I am officially a C student.  Thanks to honor credit, my high school GPA was over 4.0, and during my first year at Penn, only A’s graced my transcript, but now I am a kid who gets C’s.  After my initial feelings of hatred and bitterness, I realized that C’s might not be the start of my demise. In fact, C’s might be the start of a much better life.

In high school I was an asshole.  If you are any sort of self-respecting person you would have hated me.  I was the kid who all of the teachers loved, but all of his peers hated.  I wasn’t as smart as you, but I studied more than you.  I begged teachers for extra points and partial credit, and I would get them.  I knew people who had corrected labs from previous years, and I would copy them.  If given the chance to shove my face in the vagina of my 80-year-old history teacher for an A in the class, I would have.  In short: I grubbed my way to the top.

I quickly learned that this shit wouldn’t cut it in college.  In a class of 300 students, there were about 200 with the same lack of morals.  So I did the thing that college students fear most – I studied.  I studied my ass off for an entire year.  I taught myself how to do triple integrals and how to determine the vertical and horizontal components of compression in each element of a simple machine.  While most kids were a shit-show their freshman year, I rarely left my room. I was basically Asian.

This past semester was different.  I decided that there are more important things than a grade point average.  Students’ grades usually drop if they start going out every night of the week or if they take on a larger workload.  Not me – I decided to explore life, and this is what ruined my transcript.

For the first time in my life, I entered the world of music.  With the addition of Ruckus to my life it’s been easier than ever to discover new bands. (I do realize that Ruckus will take away all the music I’ve downloaded at the end of the year, but it’s free. So stop complaining.) I’ve always been a mainstream music type of guy.  Jack Johnson, Dave Matthews Band, and The Fray are featured at the top of my “25 Most Played” list.  But there is so much good music out there that so few people know.  Bands like The Format, Wilco, and Stars all have great songs that many people have never heard.  Sure, music is great when we dance to it and put it on in the background while we do our homework, but we can fall into it as well.  We can put on a song, lean back in our chair, and close our eyes to be enveloped by the lyrics.  I know that “I love love.  I love being in love.  I don’t care what it does to me” (The Format).  And who has never thought that “Sometimes the T.V. is like a lover, singing softly as you fall asleep.  You wake up in the morning and it’s still there.  Adding up the things you’ll never be” (Stars).

I have also spent time with the friendships that I have.  My favorite thing in life is a conversation that lasts from midnight to four in the morning.  I have found out more about my friends during these late hours than through years of regular conversation.  When the rest of the world is asleep, no topic of conversation is off-limits, and the need to hide things about oneself and keep secretes doesn’t exist. The only drawback is that I find it difficult to do work when I’m in the middle of discussing where I want to be in ten years.  And I find it impossible to end a phone call to figure out when heat is added to a Sterling engine when a friend says they might have cancer.

There are so many more things in life that I want to explore, and I plan on doing them one at a time.  I think that living life is a more worthy cause than getting straight A’s, but I recognize that I need to do a better job of balancing. B’s would be nice.  I’m not too worried though.  For the first time in my life my GPA has dipped below a 3.0, but for the first time in my life I think I got it right.