Chicken Soup for the College Soul

by Jack Canfield

  I had a formidable task ahead of me. I was in over my head, running the statistical data. I poured more time and energy into that project than I had ever done on any assignment in my life. I was not going to let him see me fail and have it reflect on him. I was working the graveyard shift at my job, so I used whatever quiet time from midnight to 6:00 A.M. to work on the project. The work consumed me. There was a sense of challenge that completely overtook me. The question remained: Was I up to it?

  Eventually, the semester came to a close, and each team had to present its findings in front of the assembled class. When it was our turn, I did my level best to present

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  his scientific methodology with my showmanship. To my amazement, we were awarded an A!

  When I told my lab mate about our shared triumph, he smiled and thanked me for carrying on. Something connected then. Something special. It had to do with trust and the exhilaration of sharing a common prize.

  We have stayed close throughout the years. He went on to achieve a doctorate. He also went on to marry his college girlfriend.

  I learned more than statistical analysis and experimental procedures that semester. My life has been enhanced by our encounter and challenged by this man, who became my unlikely hero.

  And in the end, he was right: we have become friends for life.

  Tony Luna

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  With Help from a Friend

  Cherish your visions and your dreams, as they are the children of your soul and the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.

  Napoleon Hill

  I remember the first day of classes at Parsons School of Design. How awkward I felt and how self-conscious! Were my clothes right? My hair? My talent? Was I good enough? Was I gonna cut it?

  I walked in and scoped out the room while holding my breath. My vision scanned and then sharply stopped on one person. Wow. She looked cool. I plopped myself down in the empty, waiting chair next to her.

  ''Hi, I'm Dorri." I don't remember what I thought would actually happen, but I do remember being thrilled when she smiled a big white toothy smile and said, "Hi, I'm Kathleen." That was all it took.

  What a difference Kathleen made in my college life! She was confident where I was shaky. She was disciplined while I was wild. She was responsible; I was lazy. We signed up for all of the same classes. I was so impressed with her. She

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  worked with incredible diligence and with such self-assurance. I started to emulate her. I wanted to impress her.

  One day the homework assignment was to create an exciting illustration based on a pair of shoes. I was bursting with ideas and ran home and pulled out my favorite pair of antique thrift shop ''old-lady shoes." I concentrated and worked and sweated and created a self-perceived masterpiece!

  I called Kathleen and bragged that I'd finished the assignment. "What?!" she exclaimed. "How could you possibly be finished already?" I was so pleased with myself that I asked her if I could run by her apartment and show her my stunning creation. "Sure," she said.

  I raced down from my fifth-floor apartment, precious drawing in hand, and headed to her place. When I got there, I held up my paper with such glowing confidence, only to have my swelled cockiness crushed by Kathleen's reaction: "Is that the only drawing you did?"

  "Well, yes," I responded sheepishly. "Why?"

  "C'mon," she said. "It's still nice out. Let's go to Washington Square Park and really do some drawings." I was puzzled, but when she led, I willingly followed.

  The whole way to the park, Kathleen animatedly talked about form, content, composition and really studying your subjects. She described the shoes in my drawing as the kind you see on the old women that sit in the park and feed pigeons. Her excitement was contagious.

  When we got to the park, she surveyed the scene and chirped, "Over there!" She pointed to a bench that was surrounded by discarded, crumpled paper bags, soda cans and empty cigarette packs. An old woman sitting on the bench had fallen asleep. Kathleen handed me her drawing pad and said, "Here. Now, draw the shoes on that woman! Draw them over and over until you really know what they look like."

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  I drew and drew. I filled the sketchbook pages. They were the best I'd ever done thus far. Kathleen watched, and I felt fueled by my captive audience. I was showing off! It was such fun.

  The next day was the class critique. I felt so proud hanging my drawing up on the wall for all to see. I knew I had drawn an illustration to be proud of. As the class discussion circled the room to my piece, I heard my fellow students say, "sensitive," "accurate," "beautifully stylized." I looked over at Kathleen, and she gave me that wink and loving smile of hers. College was going to be a lot more fun with her around.

  And it was. She continually inspired me, laughed with me, sketched with me and went out dancing with me. Our works of art were chosen for special exhibits, and we both made the dean's list. We wore our caps and gowns together, and a few years later, I was "best woman" at her wedding.

  Whatever fears I had going into college about not being able to make new friends were gently washed away when I found my special, best friend.

