The Turn

HERE’S a story. In college I entered the spring semester of my freshman year on academic probation. There wasn’t one reason this happened. There were many.

I had signed up for a computer science class called Digital Security with no programming knowledge. I had signed up for a Modern Media course with no understanding of how to decipher Foucault, Derrida, or Lévi-Strauss. And then there was the geographic whiplash and identity crisis of the move itself. I came from a high school in rural Oregon with a graduating class of fourteen, and I experienced severe culture shock transitioning to Brown University, stepping from the bush league to the Ivy League. I earned money in high school building barbed wire fences, changing out irrigation pipe, and shooting marmots for ranchers upset about the holes dug in their alfalfa fields, and my standard uniform was Wranglers and shitkickers. The very first thing my