It's hard out there for a young hustler, gang, so today I'm doing something heretofore unseen - I'm writing a blog on commission.
Because this is The Web 2.0, I did not ask for monetary compensation, instead, I will be paid in page views, the currency of the future. In the land of the luddite, the content generator is king.
My subject for this piece is my erstwhile roommate of three years, Aaron. I was going to post a screencap of Aaron's request, until I realized that he had written something inappropriate. (Poor form, Aaron).
I met Aaron at a very weird time in my life. It was my first semester at UT and, as a transfer student, I wasn't as able to seamlessly integrate into friend groups the way I imagine a freshman might. I spent most of my time with my friend John, who was from Lubbock, and a handful of girls that I met through John.
It was also the most explicitly churchy I think that I've ever been. In a bid to make friends, I joined a Christian student organization (I'll just say that it's Ignite, which is a great org, despite what the thoughts of young Kyle may make it seem like as this entry progresses) that John's roommate, Matt, had been a part of. I was also attending Austin Stone and Campus Crusade every week, as well as a weekly bible study.
(I've mentioned this before, but, it was actually due to said bible study that I stopped writing when I got to Austin. I told the leader that my biggest aspiration was to be a famous writer and without missing a beat, he asked if I had asked God to take that away from me. He was, I now realize, making a misguided point about pride, but I took it to mean that it was sinful of me to myself on a pedestal as a "creative." [All of this churchiness eventually led to a profound crisis of faith at the end of that semester that took several months to shake.])
Despite being surrounded by lots of friendly people who were very much like myself, I only grew increasingly more isolated. As the doubts began to creep up around the edges of my mind, I felt like a phony whenever I went to an Ignite meeting. Externally, I was growing more and more proficient in navigating the world of the Christian collegiate underclassman (which was even more obsessively positive than my Evangelical high school), but internally I felt more and more conflicted about who I was.
It got to the point that I was using
(My 20-year-old self was possibly more slavishly devoted to academia than even present Kyle. The conflux of first year philosophy [where I was, I believed, reinventing myself as a modern day Platonist {with an extremely limited understanding of Plato}] and physical anthropology [where what I was learning about evolution seemed deeply at odds with what I was learning about sin and death at Austin Stone {it was actually my anthro professor who helped to untangle me from my web of confusion, simply by showing me grace after I missed an assignment}] were creating some bastard stoic skeptic who was convinced that he could overcome the folly of man solely through will power.)
It's unsurprising then, that, in the midst of this ontological quagmire, I found it difficult to connect with the shiny happy people of Ignite. To my mind, there were only a handful of honest ones among them. Everyone was putting on show, lacking the courage to admit to their own doubts and faults. (I was being more courageous, obviously, by holding back my festering cynicism, sparing them my Old Testament rebuke of their false piety.)
My transformation into a full Doubting Thomas (he of the original fear masquerading as piety) utterly isolated me from the good people of Ignite, though I was loathe to blame anyone but the Stepford Christians that I was bearing witness to.
(Through the lens of age, I'm able to see that Young Kyle was not entirely wrong in his assessment of those early days in Ignite. There was an element of duplicity present, but that veil of holiness lifted some when everyone returned for their second year of school. At that time, I started to suddenly like all of these people I had previously resented [whether that was more a product of them being more honest or me being less of an asshole, I can't say.] Said veil was fully cast aside once everyone could drink and that last barrier between virginal Christian naif and Lutherian besotted theologizer was lifted.)
Despite my apprehensions about the overall tenor of Ignite, I, like your racist great-uncle, was willing to admit that there were a handful of good ones.
I started eating lunch regularly at the Kinsolving cafeteria with an assortment of friends and acquaintances who had come together through some combination of Ignite, orientation, church and high school. It was there that I first met Aaron, jew-froed, aggressively asexual and unabashedly dorky. Aaron had not been in Ignite, he'd found his way into my orbit through a mutual friend. He also didn't come from an Evangelical background, which lent him an air of authenticity that I was struggling to find in those early days. He was also attached at the hip to Erik (another future roommate), but I wasn't as fond of Erik in the early going because he was macking on a girl that John had a crush on, and I'm a loyal friend.
