The Sweet Pleasure of Ditching

You Can't Make Me | ✌🏻 no. 016

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When you want to be Ferris but always end up Cameron.

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“Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

—Ferris Bueller

I.

I'll be forty in a few years, but I frequently find myself fantasizing about ditching both personal plans and work—not making excuses, not reading an article about the “8 Best Ways to Say No,” not calling out sick, not taking a vacation or personal day—just disappearing without explanation, without the emotional labor of justifying an absence. Receiving permission to stay home robs you of the transgressive pleasure of reclaiming your time from those who insist on and expect your presence.

Recently, I found myself in an interminable meeting on the ninth floor of an aging administrative building on my university’s campus. The conference room had seen better days, and it was starting to gather abandoned office furniture the way old rooms tend to do: Stray pens, toothless staplers, cords to nothing.

Sitting at a long table awash in circuitous bureaucratic complaint, I watch the warm sunlight pour through the windows and catch the motes of dust whose delicate landings accentuate the room’s disrepair.

You can't make me, you can't make me, you can't make me.

I want to leave.

I can’t be the only one feeling this way, right? This sucks, right? You remember we die in the end? Bueller? Anyone?

I want to leap over the table, leave my business casual behind like shedded skin, and never look back; I want to feel the wind rush through my thinning hair and brush over the tops of my ears as I run, run, run until I'm bursting through the lobby door, leaving my fellow administrators behind to gather by the dirty conference room window and watch me hightail it into the beckoning promise of an unspoiled afternoon.

II.

I love learning, but I hate school.

I don’t remember anything about the first day I ditched class in high school or what prompted it. Any effort to recreate it gets me nothing but a composite memory that’s evacuated of all specifics except for bright sunlight, blue sky, and an overwhelming feeling of freedom.

What I do know is that once I started ditching, I never wanted to stop, a sentiment undeterred even by the letter my parents eventually received from the Costa Mesa Police Department notifying them of my truancy and their responsibility to help stop it (or else).

In the almost twenty years since I tumbled to my high school graduation at an alternative high school (the ones with paper packets, circa 2005), I’m only now discovering how my urge to ditch never truly went away but continues to quietly hum underneath the performative adulthood I’ve begrudgingly cultivated. Instead of diminishing, the urge to ditch only intensifies as I get older.

Behavior I had once ascribed to mere teenage rebellion and a fleeting dalliance with juvenile delinquency often reappears as a lifeline to recuperate the parts of myself I most need to reconnect with.

III.

Like nearly all high school students, I was wildly insecure. I attended a public high school near the beach, so the most popular boys there surfed, played water polo, or both. This translated into tan, muscular boys walking into class at 8 AM every day with their sun-bleached hair wet and tousled from a morning spent catching waves or swimming in the pool.

Their presence made me sink further into my seat and into my insecurities, suddenly hyper-aware of the fact I was short, scrawny, haunting in my paleness, and a fumbling doggy-paddler when I swam.

Public high school was meant to be a fresh start for me. I had been homeschooled from the second grade through most of freshman year when my family and I moved an hour away to a new city. But, unlike some homeschool kids who defy the stereotype of being shy and socially inept, I reinforced it and was completely unequipped with the social tools to make acquaintances let alone friends.

Sophomore year, finding myself too stupid to align with the honors students, too illiterate in Dungeons & Dragons to fit in with the nerds, and too physically inept to be allowed near the campus athletes, I quickly realized I was a young man without a country, and so I spent many afternoon lunches alone in the hallways of quiet buildings, sitting on the cold floor against lockers, eating slices of mediocre school pizza.

I eventually fell in with the first group of young boys that were nice to me, and they just so happened to be “The failures,” “The burnouts,” “The misfits,” “The dumb kids,” bearers of these and other reductive labels assigned to teenagers who don't play nice with traditional schooling and whose promise can't be foretold by GPA.

Although I was socially repellant in my awkwardness, there was something universal we could all bond over: We hated school and, in the world of hormonal, insecure, angsty teenage boys with bad grades and no direction, a shared mutual hatred of academics and authority was as good a foundation as any to build a friendship.

IV.

Ditching school soon became a way to bond with my new friends and gain the social acceptance I desperately craved.

I watched a lot of movies during those homeschool years, so I drew upon my extensive rewatches of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for guidance. Ferris—played by a young Matthew Broderick—didn't have big muscles or a great tan, but he was sneaky smart and irresistibly charming. I wanted to be just like him: Charismatic, resourceful, adventurous, and fun. Perhaps if I could exchange “weird homeschool kid” for this new persona, maybe then pretty girls like Sloane would want to date me.

