The Weather of College

Poignancy moments have their place (or rather their time...momentary though it may be), but the end of college is a terribly long thing. You have your last weekend truly in college -- before the end of classes --, then a week of "last's:" one's last Monday, last of a given class, last actual class period, last performance, last rehearsal, last show...and that's not even talking about the actual final events, the senior-only, once in a lifetime activities.

Frankly, all these last moments are terrible: they get you down. You feel like your life is flowing down a drain, it's being emptied out and pretty soon nothing will be left.

And that's not too far from the truth. In short order, there will be no excuses left to hide behind. From here on out, my place in life is entirely my fault (hm, that's a bit negative). The plan of life that comfortably guided most middle-class Americans for the first 21 years expires. The water drains out of the tub, and like the Martian man in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, we find gravity terribly difficult, without all that water to cushion us (note: that was not a tacit endorsement of the afore-mentioned book, which, I must say, was truly odd, and entirely unlike any other piece of Heinlein I've read).

So, yes, it is all ending. The roadmap is gone and the Middle East is about to go up in flames. The Middle East of our lives. Well, that metaphor needs to die.

What I'm trying to get at is that it's quite easy to be down...real down. Particularly when the weather's great and you feel like the most beautiful days in the world are happening and you're inside studying for a final when you should be nostalgically crawling through the stacks or sneaking onto rooftops.

Thank heaven for bad weather. It's been dry, cloudy and warm recently. No decent rain, no decent sun. Normally, weather that I enjoy. Now, it's weather I love. No bitter regrets about not dancing around in the smoggy wonderland of Downtown L.A. No harsh angst watching the setting sun silhouette Bovard and ponder every thing I failed to do, every door closing, every good time soon to be permanently enshrined only in memory, not as a living part of my daily routine.

Not thinking those things always helps me realize how silly that kind fo melancholia is. And remember that when I was a freshman and sophomore I couldn't wait for the time when I would be able to walk USC as an alumni and be able to reflect contentedly on the adventures I'd had and the subsequent things I'd gone on to accomplish. Keep the eyes on the prize and all that. Surely, as outrageously fun my past four years have been, they haven't been, by any means, the happiest. But that is a subject that I will save for an entirely new post.