Fall makes me miss college. Yes, even the classes. As I slither into a brown skirt with a conservative slit and high heels for added professionalism and intimidation to the majority of students who are still shorter than I am, I miss sweats and my huge college sweatshirt, lugging my coffee and over-loaded bag up the hill, and being responsible for little more than my attention span. I miss sitting in the quad, pretending to study, but really only scoping for cute faces and enjoying the flutter of leaves to the still-green grass. And I miss my girlfriends. Adult friends are great, but in no way can compare to the women who used to see me in my pajamas with my hair messy, eating the wrong sort of foods and throwing hormonally-charged temper tantrums on a daily basis. So in the spirit of nostalgia, here is all the knowledge I have that I can credit to my college experience.
1. My social security number. Go on, ask me it. I will rattle that sucker off so quickly, it will make your head spin. I learned this my freshman year, and I must say, it remains the piece of knowledge that I find most handy these days.
2. How to burp really loudly. Also learned my freshman year. Too much beer and best friends in the dorm. You wouldn’t think this would be a skill that we worked on, but it was. My mother would cringe when I came back for vacation. Unfortunately not a skill I get to practice often these days because as much as I liked to shock my mother with my disgusting habit, I’d rather not hear it from my daughter.
3. Coffee is great, but too much is not a good thing. Shaking hands and nausea aren’t ever fun, and even less so when you’re stuck in a huge lecture hall, pinned in between a bulky football hero and a sorority girl wearing way too much perfume.
4. Same thing with beer. The buzz is fun, and the delusion that you’re the most interesting person in the room is enjoyable, but it’s not worth paying for the next morning.
5. Boys are mean, and it’s best not to try to read too much into what they say or do. Weeding through the bad ones to find the good ones is a very long, tedious process…but maybe that’s why we drank so much.
6. Don’t wait for the phone to ring. It won’t. And when it does, you won’t be expecting it.
7. Libraries are wonderful places to get away from everyone. It is accepted that people don’t socialize among the book stacks. Even now, when I want to hide, this is where I go.
8. The complexity of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is amazing when someone brilliant takes your hand and leads you through it.
9. Shakespeare was ahead of his time. Don’t believe anyone who tells you he wasn’t.
10. Being a woman now is tough, but it's better than it used to be. If you're not on your hands and knees, crawling around a room, trying to peel off the yellow wallpaper in order to free the woman stuck behind it, count your blessings.
11. You will never be fluent in a language until you live in a country where it is spoken. You may be able to write it, read it, and stumble through it in conversation, but true fluency is only granted to those who are forced to abandon their native tongue and jump into the deep end of the pool.
12. A good girlfriend will long outlast any romance. I couldn’t tell you where most of my college boyfriends have disappeared to, but I know where all of my girlfriends are, what they are doing, and most of us have talked in the last month or so.
13. You can’t go home again, no matter how homesick the dorms make you, or how clueless you might be about what you plan on doing next. It’s painful trying to regress past a certain point, so you might as well suck it up and move forward.
14. Life is never a done deal. Majors change, passions die, friends move, bodies suffer injuries, and the paths that we were sure of change even as we place our next footstep down. Accept it, enjoy the view, and muster up as much gusto as you can for the day to day details.
It’s Friday, and fall is incredible here. Have a great weekend, everybody.
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