Things You’ll Miss About College

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You’ll miss pointless house parties with Facebook invites that read, “Tom Waits Listening Party! Come over and get drunk with me and my cat and listen to good ol’ Tom.” These parties will be emotionally charged and incestuous. You’ll have slept with half the room and want to sleep with the other half. Don’t worry, you eventually will. College goes for four, sometimes five, years! Everyone will be drunk, young and happy. The biggest disappointments are getting a “C-“ on your paper about Jane Eyre. No one talks about annoying things like their career. What career? You’re majoring in Drama and minoring in Jealousy!

You’ll miss the feeling of being in a cocoon. You’ll never feel it more than you do at these house parties. When you graduate, people primarily only celebrate birthday parties or good news. If you do go to a run-of-the-mill house party, you risk running into kids who are still in college, and that will be really embarrassing for you. Trust me.

Sometimes you’ll even miss writing papers and studying in the library with your friends. In retrospect, stressing about your paper for Politics of Psychology in Education sounds like a dream vacay compared to the stress you deal with now. You’ll miss taking Adderall for an actual reason and texting your friend anxiously, “OMG. So does your guy have some? I have a ten-page paper due on heteronormative ideas in the pre-middle-post Consumerist era and I can’t write without it!

You’ll miss all-nighters and taking Photobooth pictures of you and your friends looking insane after 36 hours of no sleep. You’ll miss having the knowledge that it will all eventually end. All of this hard work leads up to a winter break, spring break, or summer. When courses end, grades are given out and you move on.  After you graduate and get a nine-to-five job, there is no real end, and if there is, it typically means you’ve been fired. You take equal parts solace and grief in knowing that there’s no endpoint now, that this could be the way you spend your time day in and day out for the next five or ten years or forever.

You’ll miss being told what books to read and discovering your favorite writer in the process. You’ll miss hearing that one lecture that changed your life forever. You’ll miss idealism peppered with apathy.

You’ll miss classroom crushes and seeing a certain babe 3-5 days a week. Getting with your crush had never seemed more feasible than it did in college because let’s be honest: Sixty percent of your college experience is about getting the object of your desire to desire you back. Even colleges are aware of this fact. They allot you time each semester to have a crush on someone and potentially get into a new relationship. You’ll miss “falling in love” or “having sex” as being a part of your job description.

You’ll miss the close friendships you made and being a five-minute walk from all of your best friends. When you graduate, some of them might move back to their hometown and/or get real jobs, and you’ll suddenly realize you no longer have the luxury to lie in bed with them while nursing a hangover on a Wednesday afternoon. Your world has gotten too big for that.  You no longer live in a vacuum. Duh.

You’ll miss being expected to fuck up and being allowed to realize that you can’t eat a pot brownie before your psych class. You were given four years to indulge, to be insane, and to figure out what not to do. Now you’re expected to have all the right answers, or at least that’s how you feel.

You’ll romanticize college. Maybe it wasn’t even like the way I just described it. Maybe that’s just what you wanted it to be like. In the end, it won’t matter how accurate your memory is. What you’ll miss now about college is what you’ll miss forever.