But, instead, I was absolutely, inescapably, and always closer to Cameron than Ferris when it came to personalities. (Last semester, teaching a freshman composition course at 7:30 AM on dark, wintery Indiana mornings, I felt much more like I’d become Ben Stein’s famously monotone professor.)

Bueller is above school. His failure to answer the roll call is the first step in answering a much larger, more important call to revel in some harmless youthful mischief.¹

Beyond the obvious relief of no longer being alone at lunch every day, what made ditching such an addictive behavior was how it lightened the spirit and infused the banal with a sense of magic and mystery.

Suddenly, even mundane activities like buying a Moon Pie and ICEE from Circle K, or sitting on the sofa and watching TV became extraordinary by virtue of the stark contrast they represented: Instead of sitting in the back of a remedial math class watching the stoners drool on their desks or draw on their shoes, I was walking around in the warm sunshine laughing with my buddies.

Unlike the patron saint of ditching, I never once approached the grand adventures had by Ferris Bueller, but it didn’t matter. I was young and living in Orange County, California where you could take the local bus to the beach. Granted, you couldn’t flaunt your ditching; you could still get stopped by the cops for truancy. But even if we were just walking through suburban neighborhoods or strip malls, the sun was almost always shining, the temperature moderate and inviting, and we could walk and delight in our aimlessness.

There was no Mr. Rooney chasing us down. We had left all the adults like him back on campus in their offices and those dreary classrooms, writing on whiteboards or eating their lunches in the staff break room while we luxuriated in afternoons that were now thrown wide open, a horizon of endless youth and possibility stretching out before us; it was a victory for being young and refusing to let the adult world of responsibility eclipse our teenage world of reckless fun.

V.

Of course, the freedom of ditching is temporary and the power it grants mostly illusory.

Unbeknownst to my teenage self, every day I ditched was an assault on my future self. In the end, I didn’t actually escape anything. In fact, later, I only became further entrenched in the positions that really did rob me of my spirit and, from the vantage point of a dead-end job, the classroom reveals itself to be the privilege it always was.

After struggling to graduate, I languished in mediocrity, working full-time at a grocery store, failing remedial math classes at my junior college, and for all intents and purposes became a loser par excellence. By the time many of the students from my graduating high school class returned to town with their bachelor’s degrees, I was still slinging groceries across the scanner, and now there would be no ditching.

To ditch in this adult context would mean getting fired and not being able to pay bills and getting my Toyota Yaris repossessed and my credit ruined and having no health insurance. You can’t make me? Oh, but I can! life seems to say.

It didn’t take long for the realities of adult life to extinguish the magic of ditching.

Yet, for as much damage as ditching ultimately caused, those days spent away from campus are enshrined in my memory as some of the happiest afternoons of my young life; I was granted a momentary respite from both my insecurities and my loneliness. I was just an immature kid going on adventures with other immature kids. We never actually did anything “bad”: no drugs, no alcohol, no fights.

We weren’t “cool” enough for any of that.

We ditched because we felt like there was something out there to discover, to be seized, and so we went in search of it. Consequences be damned.

These days, even though I have more responsibilities than ever as a husband, father, and university administrator/instructor (and this knucklehead is grateful for all of it), I find myself welcoming those old feelings of rebellion when the need to ditch resurfaces amidst the monotony and unending obligations of adult life.

It’s not so much about a futile attempt to recover my youth but more so a desire to rediscover some forgotten part of myself and rescue my mind from the hopelessness and lack of imagination that has seized it, darkening a horizon that once seemed so bright and expansive.

Dramatic, sure, but after coming home from a long day of work and then taking care of the kids and sweeping up crushed cheddar bunnies and enduring the howling of two toddlers having tantrums at the same time, it’s easy to feel like the most exciting years are indeed behind me.

I realize how resigned I’ve become, how cynical; I no longer seek spontaneity, adventure, or surprise. I don’t even believe it’s possible given the realities of my life. There’s no Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—just Groundhog Day.

So, when I’m in a meeting, and the need to ditch swells inside of me, I feel an accompanying surge of joy, the recognition of an old friend from another time.

In those moments, like Ferris singing on the float, all I can say is danke schoen.

1. Of course, one wonders what eventually becomes of Ferris and all those days off. If he were to break the fourth wall in 2024 and talk to us now, what life philosophy does middle-aged Ferris espouse? Does he retain his adventurous spirit or has he come to his senses and adopted a more rational, sensible way of being in the world, concerned as he might be with the mortgage of his home in the Chicago suburbs? Does Ferris Bueller become a Midwest version of Peter Gibbons from Office Space?