| Friends help to ease the rocky transition from home to college life.
Well, boys and girls, the inevitable has occurred. The year is drawing to a close and following that trend, so is my column. There will be counselors on hand to help you cope with your grief. I am sitting here, watching the cursor blink on my Official University Thinkpad, trying to think of acceptable topics for my farewell address. I've already shot down "Aramark: Service with a Smirk" and "Johnson Hall: Thank You For Not Discussing the Outside World," when a knock came on my door.
I opened it to find a crowd of onlookers, pointing at me, like I was an albino wildbeast on a Discovery Channel special.
"That's Jelisa," one of them says in a hushed voice. "She's harmless but don't make any sudden moves."
Why had I become a spectacle on this occasion? My dashing good looks? My witty, charming, yet humble personality? I assured myself that those traits played a part, but I was being put on display for the good of a prospective student! A pre-freshman!
That's when those proverbial gears started turning. WARNING: I am going to use this paragraph to "unify" the remainder of the column. Why, it seems like just yesterday when I was that kid, setting foot on campus for the first time...
Begin flashback sequence.
Wow, my first day at college. I had been preparing for it for months: planning, packing, raising my alcohol tolerance. I am the oldest kid in my family, so my parents had not gone through the "Our Child is Leaving, We Can Turn Her Room into a Linen Closet" phase before. They were helping my efforts by crying and reading books about all the horrors that would undoubtedly occur on college campuses. My mother would take a break from sobbing to throw out uplifting facts like "1 out of 8 college students will unknowingly eat a deep-fried sparrow." It seemed ridiculous at the time, but when you think about it, where DOES the Pit get those Cornish Hens?
The packing was the big thing. I thought, Wow, I am going to need something for almost every situation... I mean, I'm on my own now, man! I graciously accepted the care packages my relatives sent, full of Econ-O-Packs of razors, staples and other sharp objects.
I would stack them in the corner with the cheese grater, the shoe shine kit and other "necessities" that to this day remain in their original wrappings.
So then I get here and realize that I have to haul all of that stuff up to the third floor (Note to Self: Next year, leave complete library of Nancy Drew books at home). I was greeted by the perky RA staff who gave me a Dentyne cup full of feminine hygiene products. I spent the rest of the day wondering what was in the guys' cups.
Then began the first evening of "real college fun." Those "Get to Know You" activities, like passing oranges under your chins, blood-typing your hallmates and watching the RAs put condoms on bananas, where we all snickered like fourth graders whose teacher had mentioned the Grand Teton Mountains.
To be honest, my first evening was miserable. Everyone had paired off with their roommate to eagerly read the Housing Agreements together. I had a single room and no one to really bond with. My first dinner was KFC. I ate alone. And I tripped up the stairs to the Pit. And I spilled gravy on my Wachovia "What Keeps You Up At Night?" T-shirt. And they were out of Freshens. And I had bad skin.
Now that you know what a dork I was, let's flash forward to the present. I managed to survive my first night and since then, I've picked up on a couple of things.
OK, here's where I'm going to get bittersweet, but I promise it will be over soon.
We all came to college for basically the same reason -- to secure a good education so that your future career isn't Sweat Mopper at a Pro-Wrestling tournament. And yeah, we all go to class on a (fairly) regular basis, but I have since learned that college is more than being able to recite the Treaty of Ghent or give the atomic weight of Californium.
College is about sitting in Benson talking about that guy you had a crush on in the eighth grade. College is trips to Waffle House at three in the morning where Flo and Alice cheerfully inform you that they "don't never take Visa." College is trying everything once. College is when you wouldn't know if the sun crashed into the earth, but are able to recite Jerry Springer's Final Thought from memory. College is what happens when you can't get to sleep.
I could go on forever, but before I sound too much like a Robert Fulghum book, let me say this one thing. College is about your friends. That's all there is to it. You meet people here who would do anything for you at any time. People who have seen you when you wake up in the morning. People who will help you get beer stains out of your pajamas. People who listen when you rant about how you're never going to succeed at anything, and then assure you that you'll do just fine.
Let me conclude this by giving a huge THANK YOU to all of you who took a shot on an unknown kid from West Virginia. Thanks for always listening, for chatting, for picking me up at five in the morning.
Thanks to everyone on my hall for dealing with me and my erratic hours and loud music. And to all of my senior buddies, I wish you all the success in the world, I wish you health, I wish you happiness, and most of all, I wish you weren't leaving.
As for the rest of you, take care of yourself and each other. See you in August. Actually, I'll see you for the next two weeks, but hey, I gotta have a theme here, right?
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