School is not for me. For every form of education that I’ve participated in to date, I have yet to do my work in anything resembling an organized, coherent fashion. I turn in my work late, my textbook reading is best described as reading between the lines without reading the lines, and my persistent exam strategy is to hope that the test questions trigger a subconscious memory-answer from a lecture during which I was probably asleep.

Yet somehow, I’m a junior at a fairly decent university (Cal State Long Beach, for those who’ve forgotten). And that means I’ve pretty well bucked the system. That idea is definitely for me.

I need to get a 3.0 average to stay in the film program, so I’m currently working out an intricate balance of A’s and C’s so that nobody catches onto the fact that I really shouldn’t be where I am. Charlie Tran, College Student… at a real college, nonetheless! This, I would not, could not have seen three years ago, when I was a high school senior doing little but dragging my ass towards mid-June so that I could exasperatedly wipe it with a diploma.

My parents had feared that I wouldn’t graduate.
My sisters had feared that my planless future would put me on a path to mediocrity.
And my friends, oddly enough, had and still have this quirky assumption that I’ll succeed, and don’t need much in the way of help or motivation. The best memory I have to explain this is that of me helping someone with their geometry homework at one in the morning, when I also had a four page book report due that day, which I hadn’t exactly started yet.

It’s a weird sort of balance, the role that I give myself. Behind me is my family, always gently holding me up with a worried half-frown on their faces, wondering how in the world I’ll ever survive in the real world. In front of me are the new faces in my life, some looking to me for advice and some just looking at me in curiousity, but for the most part there’s this respect at first sight.

I’m not the failure that my family feared before, and I’m not the automatic success that some people now assume. I think I’m the anomaly that has the luck to experience both extremes, in rapid fluctuation. The moderation-impaired glitch in the system.

In a world where only the successful succeed, one man… one failure… must risk everything… and everyone… to attain the one thing… that he kinda-sorta thinks he wants.

        C h a u L o n g T r a n
        STARS AS

        C h a r l i e T r a n
        IN
        FAILURE! TO! FAIL!