Older and Older, Day by Day

It’s that time of year again when the young come a-trooping onto campus to claim their share of “The College Experience”. With uncertain gait and awestruck gaze, the new students marched into the dining hall, shining with brilliance and naivete in their awkward yet exciting transitional states of being both on the very top of one mountain (as recently graduated high schoolers) as well as at the very bottom of another (as newly admitted freshmen). They looked so young, so full of potential and possibility that their presence left me feeling out in the rain, spurring a kind of morose reflection about how poorly I spent my first year in college. Why didn’t I do this? Why didn’t I do that? Why did I squander my time as so? Blah. Blah. Blah. Nothing but sentimental, self-loathing bile choking in the neck, blocking oxygen to the head. As a rising third year, I can say with the full confidence of experience that, indeed, it’s true:  “Upperclassmenship” is overrated.

But what exactly is it about these doe-eyed freshmen that sparks this kind of existential longing? I have to say, the enchanting, magical, and mysterious flavors of college were all densely packed into my very first year. The subsequent years to college felt more like  sequels to a ‘great’ movie (like “The Matrix”): as you watch the second and third episodes, they feel less authentic and more like cop-outs of the original thing. But then again, even the bad movies brought interesting twists and turns, and every year in college brought with it different classes, different friends, and different experiences to laugh and cry about. As much as I would like to return to the Camelot years of first year college life, I know that chasing it will only cause the present slip away as well. So that’s the mantra to the game: live it now and live it large, or go home and write a sad blog about it all a few years down the line. Either way, the fresmen will always come a-trooping, the underclassmen will always become upperclassmen, and upperclassmen will always graduate. And as we all know, “graduation” is just a nicer way of saying “you’re getting old–now get the hell out of here!”.  Please excuse me as I graduate now.