by Felicia Day
There were only about six hundred students enrolled in the music school, and people rarely left because it was assumed you locked yourself in a 4x4 practice room for eight hours a day or you were “never going to amount to anything as a musician, so why are you taking up room if you’re not serious?” No peer pressure or anything. The building sat on the fringes of campus and was supposed to house the next generation of artists. It had the aesthetics of a Hungarian women’s prison.
It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, with elevators that broke all the time. There were long green couches on the first floor that smelled like failure and skin flakes, and no one would nap on them for fear of catching salmonella. I think the whole design was just a nefarious plot to force students back into their tiny LED-lit practice room cages. All senses besides hearing were punished.
I was, of course, nervous about this huge leap into adulthood, so I prepared a detailed strategy for my first day of class. It was mostly inspired by bad TV shows. I would dress as inconspicuously as possible so people wouldn’t notice me, and that way I could do recon to figure out my place in the world. Like going undercover in 21 Jump Street. I would draw NO attention to myself, so no one would see how young or how awkward I was, and eventually, I’d just EXIST, unquestioned. Assimilated, like the Borg. Then, after I’d met everyone and fallen in love with qualified men, I’d get a cute outfit, do my hair, and arrive at school completely made over. The guys would fall at my feet, but the one who was nicest to me when I was plain and boring would have my heart, like that episode of Beverly Hills, 90210. Or Boy Meets World? One of those. Who cares, none of it happened like that, anyway.
First day of class, I wore a huge pair of pleated jeans and a T-shirt that was a men’s large and a bigger sweater over it, like a late ’80s hip-hop star. Totally inconspicuous. I began college by lurking in corners, acting like the kind of kid people say, “But she was so quiet!” after a school shooting. But by noon, no one had approached me to talk. So far, so good!
Everyone who was enrolled in college orchestra had to audition on the first day of the semester so the conductor could figure out how good you were and what seat to assign you for the season. It was The Hunger Games for music majors. The conductor, I’ll call him Mr. Murray, was a young upstart who looked like Matthew McConaughey with Farrah Fawcett hair. It tousled around when he worked in the hottest way, waving like American golden wheat. Everyone had a crush on him, and I’m sure he could have slept with every woman in the building (me included), but he was a newlywed with an extremely hot wife who wore a black leather jacket and drove a motorcycle. He didn’t need the awkward foreplay of orchestra geeks.
My plan for the audition was to lowball my performance so the other students wouldn’t look at me for any reason, but as I entered the room, Mr. Murray said, “It will be nice having you in the orchestra this year. Mr. Frittelli has told me a lot about you.”
Sheer panic. Commence inner-anxiety monologue: Mr. Frittelli told him about me? That means he told him I was good! And if I’m bad, Mr. Frittelli will look bad. But I don’t want to be TOO good, or the other kids won’t like me. But if I suck, they might take away my scholarship . . . B-U-T . . . I freaked out inside, torn between fitting in with my peers and being a praise monkey teacher pleaser.
I looked deep into Mr. Murray’s cornflower-blue eyes, tried to gather my wits, and in the end, there was no choice. The hot adult wanted me to be good. So I played my heart out.
When the roster got posted that afternoon, I had been placed in the number two First Violin seat. Right in front of the conductor’s podium. The Park Place of orchestral real estate, right out of the gate. Crap.
As I looked at the board, I heard a grad student say behind me, “Who the hell is Felicia Day?!” and I slunk away, swimming in my huge acid-washed pants. It was going to be harder to navigate this whole schooling thing than Saved by the Bell had ever taught me.
In the following weeks, I tried to keep a low profile, hiding in the back of classes and practicing in the most out-of-the-way dungeon-like practice rooms, but I could tell everyone was curious about me. I looked ten years old, got placed in front of all the seniors and grad students, and I knew they were all thinking, How good is this kid?
I caught a few of them eavesdropping outside my practice room door, and rather than make friends, I’d glare through the tiny glass window and stop playing to mark up my music in a real fake-spacework kinda way. The idea that I could open up to them never occurred to me. I wasn’t used to humans enough to have organic social impulses.
But as the weeks went by, anxiety started eating me up. I knew I couldn’t hide forever. They would hear me, and judge me. I wondered if it was too late to quit college and go back home to hang out with my brother and play Legos. It all came to a head when I performed in Professor Frittelli’s Master Class, a monthly class where a few people would play and get critiqued so everyone could learn from it. Public shaming, the great pedagogical tool, right? Answer: No. I felt strange and isolated from everyone as it was, so in my brain, “Master Class” was emblazoned as:
I had no practical concept of my skills in relation to the other students. I was raised in such a vacuum, I could only gauge myself against recordings of famous dead people. In comparison to the greatest dead violinist in the world, Jascha Heifetz, I was horrible, so my preparatory mantra became, Please don’t listen. Seriously, don’t. Oh God, they’re going to listen, aren’t they?!
I’ve always thought it’s harder to perform in front of five of your friends than five hundred strangers, and this was a perfect example. It was a small room, everyone stared at me as I got up to play, I took twenty times too long to tune my instrument, nodded to the pianist to start, and proceeded to have a panic attack that melted my brain stem into pudding.
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 w
orld 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 wor
k.” 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.