Avid College Quotes

Jerome watched movies and was an avid reader. He was an intellectual, a smart guy, but he didn’t have the funds to get into college in order to collect that piece of paper that would allow him to get a decent job. He found it absurdly comical that even without years of education at a university, he could do a better job in a “proper career” than most who had degrees. He figured it was the elites’ way of keeping the caste system in play.

When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening's Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game. They were, in a phrase, British rednecks. And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite. In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. [...] By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn't watch soccer. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners—God bless 'em—and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs. Which is to say, conservatives don't hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.

As the weekend goes on, more information about Marian Wallace emerges. She attended Harvard on scholarship. She was a Massachusetts State Champion swimmer, and an avid creative writer. She was from Roxbury. Her mother is dead—cancer when Marian was thirteen. The maternal grandmother died a year later of the same cause. Her father is a drug addict. She spent her high school years in and out of foster care. One of her foster mothers remembers young Marian always with her head in a book. No one knows who the father of her baby is. No one even remembers her having a boyfriend. She was put on academic leave from college because she failed all her classes the previous semester—the demands of motherhood and a rigorous academic schedule having become too much to bear. She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.

We have so little in common, but we were both avid readers growing up. I read almost nonstop when I was little, and it saved me in school. I hated classes, hated teachers. They always wanted me to do things I didn't want to do. But because I was a reader, they knew I wasn't stupid, just different. They cut me slack. It got me through. Reading couldn't help me make friends, though. I never got the hang of it. I would talk to kids, and over the years a handful of them even seemed to like me enough to ask to come over, but after that first visit to the house they never lasted. Ma told me what I did wrong but I could never manage to do it right. 'Act interested in what they say,' she said, but they never said anything interesting. 'Don't talk too much,' she said, but it never seemed like too much to me. So it wasn't like people threw tomatoes at me, or dipped my pigtails in inkwells, or stood up to move their desks away from mine, but I never really managed to make friends that I could keep. And I got used to it. I got used to a lot of things. Writing extra papers to make up for falling short in class participation. Volunteering to do the planning and the typing up whenever we had group work assigned, because I knew I could never really work right with a group. And the coping always worked. Up until three years into college, where despite Ma's repeated demands to try harder, I stalled. Every semester since, I was always still trying to finish that last Oral Communications class, which I had repeatedly failed. This semester I only made it six weeks in before it became obvious I wouldn't pass. I think we'd both finally given up.

I loved college... I knew exactly why I was there and what I wanted to get out of it. I wished I could take every course in the curriculum and read every book in the library. Sometimes after I finished a particularly good book, I had the urge to get the library card, find our who else had read the book, and track them down to talk about it.

David Wabick, a former All-American baseball player at the College of Charleston, was drafted by the Chicago White Sox in 2002 and the New York Mets in 2005. He played professionally until 2010 before becoming a partner at Kreshmore Group, where he oversees the sports advisory business. He’s also a licensed real estate broker and an avid traveler.

Allyson admired the way that he talked. Maybe, if her history professors in college had been more like Sean Wyatt, she might have paid a little more attention in class, or at least not fallen asleep. Sometimes, she wished that she was in a line of work that she liked better. Journalism certainly had some positives about it, but there were times that she loathed her job. Long hours stuck in a cubicle could drive even the most avid writer to madness