Volume 5, Issue 11: D-Girl

"Where is this coming from? They teach you this crap at school?"

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I have been in Minneapolis since Wednesday, at the Big Ten Tournament with my son William. Minneapolis is a great American city, vastly underrated and underappreciated by anyone who has never been there; it’s a city with a vast indoor walkway system, a rich cultural history, sports teams with dedicated fanbases who all (hockey and soccer excepted) play right in the downtown area, and a rich music history that runs from Bob Dylan to Prince to today, where the great First Avenue rock arena, just caddy corner to the Target Center, hosts an endless parade of fantastic bands. This month alone featured Jenny Lewis, Cat Power, Jason Isbell, Aimee Mann, Futurebirds, Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, Bully, KMFDM and Sleater-Kinney. There is a little part of me that dreams of getting an apartment downtown here and just going to Timberwolves and Twins games and rock shows every night. I will forever love the Mary Tyler Moore statue downtown. Here is William posing in front of a statue of a woman he does not know representing a television phenomenon he will never understand.

This is my fourth trip to Minneapolis. I covered the MLB All-Star Game here in 2014—the famous Derek Jeter “pipe shot” game—and the Super Bowl in 2019. But the first time I came here was in college. It was 1995. The Associated College Press Association was hosting its annual convention in Minneapolis that year, and, as the managing editor of the Daily Illini, I went with several of my student colleagues, including my friend Mike Cetera, who was editor-in-chief of the DI and who, if any of you have read Are We Winning?, is the Cubs fan friend I went with my father to the Cardinals-Cubs game I write about in that book. It was, for all intents and purposes, my first-ever business trip.

We chartered—a student newspaper could charter a small flight back then—a flight out of Willard Airport straight to Minneapolis; all I brought with me was a Cardinals backpack. Other than a flight I had taken with my grandparents to Florida when I was eight years old, this was the first time I had ever been on an airplane, and I remember being fascinated by how much terror the experience inspired; I stared out the window and marveled at how fragile I was in this tiny plane, how close I was to the propeller, how close to the ground we were, how all that separated me from being sucked into space was this thin little plexiglass widow. We crammed six people, three guys and three girls, into a tiny hotel room, and we spent the first night sending the one member of the group who was 21 years old down to the Walgreens down the street to load up on Icehouse beer and Mad Dog 40/40 for the room. I have no idea how I paid for any of it. I didn’t get my first credit card until I was 27 years old, and my entire income came from the money I made writing stories for the paper. I guess I figured it out somehow.

The thing I remember the most, oddly, was a place called Sushi Train. I had never had sushi in my life, and Mike, fancy suburban kid that he was, dared the rural downstate yokel to go with him and a couple of girls from Wisconsin we’d met at a panel earlier that day. I’d never had sushi; it seemed like the most disgusting possible thing you could eat, actually, but I wanted to be cultured and cool and plus there were girls. The sushi came out on conveyor belts, and you just picked up what you wanted and ate it before it passed by. That blew me away, the idea that there was so much of this thing in the world that I didn’t know anything about that it could literally come flying out on a conveyor belt, that there was an assembly line of new things, just waiting for me to come by and take my place at the table. I think I tried some octopus; it was gross. We went back to the girls’ hotel afterwards and stayed up talking and drinking way too late, nothing shady, just kids enjoying being kids, enjoying discovering that there really were so many interesting people in the world, that no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t meet them all. I think Mike and I fell asleep on the floor; we all woke up and dragged ourselves to a panel the next morning. We gave the girls our addresses and I think one of them even wrote me a letter. I don’t remember if I wrote back. I hope I did.

We were out there a full week. I saw a Timberwolves game—it was Kevin Garnett’s rookie year, and I don’t know how I paid for that either—and listened to a lot of grown-up journalists tell us how to get a job and I thought it was wild that you could walk around an entire city without ever going outside and I vaguely remember the town having some sort of diluted beer policy, like the beer had less alcohol in it or something, it’s a little hazy. It was almost 30 years ago now, the memories just randomly splash up, there’s no real rhyme or reason to it. I’m not sure I have all these details right. It was an experience in my life that I’d mostly forgotten about. It’s just another thing that happened.

I was telling my parents about this this week, about how this would be the longest amount of time I’d been in Minneapolis since college, how much William and I were looking forward to seeing the Illini, when my mom stopped me.

“You went to Minnesota in college?” she said. “You flew?”

“Yeah, it was a whole big trip,” I said. “It’s the first time I ever saw sushi. You didn’t know I was away for a whole week? That I flew on a tiny plane?”

She shrugged. “I have no idea what you did in college. I was busy. I figured you’d call if you needed something.”

A few years back, when I was back at the University of Illinois talking to students and meeting with faculty, the dean of the journalism department told me a story that illustrated the primary difference between college students today and college students when I (and she, because I’m as old as the deans now) were in school.

“When students get out of an important test, the first thing they do when they leave the classroom—the first thing they do—is call their parents and tell them how they did,” she said.

“What?” I asked. “I don’t think my parents even knew what classes I was taking, let alone when I had a test.”