(Erik's macking ultimately produced no fruit [nor did John's, actually] a theme that would continue for the majority of his college career).
Early on in our lunch club days, I determined that Aaron might make a suitable friend when I learned that his ringtone was a White Stripes song. Sure, the White Stripes weren't as cool as whatever I was into at the time (mopey white-boy rock), but it wasn't Hillsong, which was a welcome change of pace.
(My estimation of Aaron fell almost immediately when I learned that his phone was going off because he'd contacted someone on Craiglist about buying Wolfmother tickets. [This exchange did provide several years of fodder about Aaron giving someone a handjob for Wolfmother tickets, so it was ultimately worth it.])
What drew me to Aaron was his sincerity and the way he honestly seemed happy every time he saw me. My affection for him was cemented one day when, on the way to a football game, John and I passed him and he gave me the friendliest hello I'd ever received. It's still the image that I conjure in my mind whenever I think about Aaron.
The months of the calendar turned and I started hanging out with Aaron and Erik more frequently.
At some point in the Spring, a group of us, Aaron and Erik included, went camping out at some state park outside Bastrop. We went on a hike and took the stupid midair pictures that everyone was obsessed with in 2010. I spent over three hours trying to boil rice and failed because I couldn't figure out the camp stove. (Everyone ate it anyway out of politeness/severe hunger.) Aaron showed off his Eagle Scout abilities by failing to start a fire.
After night fell, a group of us broke out the hookah (mistress of my youth) and cigars, while the other, decidedly more female, group sang around the campfire as a friend of ours tried to impress the assembled girls with his musical skills.
Thirty minutes into the caterwauling, a park ranger appeared to chasten us for being so noisy. He noticed the hookah, questioned us about it briefly and then went on his way. Rather than use this as a moment of reflection, the guitar crew immediately began griping about how the smoking was the real issue.
Regardless, everyone turned in and only Aaron, Erik and I remained huddled outside the campfire. (Conventionally, I normally refer to the two as a unit as Erik and Aaron, I've been using Aaron's name first so far since the piece is ostensibly about him.) It was around that campfire that we had the crucial God, girls, family talk that solidifies male relationships. Then we all retired, bonded, to the coldest and least comfortable tent I've ever tried to sleep in.
Aaron and Erik were the first two guys that I really connected to at Texas, and that moment was especially cathartic for me. I hadn't realized it, but I was desperate for companionship.
Of course, that moment didn't do a whole lot to knock down the edifice I had constructed around myself. I had friends, but I still saw myself as a role model to these young bucks fresh out of high school.
My role modeling didn't really manifest itself in any form of mentorship, it mostly came out as pedantry and mockery.
Erik, Aaron, our friend Matt, Aaron's brother and myself joined forces officially the next year and rented a house not far from campus. Because we were too cool for frats, but not too cool for juvenile irony, we went out to the Hobby Lobby and purchased a plywood B and a plywood V, which we fashioned into a delta, then spray-painted and hung above our door. The Beta Delta was born.
(The Beta Delta moniker took on a weird life of its own amongst our friends. In truth it didn't stand for anything, but somehow it came to be whispered that it stood for "booty dooty" or "boner donor" [a phrase that only led to more mysteries. Who was donating the boner? Was it the possessor of the boner, or was it the person that inspired the boner? Debate rages on.] I like to think it stands for Big Dawg, but I lay no firm claim on the acronym.)
Moving into the Beta Delta coincided with me turning 21, which led to me asserting my hipness and authenticity by quietly drinking by myself in front of everyone whenever my roommates had people over. At this point, Erik and Aaron had joined Ignite and I had left it. They knew some of my feelings about it, so there was tension there (at least on my end, it was probably exclusive to my end). They had also started leading a small group through Austin Stone, a church that I had left on principle, which led to more tension whenever folks would come over and repeat sermons that I found personally abhorrent and damaging to the image of God.
(No one is so ardent a defender of the image of God as a 21 year old who's gotten his or her first taste of the academic study of spirituality. It was far easier for me to sit in silent judgment with a Big Dawg Rita in my glass than it was to try to engage with anyone in a meaningful way.)
It would have been cool if I had tried to actually do something remotely mentory in my younger roommates lives, but I did not. It's something I spend a lot of time regretting whenever I think about it.
