Really now? Good for them -- Massachusetts being ahead of the curve and all that.
2004 would be the beginning of "The Glory Days of Brandon" or "The Rise of Brandontology" or however you'd like me to describe it; it was the beginning of the years I would spend getting my collective shit together, so to speak. Spring 2004 was the tail end of my junior year or college; I was 21, I had a job and some saved money, I had friends and goals in mind -- those goals consisting mainly of survive and graduate, survive and graduate. It would also be the last "easy" semester of college I had, as when my senior year started that fall I'd have to chain myself to my desk to get everything done in order to graduate on time and with all aces.
As it stood, I was feeling pretty good about myself for the first time in a very long time. This time, instead of the year waiting for me in a dark alley with a crowbar, the roles were reversed. It finally felt as if I was in charge of my life, or most aspects of it, for the first time in a long while. I wasn't out of the woods yet with school, though; I still had a number of classes to take that were required by my major. I'd finished up my core lit courses, my foreign language requirements (Spanish), my linguistics requirement (the only class at WVU I got a C in and was damn happy to get it), the classics (Chaucer and Shakespeare), my required math course, and most of the creative writing courses by this time, and was left with a few philosophy, science, and humanities credits that I needed to fill.
Truthfully, I was never big on any of those subjects; they were rather dry to me, and didn't seem like they'd be anything I'd use (or anything I really needed for my major). I'd taken Geology in my freshman year; it had a lab with it and it was fine, wasn't difficult at all. They called it "rocks for jocks" because it's what all of the football players took to avoid the harder lab sciences like biology or chemistry. I took Philosophy 101; it was a lecture hall course with no attendance policy, all course materials posted online on the course website, online quizzes, and (I think) but three exams throughout the semester that you had to be in class for -- oh, and those exams were open-book. It was a joke of a class. Psychology I wanted no part of, unless it was the "human sexuality" course (which always filled up within half an hour of class registration online, and I never got to take) or the "abnormal psychology" course (which I also didn't get to take because of prerequisites), and I'd already taken sociology and anthropology.
This left me with only a few options:
Astronomy: I'd heard good things about the class, but only if you had the right professor for it.
Food And Agricultural Science: Apparently a really interesting class, but was held in the engineering building on the other side of campus and would be very difficult to get to on time (8am sharp, people), and more difficult to get to my next class afterwards on time on the other side of campus.
Small Group Communications: Another large lecture hall class that I knew little to nothing about; I assumed it was going to teach me how to lead a discussion and/or manage a team of people.
And, finally...
Religious Studies: Which sounded to me, at the time, as "learn about Jesus and other mythical figures that didn't exist, yet everyone believes did!"
You may ask why I wasn't interested in any of the business courses, or engineering courses, art history, music history, etc -- the answer is simply because I was lazy and just wanted to graduate, and I didn't want some bullshit class I had no real interest in getting in the way of that.
With the rest of my schedule booked with the remaining junior-level creative writing classes (Poetry and Nonfiction), my work schedule being what it was in the lab, and proximity to my other classes, I'd decided to enroll in the Food and Agricultural Science course, give myself a gap in time after it to get back across campus, and then take an afternoon Religious Studies class before needing to head back up to the med center for work, then home, in the afternoon (or, depending on the day, the Guild meeting in the evening). I figured this was a solid plan.
The beginning of the spring semester was brutally cold and snowy, I remember; college wasn't like public schools, where if it snowed more than a few inches, it closed -- hell no, WVU stayed open almost all the time. My parents worked and only stayed home if the weather was really really bad, and I can count on one hand the times where I missed classes in college because we couldn't make it into town. My dad had a F-250 Super Duty with dual gas tanks and four-wheel-drive, locking hubs, big tires -- that truck could go nearly anywhere, and in the West Virginia winter you needed something that would go nearly anywhere or you'd be snowed into your house for weeks at a time when the snow came. You also needed something that would start when it was -15 outside, a temperature it frequently dipped to on the coldest nights of winter on top of the mountain. My Probe and my mother's Honda would do none of those things. Did I mention that up on the mountain, we got so much more snow than Morgantown? We did. I remember one of my high school years, school was canceled for almost the entire month of February because we kept getting storm after storm.