“And if they didn’t do as well as they think they should have, the professor should expect a call from those parents,” she said. “That’s just what college is now. And that’s what parents are now too.”

Much of the point of college—of going to college, of being an alum of a college, of sending your kid to college—is that it is supposed to be a bubble, that it’s supposed to be a place where you learn things, sure, but also a place that helps you transition into the real world. A place where you can figure out who you are, what you value, what you care about, what you might want to dedicate your life toward doing. The reason I look back with nostalgia at college is not because I loved my Philosophy 104 class; it’s because I had four years to learn who I was, to meet people different than me, to get an idea of what was most important to me. I was able to concentrate on developing my personality and core beliefs at the exact moment in my life when my mind was most fertile for such things, when I wasn’t bogged down by figuring out how I was going to put food on the table for my kids, or whether a particular decision would affect my life or career. I could make mistakes. I could do stupid things. I could find out what I wanted. And I could do it in a vacuum. I could do all those things, and go through that whole process, and still come home for Thanksgiving and be the same kid who could go play football in the backyard with his cousins. I got to grow up and I got to still be a kid.

I realize now what an incredible gift that was, how much my parents gave me by leaving me alone in college to make my own mistakes. My parents told me that I had four years of college—paid for by scholarships and my parents working on their feet 60 hours a week for 20 years—and after that I was on my own. College is different than that now. It has become so expensive that college is less an experience for one individual kid and more a total family investment, an investment that everyone has to make sure pays off. The raffish, charmingly slobbish nature of college, the idea that it’s time to chill and figure out your shit, has been replaced by ruthless efficiency, the notion that every moment has to be broken down and commodified for a future payoff. Parents are spending ungodly amounts of money to send their kids to college—large percentages of their own income, or, increasingly, massive amounts of debts to follow them and their kids around for decades to come—so of course they would want to know every detail of what’s going on. That test their kid is taking isn’t just something they’re doing for their Calc 229 class; it’s a gauge of whether the investment is in danger of going belly up. Their kid has the whole family’s financial future on the line. Which means the professor does too.

I’m so grateful this was not my college experience. I went away for four years, did a lot of dumb shit, met some incredible people, came home occasionally for some hot meals and to do my laundry, then went back to school to continue the process of figuring out who I was. Which then prepared me for when I was out of college, entirely on my own, outside the cocoon of school—it made me make sure not to count on anyone but myself, to know that I had to swim on my own. I do not know if this was my parents’ strategy. It’s possible they were just so wrapped in their own lives—and my little sister’s—that sweating every little decision I was making, what classes I was taking, just wasn’t an option. But whatever it was: I think it worked. I think it was good for me. I think it was good for them too.

My older son William is only in the sixth grade; all of this is not quite around the corner for him just yet. But it gets on you fast. My friend Mike? His son graduates in two months and will be enrolling at the University of Kansas in the fall. William is four years away from applications, five years away from college visits, six years away from moving out of the house and going through the whole process. Six years is not long from now. Six years will happen in a blink. I hope I will give him, and his little brother, the grace—and, really, the space—to have their own lives, to feel like they can screw up in private, that they don’t have to call their parents when they take a test, to be able to make a big trip on their own without having to make sure we’re on board with every single bit of it. I don’t know if I will. But I will try.

Maybe someday, he’ll find himself in Minneapolis, and he’ll go see a rock show, and he’ll have a random night where he meets some people and they decide to go to the Sushi Train, and maybe it’s a memorable night, and maybe it isn’t. But I hope he doesn’t feel like he has to tell me about it. I hope it’s something he can keep to himself. He can call me if he needs something. Or he can just come home and do laundry.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Every Best Picture Winner, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with Oppenheimer.

2. My Annual World Series Winner Draft With Mike Petriello, MLB.com. One of my favorites pieces to do every year.

3. Aaron Rodgers Would Very Much Regret Entering Politics, New York. I almost want him to try it just to watch it all melt down.

4. MLB Division Preview Series: Award Winners From Every Division, MLB.com. We are very close to the season now.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we wrapped up the Oscars and discussed “Love Lies Bleeding” and “Ricky Stanicky.”

Seeing Red, Bernie and I tried to figure out the Cardinals’ outfield situation.

Waitin’ Since Last Saturday, we did our spring check-in.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping: A Grisly Theory and a Renewed Debate,” Tracy Tully, The New York Times. I have always been fascinating by the Lindbergh baby story, and it keeps taking twists and turns.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Rainy Taxi,” Spoon. The most consistent, reliable band makes the most consistent, reliable writing music. I can’t pick a favorite album of theirs: They’re all just equally good. Can you tell I’m trying to finish a book? Every song is “hey, this song is good to write to!” Sorry. It’ll be done in a couple of months, promise.

Also, remember when Pete Buttigieg played “The Way We Get By” on the piano?

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

We are very much enjoying some Illini basketball up here.

Selection Sunday is tomorrow. Be ready for the sixth annual Will Leitch Newsletter men’s and women’s tourney pool, which will be out tomorrow night. Winner, as always, wins copies of every book and the right to assign a topic for this newsletter. Prepare thyself!

Best,
Will