Escargatoire

by Daniel Kauder

When Brittany asked me to write something for Escargatoire, I was more than happy to start thinking of topics immediately. After all, this was the first “guest piece” I could remember being asked to write – and who was I to turn down the Mistress of Snails herself? Not I, I thought to myself, and so I began pondering.
My first inclination was to write something intentionally funny about a “first” of mine, but I felt that would cheapen the entire piece. Better to pick something I’m intimately familiar with, and let the situation speak for itself. Thusly I came to the topic of my first time truly away from home – college. This was a significant first for me, as it is for most people who go away to a traditional four-year university, but as I started writing it I found that I could not tell my little story as a “first”. I would have to tell it first as a “last”, and then as a “first”.

In other news, I’m bad at following directions. (Sorry, Brittany).

Now, with that out of the way, I will, as they say, begin at the beginning.

I attended the University of Delaware between 2004 and 2008, and graduated with a BA in Psychology. I originally planned to be a Communications major (because I make good life decisions!) in order to pursue a dream of being a journalist. That plan didn’t exactly fly - it never even made it onto the runway. More like it blew up in the hangar; my grades were not high enough to get into UD’s underfunded (emaciated?) Comm program, and I was forced to reassess. I think this failure was a serendipitous one, but I digress.
Fueling this love of writing was a series of journals I kept throughout high school. I recorded everything that happened to me: every thought, the music that I was listening to at the moment, everything. I wrote it for many reasons, and would keep these journals throughout my lifetime – but one thing I left out of the high school volume was the impact that my brother had on me. It was so pervasive, it was a given. Writing about it would have been like writing about how I had brown eyes; it was clearly the case, so why waste time mentioning it?
I’ll explain. If I’d really wanted to be a journalist, I’d have gone to West Virginia University… but I didn’t. If I’d have really wanted to be a counselor, I’d have gone to Ithica… but again, I turned them down. Instead, I went to UD for an underfunded, understaffed Communications program at a Chemical Engineering school. Why would I do that? Well, simply put, Dave was a Blue Hen, and by God I would be, too.

So! I roll on up to the parking lot at UD’s Dickinson dorms, which were built in the 60’s but were clearly thought up for the housing of political dissidents in the Dark Ages. The typical college shenanigans ensue – I’ll spare you the details, they’re unimportant here. What was important was that I was following in the footsteps of my older brother.

Only… I wasn’t. I rapidly found that, left to my own devices, my life wasn’t playing out like his had.

According to my knowledge at the time, he’d met his future wife in his Sophomore year of school, stayed with her throughout college and gone on to have two kids. He had a job more or less immediately after graduation, complete with house and between one and three cats.

Meanwhile, I stayed single until my Senior year of college and I had no job prospects for my time after graduation. What the hell? This isn’t how things are supposed to go! The more I deviated from “the plan”, the more agitated I got. Until, around the time things ended with that aforementioned girlfriend, a thought that had been percolating in my head finally finished brewing and came to the forefront. What if this all felt like it was going wrong because I was reading someone else’s lines?

There’s a lot of other thoughts that went into this decision, but for the sake of brevity I’ll cut to the chase: a few weeks later I decided to apply for grad school out in Chicago, far away from any Eastern influences that I might have had. I would go and define myself in a place where I knew nobody, had no connections, and no expectations. Delaware would be the last time I upend my life to fit the schema of how someone else lived theirs; Chicago would be the first time I gave myself the opportunity to become who I was supposed to be. And given that I’d been trying to be my brother for the better part of my childhood, I suppose you could say this was the first time I gave myself permission to be an adult.

That’s a scary thing, especially in today’s world- being an adult, I mean. Allowing yourself to stay stuck in these childish ways of doing things at least keeps you safe, wrapped up in things that are in the very least familiar. I see that every day; my job puts me in contact with people who, on some level, prefer staying in a psychiatric hospital to dealing with the problems that got them sent there. With them, as it is with the general population, there are a thousand ways one can fail – and if you’re your own person, failing means that you have failed; you can’t blame it on anyone else. Case in point, when I moved to Delaware, I was interested in seeing if I could restart my social life from scratch, since nobody from my high school was going there with me. I figured this would be a good litmus test of my resiliency… but if I’d failed, I coulda blamed it on how I was trying to be too much like my brother.
Well, when I went to Chicago, there was nobody to blame for my failures but me.

So that, in closing, is that. I ended up rocking Chicago, and now it seems I almost make a habit of moving somewhere new every two years or so; moving somewhere I don’t know anyone. Keeps me sharp, I suppose. I still have no attachments, no kids and no cats – and no plans to stop my little tour of America. But hell, every time I’ve thought I had my long-term Master Plan all figured out, life has thrown me a curve ball… maybe I’ll end up putting down roots sooner than I expect?
There’s a first time for everything, after all.