You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (10 page)

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.