Cafe 54
Cafe 54 is a restaurant in downtown Tucson, Ariz. where the chefs and prep workers are people who are suffering from mental disabilities. It is a non-profit organization where mentally challenged people are given a place to work and be taught special skills in order to be more comfortable in the working community.
I don’t like writing with pens. The idea of using a pen for me is nerve-wracking; it’s too permanent. I don’t like the fact that once something is written down on paper with pen it cannot be erased; you have to scratch it out, and everyone will know that your mistake was made.
I am a senior at the University of Oregon, but this is only my second term at UO. I grew up in Oregon and after high school I decided that enough rain was enough and I moved to Tucson to attend the University of Arizona.
People always asked me why I chose Tucson. You grow tired of saying, “Oh the campus was beautiful,” and, “Well, they have a great program;” those are the answers that grandparents and your uncle’s best friends want to hear – the answers that make it seem like you really looked into the college. So finally, I started telling people the real reason I was moving to the high desert for an education. I chose UA because for all four years of my high school career, for some reason, I wore a University of Arizona sweatshirt every year on Senior Sweatshirt Day. As a freshman, sophomore, junior and senior, all the teachers who did not know who I was would walk up to me and ask “Are you going to the University of Arizona in the fall?” I would politely laugh, notice my sweatshirt and the coincidence of the spirit day it was and say, “No, I just like this sweatshirt.” Finally my senior year, it dawned on me that maybe all those times I had worn that sweatshirt in the past were signs, and maybe I should accept my acceptance to the UA. So I did.
After two and a half years of double majoring in French and Journalism, I realized that I had made a mistake. I adore the rain, and maybe my wearing that Arizona sweatshirt really was a coincidence, not a sign.
Twelve hours before my flight back to Tucson during winter break of my junior year, I broke down and begged my parents to let me not go back. Two minutes later I was a college drop out hoping I wasn’t too late or not qualified enough to attend the University of Oregon in the spring. But I was qualified enough. And even though at first I believed that staying in Arizona was a mistake – a mistake that everyone would see and hear about scratched out in thick black ink, how I was total failure at trying to make it on my own, that I was weak and only homesick, that I had wasted all that money on an education I could have received at a cheaper Resident price – it was a lovely mistake. I needed to leave Oregon and go to a place completely unfamiliar where I was alone to find out who I really was. The teachers and courses at UA were great, helpful and motivating, but the Tucson culture was just not for me. However, I needed to see and live in a culture that was completely different from Oregon’s; I needed to open my eyes from the bubble that my small hometown is in; and I needed to attend UO at the time I did, not being a freshman.
As Leonardo DiCaprio says as Jack Dawson in James Cameron’s Titanic, “and now here I am on the grandest ship in the world having champagne with you fine people.”
According to a quiz I found on StumbleUpon, I’m supposed to be 37. So I guess being 21, you could say that my mind is stuck in 1996.
, Newberg, OR 97132