  After we obtained our B.F.A. degrees, the world opened up for both of us. Now we are both successful self-employed artists. Me, a freelance illustrator and graphic designer. Kathleen, a sculptor and mural painter. I work in my lovely Chelsea cooperative apartment that I bought five years ago. Every morning I wake up grateful for how life has turned out. I make myself a cappuccino and enjoy sipping it as I sit at my computer.

  Oops! I gotta run. Kathleen and I are meeting for dinner and a movie.

  Dorri Olds

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  8

  TOUGH STUFF

  Each time something difficult and challenging has happened to me it has marked the beginning of a new era in my life.

  Kimberly Kirberger

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  My Star

  My head plopped down right in the middle of my open calculus book.

  Maybe the information will just work its way into my brain through osmosis. I was beginning to think that was my only hope for learning this material. I felt like I was on a different planet. How could this seem so foreign to me? Of all the classes that I had taken so far in college, I could not make this one work. I couldn't even lay out a logical study plan. What now? I pondered, with my head down on my desk in the middle of class.

  When I lifted my head off the page, unbeknownst to me, a Post-it Note had stuck to my bangs. There was a pretty picture. I turned to face the guy next to me; he laughed and reached over to pull the note off my bangs in hopes of retrieving some of my dignity.

  That was the beginning of a great friendship. The guy who was willing to pull a sticky note off my hair would soon become my calculus savior. I didn't know it at the time, but Matt Starr was the literal "star" of the class. I was convinced he could teach it. And, as luck would have it, he was willing to help me.

  He lived in an apartment just off campus, and I would

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  go over there for tutoring. In exchange for his help, I cleaned his apartment and brought over bribe treats. Cookies, snacks, even dinner sometimes. He was so smart and would get so involved in the material. He would say, "Don't you realize that this is the stuff that the universe is made of?" Not my universe. I told him that my universe was made up of child development and psychology classes and an occasional shopping mall, not equations like this. He would just laugh and persevere. He was convinced that he could get me to understand this material, and in a way he was right. He was so crystal clear in his understanding that I began to see it through his eyes.

  Matt and I started spending more time together. We would take long walks, go to movieswhen he wasn't forcing me to study. I helped him put together a very hip wardrobe, and he taught me how to change the oil in my carsomething every girl should know. When I brought home a B in calculus, we celebrated for three days.

  Throughout
college we stayed as close as a guy and a girl who are friends can be. We dated, only briefly, but the chemistry we shared was more like that of a brother and sister. We did, however, help each other through our other various and odd relationships; and when it looked hopeless, like neither one of us would ever find a mate, we took the next logical stepwe got a puppy. Having rescued it from the pound, we called this little shepherd mix Tucker. We had been spending so much time together that when I moved out of my dorm, Tucker, Matt and I became roommates.

  The day he came home and told me he was sick, it was raining. It rained that entire week, almost as if the world was mirroring our tears. Matt had AIDS.

  Two weeks later, he was in the hospital with pneumocystis. The hows and the whys didn't matter when we were both spending every moment trying to get him

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  better. Between taking final exams, figuring out medications, visiting healers and making Matt drink wheatgrass juice, I was exhaustedbut he was getting better.

  Matt and I decided that we were going to make the time either one of us had left on this planet count. By the time we arrived at our senior year, I had lived life more fully than I had in all my twenty previous years. When we graduated, we all proudly wore our caps and gowns, Tucker included. Two months later, Matt went home to Minneapolis to live with his family.

  Life continued; we e-mailed each other voraciously. I sent him tons of JPEG images of Tucker and his antics, and we went back and forth recounting stories of our lives.

  Matt lived only two years more. When I got the news that he had been taken to the hospital, I flew out to be with him. By then, he had fallen into a coma from which he would never awaken. At the funeral, I artfully arranged a yellow Post-it Note in my hair and put one of Tucker's favorite chew toys in the casket.

  One night, about a year after Matt's funeral, Tucker and I were driving in the hills of Mulholland. Suddenly, I smelled something so very familiar to me, and yet I couldn't place it. It was a lovely cologne-like fragrance. Then Tucker began acting peculiar.

  "What's the matter, boy, did you smell it, too? What is that smell? I just can't place it."

  Stopped at a red light, I looked up at the night sky and Tucker barked. What I saw next amazed me. It was a shooting star. A star! Of course, Matt Starr! It was his cologne I smelled.

