Now Meets Then

Here is a good informative article that the good people at fastweb.com were good enough to send me:

Home for the Holidays
Jennifer LeClaire
The holiday season can be a strange time for college students. While it can be refreshing to sleep in your old bed, devour some home cooking, and wash some laundry, some things do change over time. It's not always easy to sleep under your parent's roof in a neighborhood where everyone still sees you as a kid - even though you've clearly achieved independent living status.
Then there's your not-so-favorite uncle with his incessant questions about your major. And let's not forget your old best friend who points out - with disappointment - how much you've changed.
Going home for the holiday doesn't have to be stressful. You just need some strategies for handling confrontations with the maturity that you want everyone to recognize.
"You're probably not going to emulate a Norman Rockwell painting at holiday time. If you're lucky, you'll look like Homer Simpson and his family, and not the South Park gang," says advice columnist April Masini of AskApril.com. "If you expect smooth sailing, you're going to be disappointed."

How boundless was my relief, to discover that I'm not alone in my holiday worries! There's nothing quite like being understood.

Jennifer LeClaire is, quite simply, dead on. I've clearly achieved independent living status in this place where Spanish-speaking women clean up after me; where I eat in a cafeteria and push my dishes through a slot when I'm done; where my bills are paid partly by my parents and grandparents and partly by the Stafford Loan Corporation, whom I'll be repaying until I'm forty-five. I'm free!

And of course, I've changed a lot since leaving home. Some days I'll walk past a mirror and I'll say to myself "Well now! Who was that dapper and distinguished-looking gentleman who just sauntered past?" and it'll take me a moment to realize that it was me! When I came to this place, I was only a child. I leave it a man, dear friends. And I hope that the folks back home will treat me like the mature adult I have become.

One side note about maturity: it really gets my hackles up when older people talk down to us college students. We are adults now, so treat us like adults. Jeez Louise. We know what we're doing. Like that guy who was vomiting all over himself and the dormitory lounge after a party the second weekend I was here. Or the caring, committed "friend-with-benefits" arrangements that have been blowing up all around me like package bombs during the past couple of months.

The bottom line is, fastweb.com knows the issues when it comes to college, but as long as everyone's willing to be reasonable, there should be no problems. We might be able to attain Norman Rockwell status after all; but even if we end up looking more like an Unger cartoon, at least I'll have this little unsupervised corner of the world to come back to.

Try To Stay Awake

Sleep, according to most people, is a very desirable thing. The hardest part of having a baby, I'm told, is that you don't get any sleep for months. One of the worst parts of getting old is apparently that you're unable to get a good night's sleep. In military interrogations, sleep-deprivation is considered very useful for loosening prisoners' (sorry, "detainees'") tongues. Shakespeare liked sleep; he wrote that it "knit[ted] up the ravell'd sleeve of care" (Macbeth 2.2.36). So clearly, sleep is often viewed as a wonderful thing. A lot of my fellow college students seem to want to do nothing else (except at night). But this morning I woke up feeling terrible, and when I thought about it, I realized that I always do. Which forces me to wonder: what is the point of going to sleep if you're more tired when you wake up? Why is it that when you start to sleep, it's so hard to stop? And is this really the hallmark of a healthy activity?

Sleep frightens me, frankly, because nobody knows where you go for those six or eight hours. Sure, you can be called back at any second, but where are you? You go to nowhere, and sometimes you don't get all the way back until 1 p.m. or later. Aside from the bothersome possibility that it's a preview of death, don't you think you would accomplish a lot more if you didn't have to sleep? People are always saying that they wish they could put more hours in the day, but I would be satisfied if we could just make use of the ones we've already got. Not really. But I would like to have those hours. If I did, perhaps I'd be able to worry less about whether I'm using my time in a worthwhile way. But then, time is finite and no matter how much you have, it will one day run out, so I guess we'll always have cause to worry.

I guess what it comes down to is a simple piece of advice: life is short, so make the most of it.

Oh, dear. I believe I've fallen victim to a cliche. Cut off my typing fingers (there are two) and put me in the stocks. I may die of the shame. It's clearly time to end this little discourse.