the miseducation of patrick dunn

I can’t think of a better way to spend my day off than with a marathon of NBC’s Community. I always felt a personal connection to the series because it always reminded me of my own foray at a junior college. It was nearly ten years ago that I first stepped foot onto my alma mater (can I call it that if I never even graduated). I was fresh off the high school assembly line, which I often look back on and refer to as, “The most glorious and wasted years of my life.” To me, high school was a time when I was encompassed by a world of tomfoolery and drug experimentation, both recreational and the kind that treated acne. After graduation, the next logical step for me was college; the community kind.

The beauty of Community is that my opinion of the series was prophetically imagined in my recently rediscovered college essay, “Why I Chose to go to Community College,” that curiously also included a paragraph drawing from that episode of The Cosby Show where all the men fantasized they were pregnant. I was either really ahead of my time or doped up on a cocktail of various acne treatment medication.

To quote myself from a decade ago, “There is a subtle and hidden context behind the title ‘community college.’ With students of all backgrounds, genders, race and age it is truly a melting pot of the community we live in. There is even a lawyer in one of my classes who is studying to become a computer programmer!” The amount of enthusiasm I displayed for sharing classroom space with a lawyer is how I envisioned the fictional study group of Community felt when Jeff Winger first strolled into the classroom. Looking back, I now wish I included a blurb of the Federal Express worker who used his lunch break to take that Accounting class. There is nothing more magical than seeing a man in a package delivery uniform crunching numbers in one of those small and uncomfortable desk slabs that are connected to the chair.

The following sentence was most likely a work of fiction due to my irrational fear of authority figures, “The professors and staff are so helpful and accessible, you can even eat lunch at the same table in the cafeteria with the Dean of Students!” Again, I’m overcome with excitement; this time over the mystical Dean of Students. I don’t even remember what he looks, frankly, I’m not sure I ever even knew what he looked like. Instead, I find myself imagining Dean Pelton, flamboyantly eating a grilled cheese sandwich across from me at a cafeteria booth and trying to convince me to participate in a KFC branded space flight simulator or something. 

Then I go on to describe my eagerness to work on a project with a group of strangers, “Recently, my Sociology professor randomly paired us with students and asked us to discuss our differences and similarities. For example, there was one student named Sally who was much older than me and also happened to be a woman. These were the obvious differences, but we both share a birthday in the same month and like the new Kiefer Sutherland show, 24.” Sally was clearly my own version of Pierce Hawthorne. She was old, probably useless, but she served her purpose, which was occasionally bonding over fictionalized accounts of international terrorism. She may have had me beat in the “old and wiser” department, but she sucked at trying to save files onto a floppy disk.

Now how does Bill Cosby fall into all of this? Well, Greendale alma mater Luis Guzman wasn’t the only celebrity to attend community college, my extraordinary research skills uncovered that William Henry Cosby, Jr., was also an attendee of one. I’m guessing I included this tidbit to earn myself some street cred; that and I was a few paragraphs short of fulfilling my three page requirement. My closing argument to that matter, “Who knows, perhaps if Cosby was never inspired by the close-knit educational experience that is often received at community college, we may have never witnessed a very pregnant Cliff Huxtable complain to Clair about back pain.” I guess classic sitcoms do serve their purpose in higher education, just ask Abed and the class he signed up for that was an in-depth analysis of Who’s the Boss.

I’d love to post the whole essay, but now I’m worried about being retroactively accused of plagiarizing something from the internet; or as Sally called it, the surfing hideout on the fancy calculator machine.