The Elm Student Newspaper
My Day As.. An Ender
Volume 80, Issue 25
May 1, 2009
By Jacki Bower
Elm Staff Writer
Another year is coming to a climactic close- at least in the college world. According to the “real world” calendar it’s only May, but in our world, it’s around metaphorical Christmas time. Our exam care packages are hung by the mail room with care, and in a week or so, this year will be over. We’ll make some resolutions we never intend to keep, and prepare ourselves for a brand new beginning. Some will leave college forever, some will come back again for another year, some will wander around aimlessly with a bottle of Burnett’s in a brown paper bag and continue calling it “college.” To each his own.
As for me, I’ve always been good at endings. Back when I was an English major, I would write the world’s crappiest short story, but cap it off with a real twist of an ending and call it pretty good. Even in this very column, I’ll often be totally bereft of inspiration, but as long as I can think of a quippy line to close with, I’ll still consider it a win. I guess I’ve always just been an ender- better at goodbyes than hellos, good at pulling things out of my ass at the last second. I would even say my back end humps outshine my front ones, if you want to get all Fergie on this analogy.
But there’s another kind of Ender I associate myself with as well— the proper noun form. You know, Ender Wiggin. I know Grace Harter is abroad, but there has to be SOMEONE else on campus who read Ender’s Game as a kid. If you did, I know one thing you and I have in common—we both thought we were Ender while reading the series.
Every kid who reads Ender’s Game thinks they’re Ender— the most brilliant, advanced specimen of young person there ever was or will be, with skills far beyond their peers, and fated to be lifted up far beyond their current station and into the highest ranks of humanity.
The fact is, we can’t all have been Ender. We realized as we matured that if we were Ender, we wouldn’t be going to a public high school and getting a C in physics. We wouldn’t have gotten the part of “Congregation Member #12” in the school production of Footloose. We wouldn’t be depressed for a month because the boy we liked was taking someone else to prom— we’d be way too busy fighting Buggers to deal with that crap. Here we are now, all of us Enders, attending a fine college, but it’s still no Battle School. It should have dawned on us by now that we can’t all be Ender—clearly that role went to someone else.
But I’ll admit, I still have days where I’m hopeful. You know the feeling-—that maybe your Hogwarts letter just got lost in the mail for a decade, but it’s still coming. That maybe you’re still that special person who’s going to save the world. Whether we think we’re Ender, or Harry, or someone slightly less 5th grade lit, I don’t know that we ever lose the ideation that we’re the crux of the human race. So for just a moment, as an ender and an Ender, I’ll indulge myself.
I am in the final stage of my training. I have only one final test ahead of me, one last chance to prove my worth. To be honest, I’d almost rather sabotage it. I’m getting tired of being tested, and I really just want to go home. I’ve been relatively successful when tested so far, but success has only provided me with more tests, each more difficult. I feel like I have only a tenuous grip on my sanity at this point— days and nights blur together and I hardly know what’s what. Also, the Robin Williams dreams are back, and now he’s sometimes joined by Ed Norton, which has forged the creation of a new page in my personal Kama Sutra called the “Death to Coochy.”
As final exams approach, I become less and less concerned with my performance. I will enter the battle room without a plan, and without a care. The only thing I wish to prove now is that I DON’T deserve this, that I shouldn’t be tested any more because I am unworthy. Seriously, I plan on bubbling in my scantrons to recreate Escher’s greatest works, and filling in my essay questions with games of hang man (what letters are missing in “f_c_ bio_og_”?). I’m tired of being so brilliant. It’s really quite a burden. Imagine if you had to write hilarious “coochy” jokes night and day—it’s exhausting.
And I’m not alone. So many of us begin to give up— wonder what good any of this is doing us anyway. We bomb our finals, we BS our term papers, we go to Taco Bell eight times a day instead of studying. Why should it matter? This is just a simulation.
And then, in the final chapter, the terrible truth begins to dawn. College wasn’t just a simulation for us to stumble through drunkenly—college WAS real life. We were learning the things we needed to know to survive in the real world. Everything we did actually counted. The Buggers were real, and in this case, Buggers were the textbooks we demolished, the notes we incinerated, all the knowledge we bombed into oblivion. This “battle room,” this was the real world. We kicked its ass, well, then we kicked our real life’s ass.
As much as this knowledge frightens me, that’s not even the real twist. The real twist is this—we’re actually playing in a totally different game, one where McDonald’s is the supreme overlord of Earth, controlling us all, and the real challenge is maximum consumption of chicken products. It’s called “Tender’s Game.”
How’s that for a quippy ending?