I went to Penn State.

But I didn't want to. 

I saw Penn State as the community college of State College--a town, where yes, as the name clearly states, is where the State University of Pennsylvania is located--but also a town with a high-ranking high school and a graduating class that wanted more than what the town repeatedly tried to tell us was all. Well, I did. 

I had a friend a year older than me who went to NYU to study photography, and I wanted nothing else than to do that too or do SOMETHING besides the default. Default because most kids parents worked at the school and got a 75% discount on tuition (my parents did not). Default because the main campus of Penn State WAS the region's branch campus, and largely, the only kids or townies that went here happily were kids who knew that if they lived ANYWHERE else, they wouldn't have gotten in before doing a two year penance in Altoona or some other unfortunately named place. Default because Penn State was like religion in my household--religion to my dad.

I asked my parents if they would take me to look at some schools to which my dad replied, "Look in the backyard." That's where Penn State was. Literally. When I was sixteen my parents had moved us an hour and fifteen minutes away from the small town I grew up in for that very reason. They built one of those houses with brick on the front and vinyl siding on the back, over a noisy highway on a fault line (one of the few things I learned in my required freshman science class affectionately known as "Rocks for Jocks"), for no better reason than you could see Beaver Stadium from the back porch. So I did. I looked. And then I bought myself a greyhound bus ticket and went to New York City for the very first time.

I slept on my friend's dorm room floor, ate Thai food for the first time, promised my friend that I would get my nose pierced too and then changed my mind after seeing the size of the needle that was jammed through her left nostril, saw an aerial view of Proof, went to a jazz club where people actually snapped instead of clapped, and fell in love with what I saw as the prize for all the science fairs won and tests studied for and cigarettes turned down. But instead I went to Penn State.

My dad was obsessed with Penn State. When he wasn't teaching high school history back in the town that we moved from (yes, commuting every day for the last 13 years) it was rare to find him in anything other than a Penn State t-shirt. Even when my sister had her first NY fashion week fashion show, my dad showed up wearing a Penn State pullover and headphones with the game blasting. The Joe Paterno cardboard cut-out was a permanent fixture in the living room, the carpets are navy blue, walls primarily white, and the mantel above the flip-a-switch fireplace was filled with models of Beaver Stadium pre- and post- renovation. There was a time when he wore a little stuffed lion's tail tucked into the back of his pants on game day. My parents answering machine ends with my dad's rendition of the Penn State roar. He sent Joe Paterno a birthday card every year but let my mom sign his name on mine.

My dad thought that Penn State was the greatest university in the world and I would have to be an idiot to go anywhere else--not because of the cutting-edge research (there definitely is some) or the expanse of the courses offered online (Why is this promoted as a positive thing anyway? Has there been a study I missed that proved that some people are auditory learners, some visual, and SOME simply learn better with a cat video playing next to their online coursework?), OR the breadth of art offerings. No. My dad thought that Penn State was the greatest university and the best thing for me and my future because of football. You know, that sport that I never cared about, never understood, never played? Yes. Football.

Sure, I could have taken out a massive amount of loans to go to NYU like Felicity did. But the amount I had to take out to go to the school I didn't want to was overwhelming enough. This wasn't accepted with an apathetic shrug of the shoulders though. I was furious. One night, I dumped the entirety of the milk crate I had jammed with the myriad brochures and recruitment packets from small, expensive, liberal arts schools with Saints in their names as well as crazytown places like the The Citadel and BYU (which I requested, but that's another story) over the first floor balcony. The result was one of the not infrequent times I was able to see my dad not just as a football fan, but as a football coach who had flown off the handle because a player dared not to hustle.

My parents paid for about half of my undergraduate college education at Penn State and once I moved off campus, begrudgingly gave me 100 dollars a month for food and expenses. Yet, every year, my dad splurged on a season pass for me to the football games while he watched from home.

I went once and got cheese sauce thrown in my hair. After that, I sold my tickets on ebay for around forty bucks, and ONCE for over 100 (even though I knew that you had to show your student ID to get into the student section and that these proud alumnus/meatheads had likely lost their expired ones years ago in some toilet)! 

I hated football. I hated football games. I hated tailgating. I hated the sweatpants with the little paw prints on the butt. I hated how I'd get heckled walking down College Avenue in bright green rain boots, but for some reason, on game day, these assholes could wear whatever nonsense they wanted, and they did.

My dad would call me after each home game to ask me what the score was (as if the numbers were some sort of secret that only those sitting--wait no, there's no sitting in the student section--STANDING in the stadium were privy to) even though he must have known that I never went. I was never quiet about my anti-Penn State stance or my constant research into transferring to another school, so I really don't know why he kept doing it. I mean, it was hard to get him to give me money at the end of the semester when my meal plan was used up and I only had microwaveable popcorn to eat. 

Maybe he liked to pretend that I didn't hate Penn State and seemingly everything that he loved. Maybe doing something tangible like buying tickets made this pretending more real. Maybe he felt so strongly about Penn State football that even if I only decided to go once, the money spent on providing the opportunity week after week and season after season, was money well spent. Maybe he hoped I'd change, that I'd start to realize that like it or not, technically, I was part of the 'we' in "We Are!"

I don't know.

