured Southern Mississippi vicinity. I'm not sure what the endgame was other than "My beautiful child is a violin savant, I will get her the best training possible so the world can be blessed with her greatness!" but it was a real gift, because we didn't have a lot of money and lessons were expensive, and my violin abilities ended up getting me a full scholarship to college. I just wish the teacher she found me at the time hadn't been a Russian madman.
  
  For years, we'd drive an hour and a half to New Orleans so I could train with a huge, had-to-be-related-to-a-bear man named Viktor. He was from the "A touch of abuse very good!" school of Soviet training. He would hit me on the arm when I played off-key. With an actual stick. My theory? It was the whittled-down arm bone of a former student.
  
  "Nyet! Nyet! You no practice?! Lazy!" He'd throw up his hands and stare at me with colossal disappointment, like I was his underage daughter, pregnant with fifteen sets of twins.
  
  "I'm sorry, I'll practice more next week!" I rarely did, but it always felt good to have that moment of resolve, like saying, "I'm gonna learn French!" It doesn't MATTER if you do it or not, deciding is the high, right?
  
  When I'd massacre Bach again the following week, Viktor would take a more Communist approach. "Nyet! Nyet!!" He'd stomp over and take my bow hand roughly from behind me and start sawing at the instrument, moving my arm like a terrified puppet across the strings. I'd hang on as much as I could, struggling to keep the bow anywhere near the instrument.
  
  "Understand? You play like this!" I didn't, but I'd nod and just pray for the horrible amusement park ride to be over. This is how I learned to play the violin really, really well.
  
  Despite Czar Viktor's passive aggressiveness and his exact resemblance to Mikhail Gorbachev (sans head tattoo), I loved him and never wanted to disappoint him. Because, as sad as he could get when I was lazy, he became equally impassioned when I was great.
  
  One year I had to play a Mozart concerto for the spring recital, and I came super prepared for dress rehearsal at Viktor's house. My family was having money problems, and it cost a lot to hire a pianist to play with me, so I was determined to get a gold star to show that the money was worth it. Oh, and because my mom said, "I'm paying a lot of money for that pianist, we might not eat this week, so play well or else!"
  
  We started rehearsing, objectively I was rocking the trills, and in the middle I looked over and saw Viktor waving his arms and head around like Stevie Wonder. (No insult, he was just into it.) Out of his right eye, I could have sworn there was... moisture? Trickling?! Was the meanest man I'd ever met having a stroke?! Was I having a stroke? What should I do?! It freaked me out and I almost stopped playing. I didn't, because I didn't want to waste $2.25 a minute, but the impulse was definitely there.
  
  After I was done, Viktor walked over and cupped my face in both hands like it was a Fabergé egg. "So good, so good, my heart!" He thumped himself in the chest. It was a gesture of... I'm not sure. Something positive, like CPR. As the pianist left, he screamed into his kitchen at his little wife, Raeza, who was always cooking while wearing a pair of medical scrubs, even though she wasn't in the medical profession.
  
  "Raeza! Borscht! We eat!"
  
  He hauled me into the kitchen, a room I'd never entered in more than five years of studying with him, and ate disgusting blood-pink soup together.
  
  He looked over the top of his bowl, smiling. "Yes?"
  
  "It's great!" I wanted to throw up.
  
  "Good girl." Viktor patted my head and slurped.
  
  I think in Russia, he'd legally adopted me.
  
  [ College Timez! ]
  
  When I got into my teens, I took the violin more seriously. Because people would tell me how I was adorable when I played, and I'm a praise monkey. (Will perform for smiles!) I auditioned for the Juilliard pre-program when I was fourteen and was accepted, but finances wouldn't allow us to move to New York City full-time. It was a crushing blow because I was definitely ready to move out of the house. In fact, I was always ready to move out. I'd picked out a list of excellent boarding schools by age twelve and couldn't understand why we weren't wealthy enough for me to go abroad like in the "Madeline" books. Or, alternatively, rent me an apartment down the street. I forged my mom's signature and paid all the bills for her anyway, so at that point it was just geographical logistics, right? My parents couldn't understand my vision.
  
