mass pike

day 4 - mass pike. by the get up kids.

good lord did I love the get up kids. obsessed with them. they were the perfect soundtrack for an angsty 16 year old. perrrrfect. I used to fall asleep while listening to them on my discman.

I remember listening to this song, on said discman, while sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car. most likely i was brooding, while they were driving me home from one of my brother’s basketball games. background story: my brother is 3 years older than me, and played basketball at Duquesne. at the time, I was undecided on where I wanted to go to college.  

get ready because you are going to find out, for the first time ever, the story of how I decided where I would spend 4.5 years of my life, as well as a good chunk of my parents’ (& my own) money.

for some reason, while jamming out to this song, I made this sudden connection between the fact that Duquesne is located atop a hillside, and the fact that I imagined “mass pike”  to also be some sort of hill like place.

in that moment I decided that I would, without a doubt, go to Duquesne. maybe it was a hasty decision as I have a bad habit of letting song lyrics dictate how to act or what to say. but, I’m stubborn, and generally when I decide on something, there is no changing my mind.  flash forward ten years and I realize that matt pryor is singing about the Massachusetts Turnpike. and I’m embarrassed. there’s a slim chance that I should have ended up at Harvard.