What I do know is that not going to the football games was usually the best thing about my week. When that ball was being thrown around, State College becomes the third most populated city in the state--but interestingly, what this meant for me was that there was a four hour window when everyone was either in the stadium, huddled around an open trunk in the parking lot of the stadium or the fields surrounding, or staring at a TV somewhere. The campus and the town and everywhere the game wasn't was like a ghost town. 

It was glorious. 

There's an insider-ness that seems to band outsiders together, especially when they're outside of something as meaningless and all-encompassing as Penn State football. There was like a charge in the eye contact I would make with someone I passed on the street during this time. It was like an invisible chest bump that said, "Hey. Fuck this town. Am I right or am I RIGHT?" Or a proverbial pat on the ass that said, "You're cool. What bands are you into? Nevermind, I'm currently being informed by the small buttons on your shoulder bag and I will make all kinds of concessions of taste simply because you are here and not there."

I know now that this feeling is similar to how fans feel when they see someone else wearing some of the school's paraphernalia or what causes them to shout "WE ARE!". How do I know now? Because oddly, in the years after leaving Penn State, I started to feel the tiniest twinge of this too. 

When I first graduated and made a beeline across the country to Portland--the farthest, cheapest city I could think of--I would feel an inexplicable bit of pride when I saw something for that other PSU or that other Happy Valley. And then when I finally got to New York and I got to a graduate school that I didn't need to caveat ("No…Penn STATE…the football one…yes, they have a film program) and whose colors also happen to be blue and white, I realized how much who I am was informed by having kept myself apart from Penn State...and dipping my toe in when I felt like it.   

I found myself buying a vintage Penn State shirt on ebay and only half joking when I blaming my drinking habits on Penn State, "I went to a state school! What do you want from me?!" Similar to how Diane Keaton couches her pretensions in Manhattan with "I'm from Philadelphia! What do I know?!" This is a bit weird, and not something I expected, but I guess I also didn't really expect not to fit any better in New York or Columbia than I did at Penn State. 

I suppose I'd rather exacerbate that fact than squeeze in anywhere.

I went home for Thanksgiving for the first time in about five years after the scandal broke. I was curious to see how my dad was taking it and just what it was like in the town. My sister and I joked about how hard Christmas shopping would be for my dad now as we attempted to drive by Jerry Sandusky's house, (which is less than a mile from my parents and overlooks an elementary school, btw) only to find that it's on a cul-de-sac, which, paired with my rusty driving skills, made it nearly impossible to do a casual bit of looky-looing. The camera crews turned on us just in time to see me finagle a seventeen point turn and be on our way.

My mom had said that a woman she worked with saw Sandusky a few days before at Sears looking at treadmills. Why the man wouldn't order the thing online at a time like that was beyond her. Ok. So there was still some distance. My dad didn't have a cardboard cutout of Sandusky in the living room after all, and at that point, he was adamant that, "Joe didn't know." He knew him after all. He had read everything the man had ever written and everything that was ever written about the man, he had listened to every Thursday night pre-game interview, and had admittedly based his life on Joe's teachings. At this point, he was in the habit of taking nightly drives past Joe's modest home, “just to see if he was ok.”

We got in a fight about the core of the issue--that it came down to putting football above everything else, something that was simply wrong, but expected, considering that that's how the University, the town, even he, operated. Sure, the repercussions are far less when you're not talking about sex crimes, but still, it's a cultural issue and a fucked up numbering of priorities that could allow something like this to happen and to allow someone like this to go unpunished for so long. He didn't quite see it like that. Sandusky was a monster, but Penn State football and Joe Paterno were still air tight. Fine.

I was bored and went to the mall. I bought a Penn State t-shirt for ten bucks that said "Thanks Joe." At this point I could still buy the t-shirt with the patronizing mix of irony and nostalgia that I had been using towards the school, the town, and my dad for years. I went there sure, but I wasn't like, you know, one of those people wearing a Penn State shirt…except for the small fact that I was.

And now the Freeh report has laid it all out. I couldn't get a hold of my dad for a few days, but noted that the roar on the answering machine hadn't been changed so I wasn't expecting that he would have either. But last night I finally talked to him. 

He's only a quarter of the way through the report, but he's already put his Penn State t-shirts away.

I've never believed in anyone or anything with the same amount of passion and dedication that my father had for Joe Paterno and Penn State football. And although it's been a constant source of eye rolling, now, it's more than that. I know my dad's not the only one who believed in the man and the machine, drank the kool-aid, wore the Nikes, whatever, but you know, in a way you'd think I'd feel happy or victorious now that the myth has been revealed and everyone is admitting the issues with heralding something like football that I was pretty convinced about at 18. But I'm just not.

I'm skeptical enough about money and power and big business (and let's face it, that's what Penn State is) not to think that a whole lot of change can come from what has been learned beyond a lot of lip service and candlelight vigils and somber nods from the Board of Trustees. 

But, for me, I can't help but hope that come this November--a time when my Dad is usually immersed in the throes of a football season--maybe, just maybe, I'll be the one to get a birthday card signed by him. And hey, since his birthday is in November too, maybe I'll send him a Columbia Lions t-shirt--but you know, not like in a rah-rah school spirit kind of way, but in a "hey, this is me and this is what's important to me" kind of way--and that he’ll wear it.