  So when my professor offered to help me get into University of Texas at Austin, I was all over it like a rabid dog on jerky. Or whatever analogy. Look, I was excited.
  
  We were living in San Antonio at the time, and my violin teacher was Mr. Frittelli, a professor at UT. He was a tiny man and a dazzling violinist who appreciated a good fart joke. My kind of guy.
  
  One day he asked, "What are you doing for college?"
  
  I sighed a dramatic teen sigh. "I have a ton of them picked out, but I dunno, I have forever to decide." Being precocious was SO HARD.
  
  "How old are you?"
  
  "Fifteen, gonna be sixteen in June."
  
  "Do you want to go to college this year?"
  
  "What?"
  
  OMG.
  
  "Yes. Take me there now, please!"
  
  I'm not sure who Mr. Frittelli blackmailed in order to get an underage teenager with literally NO school transcripts into a public collegiate institution, but a week after we spoke—*BOOM*—he'd arranged for a full scholarship for me to study music starting in the fall. All I had to provide was an SAT score!
  
  Um... okay?
  
  I had taken exactly one standardized test in my life. It was an IQ test to get into preschool. I got all the questions right except one where they asked, "Where is your mom in this picture? The beach or the shed?" I answered "the shed" because I thought they meant "the shade." I knew at age five that my mom was paranoid about sun damage, no way was she hanging on the beach. So in a relative sense, I did perfectly. Anyway, whatever qualifications, I was not letting a stupid bubble test get in the way of this "escape homeschooling" opportunity. The SAT was the Rosetta stone for me. I had no idea what was going on with that thing, but I was gonna crack it!
  
  I scheduled the test for the following weekend (five days of study seemed more than enough) and got one of those thick SAT practice books from the library. I filled out more than one hundred practice tests in five days. No joke. Hand cramped, eyes watering; in retrospect, it would have made a great movie montage with "Eye of the Tiger" playing in the background.
  
  If this story followed classic movie plot construction, I would have failed the test horribly, given up, then discovered newfound resolve through an old homeless man's inspirational words to try again and ace the results. But life doesn't follow traditional story arcs. Whether it was by naïveté or the hand of Thor, I have no idea, but when the results came back, I'd gotten an almost perfect score. One of the few answers I missed was a vocabulary question defining "Spartan," which does NOT mean "warrior-like" but "austere and sparse." (To this day I still think that is misleading and stupid. I saw 300. What am I, a fool?) But based on my scores, I was definitely, absolutely going to college!
  
  Things were going to CHANGE! I could be on my own. To experience life in bigger social contexts than just me and my brother and my online friends! I would move to Austin, be like Felicity or Doogie Howser, MD, plans plans plans... TIRE SCREECH.
  
  Turns out, legally, I was too young to live in the dorms alone. My family's solution? Move to Austin so I could attend school while living at home.
  
  And my mom ended up driving me to college every day.
  
  For four years.
  
  Sigh.
  
  I entered college just as I turned sixteen, with a plan to double-major in mathematics and music. The math thing was for my dad and grandpa, who were firm believers in Real Degrees. (I capitalize because that's how they sounded when they said I had to get one. "A Real Degree.")
  
  You'd think jumping into a school of 30,000-plus students would be intimidating for a girl who'd had only her little brother to hang around for most her life, and you would be right. Luckily, most of my time was to be spent in the music building annex, which was a small underfunded island unto itself. So at least it was the shallow end of the pool I got thrown into without having any limbs to swim.
  
  There were only about six hundred students enrolled in the music school, and people rarely left because it was assumed you locked yourself in a 4x4 practice room for eight hours a day or you were "never going to amount to anything as a musician, so why are you taking up room if you're not serious?" No peer pressure or anything. The building sat on the fringes of campus and was supposed to house the next generation of artists. It had the aesthetics of a Hungarian women's prison.
  
  It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, with elevators that broke all the time. There were long green couches on the first floor that smelled like failure and skin flakes, and no one would nap on them for fear of catching salmonella. I think the whole design was just a nefarious plot to force students back into their tiny LED-lit practice room cages. All senses besides hearing were punished.
  
