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September 11, 2007
Whenever I see a huge lime green plastic cup, I am reminded...
I've been in full-on nostalgia mode lately. Partly because I have PMS, and when I have PMS, I have three modes--maudlin, shouting, and sentimental. Usually all three at once. But more than that, it's this time of year. Something about it makes me start recalling previous years and I tend to sort of lose myself in those memories. I wish I could say it was the high holidays, but it's not. It's convenient that they follow it immediately, at a time when I'm ready to start looking forward, but it's the start of school that gets to me.
As usual, on the Tuesday after Labor Day, I found myself thinking about school. I loved school. School was good to me. Every year from 1983-2004, on the Tuesday after Labor Day, I was heading off to my first day of a new year of school. When you think about the fact that I'm 26 and that's 22 years of my life that I went to school... Man, is it really any wonder that I've had trouble adjusting to Life After School? I really do miss school. I would kill to go back.
But this year, a completely different experience sent me back into the land of "oh my god, I'm OLD!" in relation to school starting. On September first, the freshmen here moved in and invaded our building, turning it from an 800-capacity building with 30 summer residents to a building that was full to bursting with eager eighteen year olds. They were loud. Oh, were they loud. This entry has, in fact, taken me a week to write because it's taken me this long to adjust to the new noise level around here--although this building apparently has--gasp!--insulation and venting systems that don't mean I can hear every single word the people around me are saying, unlike Oberlin.
But let's not get into that. That's not the point. The point is that they moved in, I sighed and stared out the window and muttered under my breath like an old woman on her porch shaking her cane at the younguns about how back in my day, I only brought a duffel bag and a trunk and a computer with me to Oberlin and I made due just fine without a billion boxes and a U-HAUL (I wish I was kidding). And I moved on with my day. And then my night. And then, because I'm a terrible insomniac, as I was crawling into bed at four a.m., my attention was drawn to our open window because I heard kids out there talking and laughing, and drunkenly shouting. And as I pulled the covers up, I grumbled again--"they just moved in today; are they really partying already??"
And then it hit me. A flashback, hard, shooting right across my brain. Of my first night of college, at Toledo. I had been placed in overflow housing in an apartment building, a two-bedroom apartment with three other girls, who I'm going to politely call K, M, & S. And ho-ly shit did those girls get drunk. They didn't bother unpacking anything but their colored plastic cups and we all sat out on the balcony while two of them smoked and the three of them, plus M's friend D and K's cousin, drank beer and called down to every boy who passed by. M & D drank, if I remember right, an entire bottle of vodka, and neither had had anything to drink before. They invited strange boys up to our apartment and after awhile, S, K, and K's cousin went out to get more beer and I do believe stopped off at a party, and I was left with M & D, the former of whom became nearly unconscious within minutes of everyone else leaving. I knew nothing about alcohol poisoning at the time, all I knew was to get her to eat some bread, to not let her sleep on her back, and to stay with her.
There was so much more to that night than that, but wow. How could I have almost forgotten that night? How could I be so surprised that freshmen are out partying on their first night when my own first night was so... overwhelming? And what is wrong in general that that's what eighteen year olds do on their first night at college?
Oh, and is it any wonder that I only lasted a month in that apartment (oh, the stories I could tell about that month) before moving into the first opening in a decent dorm and living with three devout Christians who I barely had a thing in common with? Yeah. I thought not.
Posted to Nostalgia at September 11, 2007 04:35 PM