So my semester started on a very cold, icy morning -- hard wind and sleet/ice falling in sheets. It took almost an hour to get to campus, and my first class of the day was the Food and Agricultural Science course on the Engineering campus. All of us students got into a very cramped, crowded little classroom to be told two things:
1) "Actually, the structure of this course, and the workload involved, is more like a graduate level course than an undergrad course, and you'll have field operations where you need to go to X location for Y reason on Z date...." etc.
2) "This course is also overbooked due to an error in the registration systems, so if you don't need it for your major to graduate this spring, I suggest and request that you take it another time and let someone else have your spot this time around"
Welp, there went that plan. I was done. I dropped it that afternoon from the computer I did my work on in the lab, and Food and Agricultural Sciences was something I'd never learn about in my college career.
This, of course, left my mornings free, so for a while I changed up my work schedule on certain days -- go to work in the morning hours when my parents went to work, work until noon or 1, then go to my classes in the afternoon and have the parents pick me up from the main campus on their way back out of town. This worked fairly well for the most part, and I would be able to avoid the bulk of the bitter cold mornings.
The Religious Studies class I took in the afternoons, however, changed my life.
No, not in that way.
At the time (and it may still be), the Religious Studies department at WVU was really small. I'm talking two or three small offices and maybe three professors, with those professors actually taking on the courseloads of the entire department, including the big 101 lecture hall courses. The chair of the department, and my own professor, was Dr. Gale. Dr. Gale was in his early 40s, bald, tall, and thin, and had an infectious energy about him -- he was stoked to be teaching, and he was as energizing as a street preacher was to relay his message. He was also ethnically and culturally American Jewish, though he didn't let that bias him, and was honestly probably the best professor (at least my personal favorite) I had throughout my entire time at WVU. I took four classes with Dr. Gale -- History of World Religions, Old Testament, New Testament, and The History of Evil, which was generally only offered as a capstone course for the actual majors, but he made exceptions for me and my friends Adam and Josh. Had I taken a fifth class, or had room/time for another one in my senior year, I would've been able to get a second minor in Religious Studies.
These were not classes that were meant to minister to you, but were classes that studied the religious texts from an outside perspective, both as literature and as interpretation. They were taught from the perspective that they were just books, they weren't sacred or literal (and at times -- almost all times -- they were completely non-factual). We studied who we believed wrote them with a historical bent, connecting them to world events, connecting the fables to the reality they were trying to relay -- they were really historical literature courses. I thoroughly enjoyed my courses with Dr. Gale, probably especially because I was and am an atheist. Upon my graduation, I wrote Dr. Gale a personal letter of thanks for everything he'd done for me in his classes, and let him know what a valuable asset the university had in him.
In other news, the rest of my life was looking up as well. The Criminally Goofy was in its heyday, I was well-liked amongst those that mattered, I was entering my fourth year at my job (which I would need to give up, temporarily, at the end of the semester in order to focus on graduation), and I became President of the WVU Anime Guild, which was undergoing a bit of restructuring as some of us were graduating or entering the really time-intensive year(s) of their studies.
That spring, I met a woman named Nicole; she was kind, well-traveled, fun to be around, and meshed well with all of us in our group of Freaks. She took a particular interest in me, for some reason, and we began dating. Our relationship lasted about...oh, probably two, two-and-a-half months, something like that, before it dissolved and we went our separate ways. It was my first boyfriend-girlfriend relationship as an adult; I was 21.
I was bitter about our breakup for a while; I didn't want to see her or talk to her when we returned to campus in the fall, and over time I loosened up on that quite a bit. My friend Dusten began dating her soon thereafter, but not without talking to me first ("bro code" or whatever) and I was happy for them; their relationship lasted a while before it also dissolved, and Nicole found another guy on the outskirts of our friends group -- a friend of a friend of a friend, etc etc -- who she ended up marrying a few years later. They've been married ever since, and I wish them nothing but happiness.
