College...continued

Four years seems like a long time to spend in school. A long time to spend at college anyway. But then sometimes I wish I had longer. It has taken me 2 years to figure out what I want and that happened largely by accident, and who can say whether or not I will change my mind? I suppose four years sounds like a long time, but it feels shorter and shorter all the time. I am a junior. A freaking junior. I don't feel like one somehow.

Coming back to campus after a summer of living a pretty unsheltered existence (in terms of work and living conditions), I realize how sheltered I have been and how most college kids are. I go to a liberal arts college, which, although I love it, pretty much equates to middle class hippie kids who have had life handed to them on, if not a silver platter, a platter nonetheless. We have been nurtured by loving parents. Our birthdays have been celebrated. We have been well-nourished, coddled, tucked in at night, and kissed on both cheeks. We have been brought up in a clean, comfortable existence, and college is simply an extension of that. We have cute little dorm rooms that allow us to feel independant without feeling lonely. We have our meals cooked for us and can take those meals whenever we want. Our schedules are planned, and we have advisors to steer us down the straight and narrow halls of academia. We're fucking babies.

I say we...I don't feel like a baby. And I do feel much more mature than many (if not most) of my peers. But no matter how mature, thoughtful, intelligent, even wise I may be I am still so much a child. And is that really wrong? I will be completely independant soon enough. Is it wrong that I sometimes call my mother to ask for grocery money? Should I forgo the love and affection that my family wants so desperately to give me on the basis of sheer pride in my self-sufficiency? Somehow I don't think so. This will all be gone very soon. I remember being in high school wishing that I was a graduating senior. And then I was a graduating senior. And now I'm looking down the barrel of some insidious weapon that will soon sever me from the comfort I experience as a college junior. I am living in that short space between night and dawn when the fog lingers in the valley and the first bird of morning sings alone.