I thought about throwing the towel in on the blog altogether, between the Secretary's merciless dissection of my structure and another regular commentator's cruel verbal imitation of my word tics. But instead, I will rise above it. I will overlook it. And when I get my hands on the secret treasure, certain parties should watch their goddamn backs, is all I'm saying.
So I miss being young, sometimes. Having undergone a super-stereotypical version of the college years for my age and background, I miss it. Not really, you understand. It's actually more fun being my age now and leading my life now. More interesting, more rich and fulfilling, all that stuff.
What I miss is not really knowing that much about the world or myself or anything. What I miss is moving in a pack with a bunch of people that you maybe don't actually like that much, but that you think you might like, given the chance to just have one real, serious, intimate conversation. What I miss is not knowing the odds.
These days, I have friends that I actually like, that I know, that know me. We don't move in a pack. We make plans to do things that we think will be fun. If the plans don't sound fun we change them. Sometimes we make plans because we need to catch up.
In the spring of my sophomore year I shared a room and a phone line with two people. The way I remember Friday nights, which is probably not at all accurate, is a kind of round-robin of phoning, of call-waiting, of running out the battery on the cordless until some kind of consensus was reached. I was so young that I could actually be affronted when one of my roommates went to a party and didn't invite me. That seemed like such a goddamn slight.
A couple times this summer I spent time with people I went to college with. We talked about it, about how you could just go sit on the Sproul steps or the Dwinelle benches and wait for the world to pass you by and then you could attach yourself to some semi-random group and see what happened next. What happened next wasn't really all that fun, but you never knew.
I would say this is just another symptom of me getting old, but I think I pretty much felt nostalgic at the time.
Did I already post exactly this earlier?
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1 comment:
The main thing I miss about being young is also the thing I hated about being young: feeling all caught-up-in-things, almost overwhelmed by them. Everything a matter of life and death! Now I can't seem to help taking the "long view." And, of course, in the run, we'll all be dead, so the long view can be a bit of a downer.
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