Nicole taught me a lot of things; the biggest one was that I wasn't exactly ready for a real relationship. Not emotionally or maturation-wise, anyhow. I still viewed relationships and "love" as I did when I was in high school, which is to say that I was naive. I'm not afraid to say that now, but I would've been too prideful to admit it back then. I was naive. I didn't necessarily know how to act in a relationship, or know how slowly they can and generally should develop. I didn't know not to wear my heart on my sleeve at all times, didn't know how to follow relationship social cues and norms because I had no clue what those cues and norms were.
The previous fall -- and I had forgotten to mention this in my previous posts -- I entered therapy at WVU. WVU had free counseling and therapy available to any of its students (and probably employees, too, I'm sure); I had decided that it was something I desperately needed in order to keep myself a bit more stable and even-keel, and I'd had a very dark few weeks/month or two where I could feel myself slipping dangerously close to suicidal levels again. My parents noticed this time, and I told them that I needed to start seeing somebody and perhaps get on some medication because, if I didn't, I feared that this time I would not come out of it.
My therapist was a kind old man named Claude; he had worked at WVU for probably 30 years at that point, and seemed so old, so ancient to me. But, he was very calm, very soft spoken, and much like Mr. Rogers if Mr. Rogers had worn thick glasses and had a bushy mustache. I told him my entire life story (much like this series of posts); I told him about my suicide attempt, I told him about my struggles with depression, isolation, being overworked, alcoholism, not feeling as if I had any control, etc. He was the first one to tell me that all of these feelings were normal and understandable after what I'd been through, but more importantly, he was the first one to tell me that it wasn't my fault that I was so fucked up.
It was a revolutionary concept to me at the time. I'd had such low self-esteem and such high-levels of self-loathing throughout my life that I'd never questioned that everything that I'd been through was somehow my fault. Well, most of it, anyway. There were some self-destructive decisions I'd made, and he helped me face those decisions. I was encouraged to try to view things from an outside perspective, to battle my demons one at a time and figure out why they existed -- they could only hold power over me if I let them.
I always felt emotionally spent and drained after seeing Claude, but it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. He sent me a referral over to the med center to be psychiatrically evaluated for depression meds; I was really nervous about that because one snap reaction or something of that sort, in that meeting, would mean I could be institutionalized. The psychiatrist seemed bored and mostly uninterested, and wrote me a prescription for one of the new drugs on the market at the time, Lexapro. I decided to give it a try. It wasn't cheap.
Lexapro did two things for me -- one, it worked fast; I almost immediately felt its effects after starting it. Two, those effects were that it made me feel absolutely nothing about anything. I've felt numb and disaffected before, but this was different. It was supposed to "even me out," so to speak -- to balance everything going on in my psyche and brain chemistry -- it did not do that. It made me not give a single flying fuck about anything, good or bad. It drained my creativity, and made it hard to sleep, but also hard to stay awake and concentrate because the drive to do so just wasn't there. That's not what I wanted and definitely something I couldn't continue. I relayed that to Claude, who relayed it to the psychiatrist, who wrote me a prescription for Prozac instead. I never filled said prescription as I was very, very apprehensive about any other medications after seeing what one of them would do to me.
I continued therapy off and on for about a year; I would usually see him once every week or two, and that eventually became once a month or so, and then eventually we ended our therapy relationship at the end of my second semester of doing it; Claude had told me he would be retiring soon, and I wished him well and thanked him for everything he did for me.
Claude died in 2007, and is buried in his hometown of Luray, Virginia. He was 70.
During the spring of 2004, I would eventually whittle down my hours enough to where I had to end up leaving my job in the Microbiology lab; this was partially my decision and partially not. My job was funded by research grant money and was university-sanctioned -- however, that grant was ending, and for several months by that time I had been training my replacement, a small girl from China who spoke very little English but was very sweet. She would be joining the lab as a volunteer to help cement her visa stuff, or something of that sort -- I didn't really ask many questions. Once she was trained up and could fulfill what I'd done in the lab, my employment had an end-date.