  I was, of course, nervous about this huge leap into adulthood, so I prepared a detailed strategy for my first day of class. It was mostly inspired by bad TV shows. I would dress as inconspicuously as possible so people wouldn't notice me, and that way I could do recon to figure out my place in the world. Like going undercover in 21 Jump Street. I would draw NO attention to myself, so no one would see how young or how awkward I was, and eventually, I'd just EXIST, unquestioned. Assimilated, like the Borg. Then, after I'd met everyone and fallen in love with qualified men, I'd get a cute outfit, do my hair, and arrive at school completely made over. The guys would fall at my feet, but the one who was nicest to me when I was plain and boring would have my heart, like that episode of Beverly Hills, 90210. Or Boy Meets World? One of those. Who cares, none of it happened like that, anyway.
  
  First day of class, I wore a huge pair of pleated jeans and a T-shirt that was a men's large and a bigger sweater over it, like a late '80s hip-hop star. Totally inconspicuous. I began college by lurking in corners, acting like the kind of kid people say, "But she was so quiet!" after a school shooting. But by noon, no one had approached me to talk. So far, so good!
  
  Everyone who was enrolled in college orchestra had to audition on the first day of the semester so the conductor could figure out how good you were and what seat to assign you for the season. It was The Hunger Games for music majors. The conductor, I'll call him Mr. Murray, was a young upstart who looked like Matthew McConaughey with Farrah Fawcett hair. It tousled around when he worked in the hottest way, waving like American golden wheat. Everyone had a crush on him, and I'm sure he could have slept with every woman in the building (me included), but he was a newlywed with an extremely hot wife who wore a black leather jacket and drove a motorcycle. He didn't need the awkward foreplay of orchestra geeks.
  
  My plan for the audition was to lowball my performance so the other students wouldn't look at me for any reason, but as I entered the room, Mr. Murray said, "It will be nice having you in the orchestra this year. Mr. Frittelli has told me a lot about you."
  
  Sheer panic. Commence inner-anxiety monologue: Mr. Frittelli told him about me? That means he told him I was good! And if I'm bad, Mr. Frittelli will look bad. But I don't want to be TOO good, or the other kids won't like me. But if I suck, they might take away my scholarship... B-U-T... I freaked out inside, torn between fitting in with my peers and being a praise monkey teacher pleaser.
  
  I looked deep into Mr. Murray's cornflower-blue eyes, tried to gather my wits, and in the end, there was no choice. The hot adult wanted me to be good. So I played my heart out.
  
  When the roster got posted that afternoon, I had been placed in the number two First Violin seat. Right in front of the conductor's podium. The Park Place of orchestral real estate, right out of the gate. Crap.
  
  As I looked at the board, I heard a grad student say behind me, "Who the hell is Felicia Day?!" and I slunk away, swimming in my huge acid-washed pants. It was going to be harder to navigate this whole schooling thing than Saved by the Bell had ever taught me.
  
  In the following weeks, I tried to keep a low profile, hiding in the back of classes and practicing in the most out-of-the-way dungeon-like practice rooms, but I could tell everyone was curious about me. I looked ten years old, got placed in front of all the seniors and grad students, and I knew they were all thinking, How good is this kid?
  
  I caught a few of them eavesdropping outside my practice room door, and rather than make friends, I'd glare through the tiny glass window and stop playing to mark up my music in a real fake-spacework kinda way. The idea that I could open up to them never occurred to me. I wasn't used to humans enough to have organic social impulses.
  
  But as the weeks went by, anxiety started eating me up. I knew I couldn't hide forever. They would hear me, and judge me. I wondered if it was too late to quit college and go back home to hang out with my brother and play Legos. It all came to a head when I performed in Professor Frittelli's Master Class, a monthly class where a few people would play and get critiqued so everyone could learn from it. Public shaming, the great pedagogical tool, right? Answer: No. I felt strange and isolated from everyone as it was, so in my brain, "Master Class" was emblazoned as:
  
  I had no practical concept of my skills in relation to the other students. I was raised in such a vacuum, I could only gauge myself against recordings of famous dead people. In comparison to the greatest dead violinist in the world, Jascha Heifetz, I was horrible, so my preparatory mantra became, Please don't listen. Seriously, don't. Oh God, they're going to listen, aren't they?!
  
