This Stuff

I expected college to be a lot like a series of monologues, where each individual would get a moment of self-declaration and in that moment, we completely mature, learn, and grow. But that hasn't happened and I don't think it will any time soon.

Instead, "College," the theater show, is set on a stage that has been designed as a cest pool of competition, gossip and hormones, where, we the players ("college students") port North Face fleece, Nalgenes, and five-hundred pages of reading for each week, and off stage right, parents and authority figures tell us to function.

"College" should really be a musical instead. Oh, wait. Waa Mu definitely already did that. But they didn't have a musical scene in a library--and that needs to happen.





Last night I was lying in bed thinking about all the things that had happened to me in a week's time. I'm positive nothing happened to me during the entire LENGTH of summer that compared in terms of dramatic interest. More dramas should be set on college campuses.

I've been cryptic lately with everybody. I apologize.





My backyard is big with big trees, divided in half by a white fence that runs the width of the green space. Stretching away from our back door and porch, there is a patio, a walkway to our pool, the white wooden fence, and then another stretch of lawn where our barn flanks the right side and my old wooden swingset flanks the left.

When I was seven, I'd run the entire backyard in circles. I'd start at the backdoor's steps, run crosswise toward my swingset, climb the swingset and jump down, run the width of the yard to the barn, turn, follow the white fence down toward the big tree with the old swing (where I once fell and scraped open my chin), around the pool (keeping my distance from the edge like Mom asked me to), and then leap over the lavender bushes.

Once, as I tried to jump those bunches of lavender in one leap, I thought to myself (as I fell into the grass and proceeded to roll down the hill toward the patio in one motion), "Someday, I'll look back and think about this and I'll know I was really lucky."

And I was right. I do look back. And I was lucky. Everything was simple, and even though I knew it, I couldn't appreciate it.





I think I'm going to jump in leaves later this week and maybe run around campus. I think I'd smile if I saw someone else doing it in between classes or at night on their way to the library, so maybe I should go for it