This experience was bittersweet; I'd loved my time working in the lab and it had given me a strong work ethic as well as taught me how to deal with difficult people (read: some of the post-docs and grad students in the department), and my former boss there is still a very close friend of not only me, but of our family; we had dinner with him when the wife and I visited back home in 2017. But, in fall 2004, I would start my first year of schooling in several years without a steady, constant income. I'd like to say that was somewhat freeing, and gave me a lot more free time to be able to focus on my classwork, but really all it did was make me poorer.
Fall 2004 was really strange, but it helped center me a bit. I had finished all of my required courses for my major but the senior capstone course for the Creative Writing track (that I couldn't take until spring 2005, it was basically equivalent to a thesis) and I still had a ton of hours to fill in order to graduate on time in May. My solution: take the Astronomy and Communications courses and then take every 100-or-200 level lit course I possibly could and pound my way through them. In addition to those, I also signed up for the only-offered-once-in-a-blue-moon Screenwriting course that I'd desperately wanted to take since I started at WVU.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start with Astronomy.
I am, and have always been, the type of person who looks to the stars. I grew up with Star Wars and Star Trek, and believed (still do) that the best thing humanity can do with itself is get off this planet and explore the universe. I was, therefore, very excited about this astronomy course; I wanted to learn about faraway galaxies and how stars form and gravitational forces and where we were headed in the future...and I learned about approximately none of these things.
"This course is a 100-level course, but the work load is more like a graduate course," the instructor said on the first day. Bad sign. "it's also more of an astrophysics course, so if you're not familiar with physics or you haven't taken Physics 101, it'll be more difficult for you." Worse sign.
The course was taught by the chair of the Astronomy department (yes, they at the time did have that; I don't know if they still do) and he was an astrophysicist himself. From everyone I'd known who had previously taken the course, he was the professor that you did not want for it.
I tried very hard in that course to even attempt to understand the concepts he was covering. When I thought I had the equations right, I was dead wrong and was forced to start over. The readings were ponderous, the homework monumentally heavy, the exams excruciating. I had gone to the professor's office hours numerous times, taking large chunks out of my day to see if he could help me understand what I just couldn't grasp. I was so frustrated that I'd come across something that was so far out of my league of understanding that I didn't know where to begin, but I was able to name constellations and tell him how beautiful it was to see Draco rise, to study the Pleiades as they got brighter in the fall and winter months, and he didn't really have a response to that other than a small, tight-lipped smile. I think he was happy to see someone actively trying to do well, despite any knowledge inadequacies for the course. By the time I realized I was drowning with no chance of recovery and was 100% going to fail this class, it was too late to drop it. I was sealed into my fate. I took the final on a snowy December morning and got a 40% on it. I needed something like an 82% to even get the lowest C possible in the course to consider it a "passing" grade. I felt like shit. I wanted the Lexapro again.
When grades were posted, I mentally prepared myself to see that F in bold print, but I didn't. Instead, on my report card, I saw a B.
I did not question it then, and I have not questioned it since. Either my professor actually cared that I went to his office hours and was doing everything I could or there was a huge curve on the final or there was a grading mistake somewhere....it didn't matter to me, I had a B and I was not gonna ask about it, thankyouverymuchbye.
The Communications course, Small Group Communications, was much different.
Look, I'm not the first to say that most communications classes are a joke. I have to watch my words, however, as my wife has a degree in Communications. This class was one of my least favorite classes of my entire college career, because "small group communications" translates to "a semester full of nothing but group projects followed by an exam."
I was put into a group with four other people. One of them was very clearly a stoner, one of them was very clearly a preppy young business major girl from New Jersey who looked like a coke whore, one of them never showed up to class or to any of our meetings after the first one, and the fourth dropped the course rather quickly once he found out it was all group work projects. Whatever grade we got on the projects, no matter who did the work and who didn't, the entire group got. I petitioned against this with the professor and asked to just be allowed to do my project alone since none of these people gave a shit and I actually cared about the class and grade, and was very quickly shot down. Within two weeks I learned that none of these people were going to give a fuck, so fuck it, I'd just do it all myself anyhow because I wasn't about to let them pass off substandard (or zero) work as my own.