  I've always thought it's harder to perform in front of five of your friends than five hundred strangers, and this was a perfect example. It was a small room, everyone stared at me as I got up to play, I took twenty times too long to tune my instrument, nodded to the pianist to start, and proceeded to have a panic attack that melted my brain stem into pudding.
  
  I don't remember much. Actually, I remember nothing good, just every single mistake. Out of about five thousand notes, probably four dozen were fumbled or out of tune, but instead of brushing it off, each mistake stabbed into my psyche. I imagined the inner monologue of the other students watching. Look at the weirdo homeschooled kid, she's not so great now, let's have a party and SHUN her later!
  
  I got to the end of the concerto. I bowed. There seemed to be five hours of mocking silence (probably three seconds without mocking, at most). Then I looked my teacher in the eye, said "I'm sorry," burst into tears, and ran out of the room.
  
  Well, I can't say it was the worst thing for the upstart, standoffish little prodigy to do, because everyone realized I wasn't as badass as I acted. After the meltdown, people were a lot nicer to me!
  
  I eventually found my place in the school as the little overachieving sister everyone protected. "Keep Austin Weird" is the motto of the town, and it was the perfect place for me. I never wore matching socks on principle; I had a red sweater that eventually disintegrated from overuse. (Think Linus and his little blue blanket, that was my Big Dog maroon hobo sweater.) And over time I made friends. Because they talked to me, and I decided to talk back to them. Moral of the story: Mortify yourself—when you are at your lowest, you feel ironically self-confident!
  
  I became part of the local classical music scene, on and off campus, playing wedding gigs every weekend and joining the Austin Symphony as the youngest member in their history (until a cellist named Doug joined, who was two months younger. What an ass). I lived at the music building for almost five straight years, practicing twelve hours a day, rehearsing from the time I arrived until they locked the doors at 11:00 p.m. Every single night.
  
  And I loved every intense minute of it.
  
  Oh, and that other full-time degree I was getting at the same time? Yeah, that was happening. But it was mostly just advanced theoretic mathematics, so how stressful could adding THAT on top of everything else be? Psh.
  
  [ Ego Math Stuff ]
  
  I'll be honest: I got my math degree mostly for my dad and grandpa, not for myself. I never longed to become a calculus professor or dazzle the world with my elite accounting skills. I enjoyed it, sure. I liked being different, and I especially liked working hard at something and getting an A in it. That was the thing I REALLY liked. Getting good grades. It was pathological. At campus gatherings I'd introduce myself as, "Felicia Day. I have a 4.0." Not EVEN kidding.
  
  For any math student, the two hardest classes were the ones you took at the end of your degree: Group Theory, and Real Analysis. They were legendary. I knew people who could kick Stephen Hawking in the mind nuts who'd failed out of the classes twice. (A ridiculous exaggeration, but it seemed like a cool sentence.) But I was feeling pretty cocky about completing my degree and sticking the 4.0 landing. My dad promised me $200 if I made it, so there was a natural incentive for me to obsessively study with no breaks for four years straight.
  
  I decided to take Group Theory over the summer, which was a shorter semester and even MORE risky than usual, but hey, I was the golden 4.0 child! Nothing could bring me down. Except colossal arrogant hubris, right?
  
  I'm not gonna try to explain Group Theory in any specificity, but it's the most high-level theoretical math you can do at an undergrad level, analyzing abstract algebraic structures and how they recur throughout mathematics, like rings, fields, vector spaces... okay, I've lost you. And myself. I couldn't remember one bit of it if you waterboarded me. (Patched together that description above from Wikipedia.)
  
  There were maybe fifteen students in the class, and it was taught by a guy who tutored me a bit before college, call him Dr. Cleary (yes, I had math tutors growing up, like royalty). During his first lecture, I was lost. Completely and utterly lost. It was like the professor was speaking a dead language, but it wasn't nearly as cool as Klingon or Elvish.
  
  This was gonna be bad.
  
