Did you ever have to complete those creative, problem-solving activities when you were little? You know the kind that says, "Here's a piece of string, half a roll of toilet paper and a bendy straw. Now build a fully functional suspension bridge." OK, maybe they weren't quite that intense but you get the idea. I used to have to do those all the time in elementary school and always wondered what the point was. How could this possibly be preparing me for real life? Well, now I know they weren't preparing me for real life. They were preparing me for college.
Last week, as I looked around my kitchen, searching in vain for something to make for dinner, I had a flashback to that room that smelled of Play-Doh and that child-sized table covered with random materials. It was the end of the month, and I hadn't made a grocery store run in a while, so the pickings were pretty slim. I knew I was going to have to get creative if I didn't want to fall back on my old standby of oatmeal for the third time that day. Desperate, I pulled out everything I had left in the freezer and the few items left on my pantry shelf. I came up with frozen vegetables, a veggie burger, some pasta and a bag of carrots. Not exactly ingredients worthy of Emeril, but by that time, I was starving, so I threw everything into a pot while I defrosted the veggie burger. When the ingredients were cooked, I cut everything up, mixed them in a skillet, then ate probably the weirdest pasta mixture of my life.
Weird, but satisfying. After all, I didn't have to go out for food; I didn't have to eat oatmeal; and while it may not have been Hubert's style, I'd like to think that Rachel Ray, at least, would have been impressed by my creativity.
Learning to work with what you've got seems to be a recurring theme in my life, and I believe that it is a crucial part of the college experience. Our world is one of excitement and opportunity, but it also one that is away from many comforts and conveniences of home. To make it here, you have to be flexible. This is a world where you have to be okay with doing your laundry in the sink at 3 a.m. because you just realized that the shirt you need for your interview still has mustard on it from last week. When something breaks, you learn to fix it or live without it. When you can't get something you need, you make due with a substitute. You make it work.
Part of learning to get creative is being ready for the consequences when your substitutions don't pan out. During the last two years, I have seen people attack a lot of situations with unusual solutions. Some work amazingly, and some are total failures. Take all the snowstorms we had this year, for example. Their magnitude was totally unexpected, and I know I wasn't the only college student who was unprepared. When the time came to dig out my car, I had no shovel, knew no one with a shovel and was well aware that they were sold out every store that I could conceivably walk to.
With this in mind, I searched my apartment for any tool that might help excavate my old station wagon. I came up with a bent cookie sheet and an umbrella. I thought there was a chance that the bowl shape of the open umbrella might be useful in scooping snow off the roof. I think you can probably guess that flimsy nylon against two feet of frozen ice wasn't much of a fight. The cookie sheet, on the other hand, turned out to be surprisingly useful to push away hard-to-reach layers of snow.
College life is unpredictable and you are usually without means to deal with weird situations. Dealing with these situations requires you to be flexible and take a creative approach. So all that early problem-solving with pipe cleaners and Popsicle sticks might actually come in handy.
Katie's column runs biweekly Tuesdays. She can be reached at k.mcnally@cavalierdaily.com
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