At every stage of my life, I’ve always felt like I should be older to be granted the privileges handed down to me. The 13 year old in me recalls looking starry eyed at 16 year olds with their drivers licenses, 22 year olds coaching for the summer while they were home from college and all of the adults rushing around the grocery stores in their work clothes trying to figure out what to make for dinner that night*.
I, on the other hand, find myself perpetually stuck feeling like an 18 year old.** When asked for my ID, I still look around awkwardly trying to figure out how I’m ‘supposed’ to act to avoid suspicion; I still have a slight inclination towards diving into the bathroom when I see cops arrive at a bar; when trying to judge ages of people around me, I usually peg the chicks who are 5-7 years my junior as the closest to me; and the nose ring that I assumed I’d feel too old for by the time was 25 is not going anywhere anytime soon.
And when I found myself navigating the UWM campus a few weeks ago, as I stood in a courtyard feeling just a little bit turned around, I wondered if people could tell that I had already done this, was actually paying off the debt that they were all incurring and had health insurance procured through full time employment, not my parents. Or, as I usually suspect, did the sophomores just look and scoff at another lost freshman.
Did they know that I had recently realized that I could appropriately say, ‘when I was in college . . .‘ and not feel like a phony?
That the first days of winter leave me feeling wistful for the brisk 15 minute walk back to the dorms from class – feeling proud of myself that I was able to drag myself to an 8:50 discussion and maintain a steadfast determination to sit through my 9:55 lecture? Arriving ‘home’ with frozen hands, a chill in your bones and a freshly loaded food credit, there was always someone ready to go hang out at Frank’s with you, whether they too braved a morning class or were simply nursing a hangover from the night before.
I hold a very specific fondness towards living in the dorms. Not one specific memory (while there are a lot of them . . .) but the general sense of independence and solidarity. It’s the last time in your life that you’ll probably have the opportunity to make life-long friends – the kinds of friends that you can go years without seeing but then spend one night at a bar with and it’s like you never left. After that, the new friendships you make probably won’t outlast a job change or out-of-state move.
. . . and as often as I admonished adults for saying they’d kill to be back in college, I now share the same feeling. “But you get paid for the hours you put it,’ I’d retort. ‘When you leave work, you’re pretty much done . . there’s always more studying for me to do.’ And while there were plenty of sleepless nights and frantic studying – there were also nights where, punchy from stress, an impromptu game of Pictionary would somehow materialize or a strange quote in a textbook would inspire conversation not at all related to your final the next day. Cram five people in a dorm room, all with resolute determination to spend the next hours engrossed in their respective notecards, and it’ll very quickly turn to a trip for food from the late night cafeteria, frequent visits to other burdened studiers also looking for excuses to procrastinate and hours long music video marathons – after you promised yourselves just a 15 minute break.
As I begin processing the concept of going back to school, I remember fondly those times when studying was more of an excuse to hang out in the basement, calling it quits and heading to the bars because you’d logged enough hours with piles of art history notecards splayed in front of you***. And I know that I’m still under the delusion that, somehow, I’m going to rekindle those events. Instead of maintaining a true understanding of what might come with a forty hour week and a few more hours of coaching, coupled with 6 hours of class and an unknowable amount of homework****, I’m going to continue with the assumption that my impeccable study habits will remain unchanged from when I was 18 years old.
And when that notion fails me, I will remind myself that at 18 I was forced to live in a closet of a room, rotate my clothing options between Madison and Manitowoc, and didn’t find it unsettling at all to use an unattended cup to avoid paying a $5 charge at a stranger’s house.
And, most importantly, remember that my only access to kitchen was an ill equipped one in the basement of a neighboring dorm – one in which my sole adventure included making hard biscuit-like cookies for my friend Rafi – which we termed, as the politically sensitive girls that we were, Jew cakes.*****
While my fondness for the dorms is persistent, somehow the many negatives always seem to allude me – so instead of yearning for a past in which I was totally broke and living off of cheerios and baked lays, I’ll simply impress all of my new freshman friends with my REALLY realistic looking fake ID and off-campus digs. And be thankful that I support my shopping, drinking and eating habits without cashing in my 20 year old savings bonds . . . . again.
* see . . it always comes back to food.
** and it doesn’t help that only a few weeks ago the girls at the gym, in trying to guess my age, hovered right around 20 . .
*** even though you never got around to flipping them over
**** as my highly tuned notecard making skills are tossed aside for an untapped set of art skills that will, I am sure, betray me over and over again.
***** simply recalling kitchen experiences, not promoting any discrimination against a culture . . regardless, lucky for me, I’m a Jew (barely . . but still) proven by may ability to both use correctly and spell words like ‘chutzpah’ without any assistance from Google
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