  First test came around, I'd studied a LOT, and I got... a 23. Yes, out of 100. A TWENTY-THREE. This was my next-to-last semester. I'd maintained a 4.0 the whole time. A red-marked 23 on a test was not just devastating for me, it was... well, yes. It was devastating. That's a good word to use. I almost threw up, but I was in the back of the classroom crying really hard, and I had a weird suspicion that if I did both at once I'd have an aneurysm, so I just concentrated on weeping softly without drawing attention to myself.
  
  After class, I went up to Dr. Cleary, holding back the tears and vomit. "Um, so, uh, what can I do to get an A in the class? Is it impossible now? Should I drop it?"
  
  Dr. Cleary had ear hair like a werewolf, but he was compassionate. Unlike a real werewolf would be. "No, you shouldn't drop it, Felicia. You take it, and if you fail, take it again. That's what a lot of people do."
  
  "I can't do that! I have a 4.0!" It wasn't sinking in through his ear pelt: 4.0 was the DEFINITION of "college Felicia." Didn't he get it?!
  
  He said, with an earnest comb-over and a voice way too calm for the situation, "You know the best thing that could happen? Get a B in this class. Life would be so much easier for you after that. It's not a big deal."
  
  Old Felicia, looking back on young Felicia, nods wisely. She says to herself, "That's the best advice I've ever heard. Why do I care about my GPA so much? Why do I have to be the best at everything? Does it really matter if I have ONE B?"
  
  But young perky-tits Felicia can't hear her thirtysomething, wrinkled self. She is determined to get an A, no matter what Dr. Clear-face said. She will break herself doing it, oh yes she will! Muhahahahah... hah.
  
  Ha!
  
  I went to every single office hour for Dr. Cleary for the rest of the semester. I went to OTHER professors' office hours and pretended to be in their classes to get extra help. I went to one of my mentor professors, Dr. Davis, who had nothing to do with Group Theory at all, but I thought she might be able to get Dr. Cleary to go easy on me. All she said was, "He's right. Get a B, it will be fine." Psh. I did NOT get her a Presidents' Day gift that year.
  
  I took over the physics lounge at the math building for the rest of the summer to study. I checked out dozens of textbooks. I studied math as hard as I ever did the violin, six, eight hours a day. When I hit a wall studying alone, I looked around the classroom and recruited a study partner, a guy named Jesse, at random. "YOU! I'm cute. You got a thirty-eight on the test. Get in here, we're studying all summer!"
  
  Jesse was a gawky but loveable guy with a huge Adam's apple and feet the size of small canoes, and was my constant companion in my quest to master this devil subject. He was at my side all summer, whether he liked it or not, eating frozen burritos for every meal and drinking fifteen cups of coffee a day. Every step of the way. Except when he left for a week because of stupid KIDNEY STONES. What a slacker.
  
  When the final test came around, I'd soaked myself in so much Group Theory that I was seeing numbers fly all over peoples' faces, like in Good Will Hunting or that Russell Crowe movie where he was super smart and then went crazy for an Oscar. I was ready. There were five questions on the test, and as I scanned the final, I saw that I knew every one of them by heart. I looked up, smiled a "Screw you, Dr. Cleary!" smile aimed at the area on his skull where his comb-over met his ear hair, and got to work.
  
  When I got the test back the following week, it had a "100" at the top in red marker.
  
  And a frowny face next to the number.
  
  Yes, a FROWNY FACE. My teacher wanted me to get a B! But I didn't give him the satisfaction. I spent a summer of my life dedicated to something I'd never use again. I showed him!
  
  One semester later I did, indeed, graduate with a 4.0. I had done it. And after that, my GPA did...
  
  Nothing. I never planned on going to graduate school. I wasn't applying for jobs that used grades as a measurement. I didn't need that GPA for any single reason other than to SAY I had it and impress people.
  
  I could turn this into an argument for "Let's reward a high GPA after college in LIFE! Can we get priority seating on Southwest? A free monthly refill at Starbucks? SOMETHING to make four years of my life chasing this arbitrary number WORTH it?!" (Great idea. Never gonna happen.) Or I could argue that if I'd been easier on myself and gotten 10 percent worse grades I could have had 50 percent more friendships and fun.
  