  "Is our friend trying to say hello and tell us he's okay?" Tucker started wagging his tail furiously. Whether it was a sign or not, I felt the warmest and most secure feeling I've felt while thinking about Matt since his death. The giant gaping void that was created when he left was

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  suddenly filled with that warm love the two of us always shared. He wasn't gone, he was right here with me, as he always would be.

  Suddenly and quite clearly, I understood how it all fit together. The universe, my friend and his beloved calculus.

  Zan Gaudioso

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  Independence Day

  I can still hear our prepubescent voices calling out to one another in the camp's swimming pool. Back in the days when getting our ears pierced and owning Cavarichis determined whether we were cool, the closest we came to cigarettes was fake smoking with pretzels.

  We were children who thought we knew everything but really knew very little. Stubborn, we believed the New Kids on the Block and Vanilla Ice were the coolest groups around and couldn't fathom our tastes ever changing, ourselves ever changing.

  The years passed. We graduated from high school and went off to different colleges, where we did change. Some of us became vegans, others atheists. We changed our majors, from Spanish to communications to international relations . . . and some of us began toweling our doors so the RAs wouldn't detect we were doing hands-on experiments for our drugs and human behavior class.

  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that my childhood friends have grown up to smoke everything that doesn't smoke them first. I remember my elementary school had a representative from D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) come and warn us against the dangers of drug

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  use. He explained about everything from shooting heroin to huffing common household products. Apparently his warnings backfired, for I recollect one of my classmates inhaling a bottle of Wite-Out during recess.

  It's not that I expected everything to stay the same. In fact, I welcomed change and was eager to go off to college and begin a new life. I knew some of my friends and I would grow apart, but I never could have predicted how I would feel when I saw one of them snorting coke.

  I was visiting a friend at her college and had become aware of changes in her since high school. She now smoked like a chimney, which was actually mild in comparison to the other toxins she routinely put in her body. As she lit up her zillionth cigarette of the day, I made a cancer comment to which she rolled her eyes and flippantly responded, "Well, I guess if I ever get suicidal, I'll be well on my way."

  We were in one of her friends' off-campus houses, and, just like the movies, white powder was carefully laid along a mirror and cut with a razor. I was offered a line but shook my head no and watched in shock as my chain-smoking friend expertly snorted one.

  Minutes later, bustling with energy, she rambled, "People think cocaine is a really big deal, but now you see it's not. I'm just really happy and alive right now, that's all."

  I felt sick to my stomach seeing her like this and hightailed it out of there, spending the night with a friend who had also declined the drug. Personally, I have found cocaine to be especially terrifying ever since childhood, when I read a Sweet Valley High book in which one of Elizabeth Wakefield's friends tries coke at a party and dies of a heart attack. If the writers intended to scare children away from coke while they were still impressionable, they sure accomplished that with me.

  I think how we've changed and why we've changed since going off to college, and I've realized some things.

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  Peer pressure is not like an after-school special where a group of bad kids with a joint surround a younger, smaller kid, saying, ''Come on, don't be a chicken. Try it! You know you want to." It's more the internal pressure of feeling like a loser for being scared and wondering whether it can really be that bad if your friends are all doing it.

  When you're living on your own for the first time, it's easy to get caught up in the moment. (Just look at the number of college girls flocking to the health center Monday morning for the morning-after pill.) A part of me wants to believe drugs really aren't that big a deal, that you're only young once and yada, yada, yada. But then I see the death tolls of kids my age and sometimes younger. And it scares meit really does. I see the flashing lights of ambulances, and it seems kind of ironic that drinking oneself into alcohol toxicity is how we try to show our independence.

  When it comes down to it, living on your own is about making decisionsnot always the right ones, but, hopefully not so many wrong ones that you lose your chance.

  Natasha Carrie Cohen

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  #38 Chucky Mullins

  On homecoming day my senior year of college, I was in the stands, surrounded by my fraternity brothers and watching my school, the University of Mississippi, play against Vanderbilt. The game was scoreless late in the first quarter, and Ole Miss had their backs to the goal line. I happened to be sitting parallel to the play action on the field. The Vanderbilt quarterback drew back and passed to the tailback for what looked to be a sure touchdown.

  All of a sudden, an Ole Miss defenderfootball jersey #38, named Chucky Mullinsread the play perfectly and charged the Vanderbilt receiver, hitting him helmet first and jarring the ball from his hands. As I stood up and cheered for the touchdown-saving play, I noticed everyone got up from the ground but #38, who lay where he had fallen.