I did 95% of the work for the group project and we got an A on it. I got zero thanks from the rest of the "team" that we had. So much for group communication.
The final exam for that class was on a Saturday morning at 8AM -- it was the only Saturday final I had throughout my entire college career -- in December, in the middle of a goddamn snowstorm. They had known the storm was coming for several days and the students in the class had asked that the final be moved up to Thursday or Friday to avoid the storm, but the professor wouldn't budge on it, because -- and this had become evident throughout the semester prior anyhow -- he was an asshole. I almost died trying to get to campus that morning and again on the way home, and noticed that a lot of people didn't show up for it. Naturally, I still got an A on the final because I actually cared to show up and had done the requisite studying and coursework.
As mentioned previously, the only other class I was really interested in taking was the Screenwriting course, offered only that semester and (I believe) restricted to English/creative writing majors. It was being taught by an actual Hollywood screenwriter, which was glamorous in 2004 West Virginia. His name was Clark Perry, and Clark has now worked on a lot of things in Hollywood since -- but back then, he was a guy who was about the age I am now, a starving-artist writer with a few good spec scripts and some minor Hollywood work under his belt. He was also a mentor and a friend to me, not only then but for many years afterwards.
Clark was a fan of the art of film -- in his course we studied sequences, acts, scenes and dialogue. We were given "homework" assignments of watching several films that he deemed culturally significant and/or changed the way the world looked at filmmaking, including The Godfather, You Can Count on Me, North By Northwest, and Night of the Hunter, amongst others. He also taught us to visualize the action and dialogue taking place on the page as we were writing -- one page equaled one minute of screen time. That's something that always stuck with me -- one page, one minute of screen time.
I took the course to better refine my writing skills, particularly for the screen -- I had been "working on" (air quotes) a story that I wanted to be on the screen for several years, and it desperately needed to be refined. This class let me do that, with the only downside being that, well, it needed to be shared with the rest of the class for critique. We were only required to write the first 20 pages of our proposed screenplay -- I wrote close to 90. I didn't share all 90 with the class, of course, but I did share it with Clark, who gave me pointers on how to make it better and tighten up some scenes. Even at 90 pages (so, only 90 minutes of screen time) it wasn't complete -- though I was getting close to the climax of the film -- and to this day, I haven't completely finished it, though I do have ideas for the sequel as well as the entire universe of the film, so to speak. Like everything else, there's never enough time to write all of it.
No, I'm not going to talk about it here; some ideas are best kept private for fear they'll be stolen or otherwise ripped off in the future.
In that class, I also met another girl -- I know, common theme throughout my college years, right? Her name was Ingrid.
Ingrid was not my type. I do believe, however, that she was the basis of what my type would slowly become over the course of the next few years. My type at the time was slender, waif-like girls with long blonde (or red) hair, shy and submissive, glasses, braces, freckles, the whole gorgeous-but-don't-know-it thing. Or Asians. I had a thing for Asians for quite some time.
Ingrid was none of these things. Ingrid was short, round, of strong Scottish or Irish descent (I can't remember which, it was a long time ago now) with naturally reddish hair she'd bleached out to blonde and kept to shoulder length. She did have very pale skin and freckles, so I'll give her that. She was rather quiet and observant in public, but in private was (or, could be) rather brash and aggressive. This intrigued me. Ingrid was also engaged to be married to some guy named Mike who lived out of state -- I found this out when I had actually asked her out -- and she and I had had a few classes together in the English department over the years. We shared a few friends but were never really close ourselves, nor did we even really know each other.
Well, that changed, sort of, by the time we were taking Clark's class together.
I want to step back for a moment and let all of you in on my mindset at the age of almost-22. I was, ahem, not a good person then. I've touched on it briefly here before, but 2002-04 were the years of peak asshole Brandon. I am not proud of the person I was then -- very misogynistic, entitled, attention-seeking, a drunk for some of it, etc -- basically, I was the early 2000s version of one of those...what do they call themselves? Incels?
