Tom Petty once said-or rather sang- “You have four years to be irresponsible here. Relax. Work is for people with jobs. You’ll never remember class time, but you’ll remember time you wasted hanging out with your friends. So, stay out late. Go out on a Tuesday with your friends when you have a paper due Wednesday. Spend money you don’t have. Drink ’til sunrise. The work never ends, but college does.” Its been a full two months since getting here and I have to say Mr. Tom Petty makes one hell of a point (not mention he’s generally fantastic). Straying for a bit since I last wrote Alumni weekend has come and gone and this past weekend was Halloween-personally my favorite day of the year. Both weekends were interesting in their own ways. During Alumni Weekend I met a few-fairly recent grads, and some older ones…and as I listened to their stories they went on and on about the parties they remember the least, the professors they loved the most and friends they shared it all with. I remember thinking ‘I can’t wait to graduate and come back and have all these stories to share.’ But, I also thought about how when I was in high school I was sort of afraid of the kids who were in college and came to visit…they looked tired stressed and nowhere near happy, and I never wanted to feel the way I thought they did, I didn’t want to feel old because of a social rite of passage, but as I listened to these Alums, never once did one say “I was so stressed out I wanted to yank all my hair out,” and I realized that was beauty of college, running an entire weekend off two hours of sleep not remembering any of it and asking God how you even made it to your 8am….is what made the experience. As Halloween buzz kicked in I completely forgot about Alumni weekend until I was sitting in my 10am this morning thinking “oh my god, how is it even physically possible I made it here?” The words of former students came back and at that moment I had never been happier. I felt like a college kid, I was exhausted out of my mind, I had woken up at 9:50am by a stroke of luck and grabbed the first thing that smelt okay, and was trying my best to not doze off……
As far as Halloween Weekend goes, I’m unwilling to spill the details via blog, but I will say that before going to bed at 5am Monday morning (to be in class by 10….ungodly), I remember thinking “I get it, this is why it’s called the best years,” through the haze and the hot mess of costumes, packed dorms and living rooms that smell like urine I had discovered the single most amazing thing I could ever discover in life: the beauty in imperfection. Since I was a girl everything always had to be perfect. Grades, posture, vocabulary, etc…and mistakes weren’t very welcoming. Over the last two weeks I’ve come to find out that nobody is perfect, but even more so its okay not to be perfect. At first I thought I couldn’t accept it but as I sit here at 2:31a.m hearing the sounds of Shakedown from my window reflecting on my weekend I find that because of mistakes, my time here has the been the best of my life. It’s these mistakes, these imperfections that have given me the most memorable, fantastic absolutely ridiculous nights of my life here. And because of them and how I’ve learned to embrace them it helps me smile a little brighter every day. It feels good to not have to beat myself up every time something goes awry. Its college, and I’m still a child, it’s the prime time for “mistakes,” and quirks. I guess my realization of all this is a little juvenile, and it could be said I should have accepted this a long time ago, but that’d take the fun out of finding out right now. College I’m learning, is “where the wild things are.” And I’m loving every second of it.
Jessica Addis
Pierce Arrow Blogger
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