  If someone's takeaway from this story is "Felicia Day said don't study!," I'll punch you in the face. But I AM saying don't chase perfection for perfection's sake, or for anyone else's sake at all. If you strive for something, make sure it's for the right reasons. And if you fail, that will be a better lesson for you than any success you'll ever have. Because you learn a lot from screwing up.
  
  Being perfect... not so much.
  
  Oh, and make sure if you're working hard at something it's in a subject you ACTUALLY want to remember something about ten years later. Because I'm reading the rest of this Wikipedia entry, and this Group Theory stuff is INCOMPREHENSIBLE.
  
  [ Dating? Nah. ]
  
  This section will be pretty short, because there's not a lot to talk about in these areas, haha... I'm serious.
  
  You'd think a girl whose mom drove her to college every day wouldn't exactly have a hoppin' collegiate social life. And you would be correct. I didn't get invited to parties or date anyone for most of those years, because I was underage and for some reason, everyone was afraid of the whole "statutory rape" thing. When I turned eighteen, there was a small party on the fifth floor of the music building, because the guys could flirt openly with me and not get arrested, but even then, I was too shy to hook up with them. Not that I didn't have the desire to. In my heart, I wanted to be with one of the classical guitarists because they were the biggest pick-up artists in the musical world. They had the quietest instruments, which meant they could play in the hallways and not get yelled at, so they sat around playing sexy classical guitar all day, and panties just DROPPED. But the few times one started circling me seriously, my professor would see us together and say, "That flamenco scam artist? He's not good enough for you, get back to work." And I'd skitter off back into my practice room and lock the door against a potentially glorious and rhythmically complicated seduction. Sigh.
  
  On a basic level, I had no idea how to approach men. My general strategy was to stare at them from afar, with big Margaret Keane eyes, waiting for them to come over and save me, like a quirky indie film ingénue. Let's be real: that character makes for good film festival fodder, but no one wants to take on that damage in real life. Manic Pixie Dream Meh, more like it.
  
  The only guy I dated for any significant time in college was able to crack the awkward ice because of a toilet flush. In "Carmina Burana," specifically, a piece we played in symphony together. He was a percussionist, and it's a totally dramatic piece, overwrought in the most entertaining way. You'll recognize the main theme from every shirtless warrior movie, but in one of the sections there's a percussion instrument that LITERALLY sounds like a toilet flush. Every time we'd play that section, I'd look back at this cute blond percussionist with two earrings in one ear and start snickering as he played that instrument, whatever it was called officially. Unofficially, it was "that toilet flush thing."
  
  One day after rehearsal, he approached me in the elevator and said, "Funny about that toilet sound, huh? Do you wanna go to lunch?" I was nineteen by then, I'd figured out I didn't have to get married after one date, and said, "Sure!"
  
  We had a great time together because, surprise! Turned out he loved computers as much as I did. He collected Atari consoles (ALL of them, he had over fifty on shelves around his bed) and we'd go to his apartment and play Kaboom! and Tank instead of fooling around. I guess to some people that might have been weird, but I got my rocks off watching someone be amazing at Duck Hunt. Whatever.
  
  My percussionist boyfriend graduated and went away to grad school a few semesters later, but not before he introduced me to the most amazing thing I'd ever experienced. No, not sex (I'm a lady; I don't write about that) but something just as good: the World Wide Web.
  
  It was just emerging as a THING in the mid-'90s. Boggles the mind, but Friendster and MySpace weren't just punch lines to jokes at one point. One day I was trying to find a reference book for a term paper at the library, and my boyfriend said to me, "You should use the computer lab, way easier than the card system." Of course, I thought he was an idiot. I was a library loyalist, paper was always superior, and flipping through the index cards made me feel industrious. But I went into the computer lab and, lo and behold, on the desktop of the music lab computer was a thing called a "browser icon." I was confused.
  
  "Mosaic? What's that?"
  
  I double-clicked and stared at a blank university database search page. There was a search bar in the middle with no instructions, no guide. That was it. Not user-friendly, even for a prototech native like me. I called over to the guy who worked there, "Hey. How do I use this browser thing?"
  
  He said, "Go to AltaVista dot-com and just search for stuff."
  
  "Do I spell out the dot?"
  