It wasn't all me being an obnoxious know-it-all. We had lots of adventures. We put a pool on the roof (used once.) We hosted campfires in our backyard. We bought baby chicks and subsequently held a viking funeral for them in the same campfire. We got into squabbles with our nefarious landlord, Raheem. It was a pretty great time.
Throughout it all, Erik and Aaron were growing up and I was retreating more and more, internally. I remember calling Lindsey one evening and crying because I didn't feel like I had any friends in Austin. I was being melodramatic, but it really did feel like my roommates were moving on without me, making friends with cool people like Patrick and horrible, intrusive midwesterners like Zach.
This would have been a great time to modify my behavior and be a more open and loving person. It took a while for that to happen.
Eventually, after one squabble too many, we parted ways with Raheem, while Aaron's brother found his own place, and rented a four bedroom in East Austin - Beta Delta 2.0.
It was at this point that I finally started to overcome the slide that I started down the winter of my sophomore year. I started to redevelop a cohesive sense of self that wasn't necessarily predicated on being somehow cooler than everyone else. (It should be emphatically noted that I have never in my life been especially cool.)
Aaron and Erik finding new friends forced me to be nicer to people and, shockingly, I made new friends of my own. I was still more isolated than the pair, as a lot of my time was occupied with my internships and freelancing, but college was shaping up into what I had always imagined it would be.
We spent most of our days watching TV, eating unhealthily and generally living without care. (They did a lot of homework, but it never looked terribly strenuous to me.)
I don't think I've ever been happier than in my two years at the Beta Delta 2.0. It was the most comfortable place I've ever lived. We all knew what to expect from each other and we all enjoyed each other's company. It was like living in a hangout sitcom, where I knew that every day I could come home and crack jokes with my best friends. (My brother, Ryan, once famously declared, "My brother's life is a TV show.")
Aaron and Erik started to come into their own as well. They both went on unsuccessful dates, birthing the Curse of Eastside Cafe. They also both finally came of age, which began the two-day birthday celebraish tradition. They then began interning, which meant that I could mooch in earnest.
I was Templeton at the fair.
The Beta Delta eventually came to an end. The night the boys graduated, we went to Sixth Street and then came home and talked on the porch until the sun came up. It was one of those moments that you know is definitively the end of an era, and you don't want to give it up even though you have to.
It was during those hours on the porch that I felt most poignantly the regret of my previous hubris. I would've given anything to turn back the clock to those first days in Kinsolving, to re-experience the birth of these friendships that would change me forever - to try to do it over and actually be a mentor or a role model. I realized that this is sappy, but I am nothing if not a profoundly sappy person. I'd rather be sappy than cynical, and I wish it hadn't taken me so long to learn that.
I'm glad that I have though, I'm thankful for my friends that were patient with me, through all of my dipshittery, until I stumbled upon that conclusion.
So this is my blog about Aaron, which, as all things are, is really about me. Maybe I'll write something less self absorbed for his wedding. (Barring that, we've still got the funeral.)
Epilogue:
Aaron's Brother now works as an engineer in Houston, every time that I see him, he's in good spirits.
Matt recently graduated and works as an engineer in Austin. He got to prolong his college experience beyond BD because he took an extra semester, lucky guy.
Ignite people have all more-or-less grown into real human beings, and the organization itself was dutifully cared for by many people that I love and respect. I'm sure if young Kyle joined the organization now, he'd find a community that was loving and honest and met his perceived needs.
John finally found some macking success and is now married and living what appears to be an awesome life in Northern California.
My female friends from early college are all still great, I ended up spending less time with them after those first semesters because I began dating Lindsey. Their loss, I'm sure.
Erik also found macking success and is "working" in Austin. If snapchat is to be believed, all he does is wear t-shirts to work and get to drink beer with his co-workers.
Patrick has taken over my role as the weird older guy living with a bunch of college kids. He'll be a doctor one day and probably have to drop a digit on a bunch of dads.
Zach lives in the metroplex like me. He was born for this town.
Aaron's wildest dreams have all come true. He has a girlfriend, makes roughly 3x my salary and eats a lot of Popeyes. I can only imagine where he'd be if I'd have been a proper mentor.
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