College

Since I last wrote in May, I have traversed three states and up a mountain to come to my new home. College.

And inevitably, I am receiving the normal question from the people I left back home: how is college?

Well, my first impression is that someone decided to take a bunch of teenagers away from homes with adults, drop them on top of a mountain with hundreds of other kids and little adult supervision and then tell to behave. In essence, college is crazy.

Case in point, I stepped out of my hall today to nearly get run over by a group of skate-boarding boys from the hall across from mine who decided to turn our indoor common room into a skate park. I walked across campus to get to class and nearly got hit in the head multiple times from Frisbees, baseballs, footballs, bean bags, volleyballs, a swinmcap, or basketballs. Someone ran past me with another guy’s underwear waving in the air on a stick. Hammocks were spread all over the grounds with multiple different students sleeping in them or underneath them. Spontaneous dance parties break out in my hall, or class, or even before chapel. The e-mail sent out to all the students detailing the list of things not allowed at convocation included and were not limited to costumes, taxidermied animals, wooden swords, water guns, water balloons, air horns, slingshots, dressers (seriously, who takes a dresser to convocation?), antlers, cap guns, glitter, etc.

I just don’t get this place.

Of course, I’m the type of uptight person who turns their nose up at the notion of “fun” and heads to the library to bury myself in the basement with the rare books.

College probably doesn’t get me either.

But I digress, this culture is vastly different than the one I left behind and I’m trying to learn how to survive. Learning, however, is an interesting challenge. How do you get used to being uprooted from the only home you’ve ever known, dumped on top of a mountain with no way to get off, expected to interact with peers you don’t understand, and try and figure out the chaos that is supposed to be a social life?   

If you ever figure out the answer to that question, let me know. For now, I’m just going to stick with earplugs and a helmet.