  "No, it's a period. 'www.altavista.com.'"
  
  "Sorry. Can you type it in for me?"
  
  He, rolling his eyes, marched over and typed on my computer. I was about to get uppity and say, "Um, you don't have to be condescending..." but as soon as I saw what appeared on the screen, I flipped out and forgot to be defensive and angry.
  
  "OH MY GOD. I CAN SEARCH FOR ANYTHING BY TYPING IN THE BOX?"
  
  "Um, why are you yelling?"
  
  "Sorry, dude."
  
  It was like my childhood dial-up technology but better. A place with unlimited messaging, no expenses, I could type to other people with a keyboard for free about anything I wanted! This browser was... and then it had... and I could... what?!?!?!?
  
  My world was transformed.
  
  After completely forgetting about whatever stupid scholastic thing led me there, it took me about two hours to plant my flag on the internet and create a personal university home page with cutting-edge green bubble GeoCities-like background art that I designed all by myself. Here's the actual picture of my stunning artistry:
  
  Amazing design. Perfect layout. (Font: default New Berolina. Oh, yeah.) True story, I ended up earning a spot on a "Babes of the World Wide Web" directory with this page. It was a disgusting and skuzzy website that compiled the URLs of the "hottest women on the internet." And I made their top fifty list in 1998, yeah! If you blow up my head shot, you can clearly see the faint outlines of a mustache on my upper lip. In the early internet days, standards were definitely lower.
  
  Before I left the lab, I made Condescending Guy show me how to dial up to this "internet" thing from my house using a program called Telnet, and after that I never looked back. Or searched for a social life for the rest of college. With this kind of technology, who needed it?!
  
  Between my web browser, math degree, playing violin and video games, and never ever dating anybody, I had the most comprehensive, unsocial college experience in the history of man. But still, I loved it. I loved being on campus. And learning. And getting perfect grades. And being the little prodigy everyone took care of. I occasionally went to kung fu movie screenings at the college rec center on Friday nights (yes, my mom went with), and I prided myself on knowing every out-of-the-way single-stall restroom hidden in the obscure campus buildings, like Archaeology, where I could poop in private. After four years I graduated as the valedictorian of my class and delivered an overly earnest speech on "Finding the Art in Your Science." The whole time I was lucky enough to find work as a musician, so everyone assumed I would continue on to graduate school and have a great violin career, and all the expectations were heaped and heaped and heaped.
  
  After graduating, I didn't do anything with any of it.
  
  Um, why?
  
  There was a student in Mr. Frittelli's class, I'll call him Carl, who was from New York City and a "BRO!" personified. With an accent like a construction worker and hands like ham hocks, he was the most out-of-place guy you can imagine in the classical music world. And he wanted to play the violin more than anything else in his life.
  
  Thing was, Carl was not good. He didn't start early enough, he didn't work hard enough, he sometimes brandished his instrument like a weapon. No one thought he could make a career of it. But he WANTED it so badly. You could see it in his eyes when he watched other people play who were better than him. It broke my heart.
  
  All I wanted was to give Carl my abilities. Even though I had been devoted to music for so many years, I knew deep down that I didn't want to play violin for the rest of my life.
  
  I admire the crap out of Carl now, because he was doing something he loved more than anything. And he was determined to do it, regardless of how successful he was. Carl played the violin because he had a PASSION for it, and screw the rest of the world. Even if he had to get a day job that wasn't musical after college, and was only able to pick the instrument up at night before bed, to play ONLY for himself, it made him complete to have that in his life. And I think every minute he spent playing that violin was a moment he was spending his time right.
  
  I wanted to find something like that for myself. I had a sense that I hadn't found it yet, that there was MORE out there somewhere. I knew I wasn't complete by playing Pachelbel's Canon for the five hundredth time at a wedding. I knew I wouldn't be satisfied by teaching adorable toddler robots "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," either. I wanted to find a dream that I couldn't live without pursuing. Regardless if I made it or not. Just like for Carl, the "trying" of it would be worth it.
  
  So after graduation, I moved to Los Angeles to become an actor. That was what my heart told me I needed to TRY to become. I knew I could do it.
  
  After all, I had two Real Degrees. How could I fail?