I Got a Mention in My College Alumni Newsletter. Sort Of.
I was digging through my junk mail last Tuesday looking for an overdue parking ticket reminder, when I clicked the wrong link. It was the quarterly alumni newsletter from my undergrad, the one I always delete immediately because 9 out of 10 emails from the alumni office start with “We need $50 for the new football field bleachers” and the other 10% are just bragging about people who sold their startup for 10 million or got nominated for a state judgeship. I wasn’t even gonna scroll past the header, but my internet glitched and the page loaded all the way, so I figured I’d kill two minutes while I waited for the parking site to stop crashing.
The feature spread this issue was “Where Are They Now: Class of 2018”. I scrolled through, saw a girl I had intro bio with who’s now a pediatrician, a guy who was student body president who works in the senate now, and then boom. There was Lila. My Lila, my college roommate, the one I still live with five years after graduation. She got a big promotion to communications director at that affordable housing non-profit she’s been working at since graduation, and she got a whole two paragraphs and a headshot. I was so busy grinning at how good her headshot looked (she spent three hours picking out the blouse and taking 42 takes, I remember, because she said her double chin looked weird in all the early ones) that I almost missed it. At the very end of the blurb, after “she leads a team of four and advocates for unhoused communities across the Pacific Northwest” it said: “Lila lives in Portland with her partner Sam and college roommate Mia Carter, who works in freelance graphic design.”
That’s me. I was in the college newsletter. Sort of.
I was sitting at my rickety secondhand desk at the time, eating leftover instant ramen that I’d microwaved for too long so the noodles were mushy, and I had a grease stain from last night’s tacos on the gray sweatpants I’d been wearing for two days straight. I stared at the screen for a full minute, chewing on a soggy noodle, trying to figure out what I was supposed to feel.
First, obviously, I was proud. Lila has worked her ass off for this. She was organizing tenant walkouts when we were still juniors, she took an unpaid internship for a year just to get her foot in the door, she stays up until 1am writing grant proposals when most people our age are out at bars. She deserves every bit of this. But there was this tiny, stupid, awkward little twinge in my chest, the kind you don’t admit to anyone because it makes you sound like a jerk. I’ve never been featured anywhere for anything. The closest I got was the local coffee shop putting my pet-sitting flyer on their bulletin board by the sugar station last year, and half of those got pulled down to make room for a lost dog poster.
When we were seniors, we used to sit in that same campus coffee shop and flip through the old alumni newsletters they kept by the door, making fun of them. We’d cackle at the 30-somethings who wrote in talking about how their liberal arts degree “prepared them for a life of purpose” and bet on which of our classmates would end up featured first. Lila always raised her hand and said it’d be her, and she was right. I always said the only thing I wanted to achieve by 27 was to never have to eat cold mac and cheese out of a shared mini fridge again. Technically I won that bet—we have a full-size fridge now, I just still share it with Lila. No one’s ever written that down in a newsletter, though.
I sent Lila a screenshot with the line where I’m mentioned circled in neon blue. I typed “Famous now, when are you sending me the royalty check?” She texted back 30 seconds later, all caps: “I TOLD them you did our entire website redesign last year! They could’ve given you a whole sentence at least! That’s such garbage.” I told her it was fine, really. And mostly it was. But I’ve had that weird feeling before, the one where you’re just a side note in other people’s milestones. I was the maid of honor in my best friend from high school’s wedding, got one line in the printed program. Our trivia team won the city championship last spring, and the local paper put a photo of the team on their website, and I’m half cut off by the edge of the frame, just my left shoulder and a sliver of my beer can visible. This wasn’t that different, honestly.
When my mom called me on Sunday to check in, I showed her the newsletter over FaceTime. She got so excited she almost dropped her iced tea. “I’m going to forward this to your aunt Linda and your uncle Mike! My kid’s in the college newsletter!” I tried to tell her it’s just a tiny mention, I’m not the one they featured, and she waved me off. “So what? You’re in it. That’s something to celebrate.” I let her forward it, even though I knew aunt Linda would reply back asking when I’m gonna get a “full time job with benefits” instead of doing freelance design for random small businesses. That’s just what aunt Linda does.
Last night, Lila, Sam and I ordered pepperoni pizza and sat on the couch watching that terrible 90 Day Fiancé spin-off we’re all obsessed with. I picked the biggest slice, the one with extra pepperoni, and thought about that blurb again. Most days I don’t mind that my life isn’t newsletter-worthy. I designed the logo for the community garden down the street, I make flyers for the cat rescue’s adoption fairs every other month, I grow cherry tomatoes on the fire escape that only half the time get eaten by squirrels. One of my tomatoes got to be the size of a baseball this year, I posted a photo of it on my Instagram and my mom liked it, and that’s more than enough most days.
I don’t need a whole paragraph in a newsletter. If I’m being honest, I’d probably mess it up anyway. I’d forget to mention something important, or I’d say something dumb that would embarrass me in front of all the alumni who donated $1000 to the school. It’s nice, actually, getting to be the side note. Lila gets the big feature, I get the extra slice of pizza and no one asking me for a donation after. I was in the college newsletter. Sort of. That’s enough for me.
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