Well, I officially don’t go this university anymore. I got my diploma and my alumni keychain, and it won’t be long before I get calls asking me to donate to the alumni association. The back-to-school ads have started once again and, for the first time since 1992, I’m not making the yearly trip to Staples for glitter pens and sparkly notebooks. It’s funny to think that when I started kindergarten, some of the parents of today’s freshmen were still in college themselves. Boy, am I old!
I’m writing this from a desk in Rockville, where I have a job. That’s right, folks. Not only do I get to go to bed early and wear long pants in August, but I even have a sweet room on top of my parents’ garage, just like Mike Seaver on Growing Pains. Who says you can’t go back home? I’m slowly reverting back to the person I was four years ago, if only because I have to squeeze into my childhood bed.
I’m glad I was able to find employment in this terrible economy, where even TV reporters are so poor they have to keep reusing the same story about how terrible the economy is. On the other hand, I’m seething with jealousy for my friends who decided to go to graduate school. It’s a straightforward choice: Either be able to pay for food or continue to sleep in for two more years. After all, you only need one or the other to live.
After graduation, it’s easy to think that you’ve already got one foot in the grave. On my lunch breaks I go to strip-mall parking lots, watch the fresh-faced teenagers sit on their skateboards and eat Chipotle burritos, and think, “They have their whole lives ahead of them.” There are so many terrible movies I’ve never seen, so much money I’ve never wasted, so many times I haven’t yelled at my parents. I definitely wish I had a few more teenage years to piss away. Now all of that is gone, and I have to take care of myself, sort of.
Living in the real world is nice and all, but I’d kind of like to go back for a little while and remember what it was like when the world was young and my facial hair didn’t itch so damn much. It’ll be at least a year until I can crawl back inside the cocoon of graduate school, and time travel looks unlikely, at least for the period for which I’m racked with so much premature nostalgia.
That’s why, come Aug. 31, I’ll be back at the university, reliving the best four years of my life. Unlike high school, where the guy who graduated three years ago and still comes by at lunch is regarded as a major creeper, college has no expiration date. I can come back any time for classes, lectures, Chick-fil-A at Stamp Student Union, waiting in lines at Thirsty Turtle, clandestine dorm parties and break-ins at Byrd Stadium. After all, my metabolism’s gonna slow down eventually, and I’m not going to be able to slide under those stadium gates with a belly.
Dan Reed graduated in May with degrees in architecture and English. He can be reached at reeddbk@gmail.com.