Except by late 2004, I had some limited sexual experience under my belt (no pun intended), and I wanted more of it. By the end of the year it had been something like eight months, and for someone of that age, that's an eternity. So I made a rather evil plan -- I was going to seduce her. I was going to seduce an engaged woman. Secretly, she would be my conquest.
Again, I wasn't a good person, okay? I'm not that guy anymore, and feel like I have to keep saying that so that y'all don't get the wrong idea about me fifteen years later.
Please note, this was the first time I'd ever tried anything like this. I wasn't exactly a romancer, though I wanted to be. I had a lot of "good game" that was really just all in my head. But -- I did have a way with words, and I was definitely good at making women be interested in me by using those words (it's how I helped land Daisy, though she denied that when I read this paragraph aloud to her).
So I put my plans into motion. I befriended Ingrid. I let her know all about me. I gave her access to my diary. We spent hours talking on AIM. In the process, I got to know her more. I got to know her strengths and weaknesses, her turn ons and turn offs, etc. She was, as she said, an open book, and likewise I was with her. I also made no secret of the fact that I found her sexually attractive, though it's not like I was super-blatant about it or anything. I was just forward and flirty. She and I toyed around with the term "dirty little secret" in our conversations, which was -- not gonna lie -- really hot. It was no secret that on some level, she was definitely attracted to me as well, though it's not like she'd ever come out and say it. She never did.
Ingrid rented a house off-campus with a few roommates. One morning, none of them were home, and I didn't have class until the afternoon, so she invited me over to watch a movie. I was so naive and inexperienced in the world that at the time, I didn't realize that this was sort of supposed to be a "Netflix and chill" scenario, because really, that concept didn't exist yet. When she nearly immediately took a shower when we got there, and I was sitting on the couch looking around the room like an idiot, I should've been heavily tipped off then as well, but I wasn't. If anything, I was nervous and slightly intrigued. Was she turning the tables on me? Was it now I who was being "seduced"?
I wouldn't even think about any of these things, or many of the blatant hints she'd been dropping, until years later.
Even during the times I was not a good person, I prided myself on being a gentleman at all times, or at least I tried to be after I'd stopped drinking and had some clarity again. I'd completely re-evaluated myself as a person -- the therapy had helped with that -- and it changed my framework (mostly) on how I viewed and treated other people. So, that day, I had a crisis of conscience. Sort of. I also wasn't confident at all in my sexual abilities, would they have come into play, and I was (at the time) maybe only 10 pounds lighter than I am now, so I didn't have much body confidence either.
So she took her shower, redressed in sweats, and we cuddled on the couch watching The Princess Bride, a movie I've seen probably twenty or thirty times over the course of my life, and nothing happened. I did not pull the trigger, primarily because my conscience knew it was wrong when she had an engagement ring on her finger.
I knew I could have, though. We probably could have done anything that day. Neither of us would have stopped the other. And that knowledge was enough.
After the movie, I had class and she had work, and we returned to campus. It was sort of a surreal drive back to campus.
After that day, my moral compass had definitely been set. I would never again attempt to "seduce" anyone already in a relationship. No matter how attracted to them I was.
Ingrid and I gradually grew apart over the course of the next year or so. She had another class or two with me, and after college our friendship dissolved. Last I knew, she had broken up with the guy she was engaged to at the time, and had later gotten married to someone else. We were never friends on Facebook (this is before Facebook was a "thing") and she is unfindable on there now, if she even has or had one.
Meanwhile, in the Screenwriting course, my script was one of the more well-liked ones in the class (though far from the best-written; that "award" goes to an acquaintance of mine who was writing a biopic of Elizabeth I, and what he'd done was phenomenal).
And so, with that stupid Saturday morning snowstorm final for my Communications course, the last fall semester of my undergrad career ended. I turned 22 the next week, and would start my final semester of college the following January.
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