What is college? OH what is college? Wouldn't you like to know? I sure would. I'd like to know why I trudge, day after day, through aching weather, die-hard little pests who try to throw brochures at you or get you to fill something out when it's obvious by how fast you're walking that you're late, and hundreds of other students trying to push past you for the exact same reason you're trying to push past them.
I mean seriously. What is this? All of this to get to one class? And just getting there isn't good enough. Once you're there, you have to listen, take notes, keep yourself from falling asleep, and then jump up to go through the exact same thing to get to your next class again. Then you finally drag yourself back to your dorm at five o'clock that evening only to look in the mirror and feel as if you're going to shoot yourself, so you throw on shorts and drag yourself outside again to go to the gym. Once you've exhausted yourself there, you go gorge yourself so that the workout didn't mean anything anyway.
You shower, you dry your hair. You make yourself all pretty for nothing. Then your Mom calls and starts complaining about how rough stuff is back home, and all you can do is sit there and listen and beg for the world to end, because Lord knows, if you don't start your homework in ten minutes, there's no way you'll finish it before you have to go to work.
At eleven, you're off work and feeling a little depressed because it seems you have no social life whatsoever, so you go out and see your friends instead of finishing that homework you should have done. You promptly eat some more, and stay out with them until 3 or so in the morning, when you have to walk all the way back to your dorm again and just have time to pass a thought about the love of your life before you drift off... to the sound of your alarm blasting at you early the next morning. And you realize you have no knowledge whatsoever of what's going on in the outside world, besides, of course, that your family's going to the shitter, but it always had been, you'd just managed to find an escape hatch. Not that this matters. All that matters is getting yourself painfully out of bed, rushing down the hall to brush your teeth, cursing your roommate for getting to sleep in, and booking it out of the building, because chances are, there are thousands of young adults who already got a head start in the race to class.
Is this college? Is this what we're here to do? Beat ourselves up so bad that we're too tired to learn anything anyway? Actually, yes. Is it logical? Actually, yes. We're all in the same boat here. You're only two doors down from that kid who always aces the science tests, we're all together in the same race. The ones who don't drop out are the ones who make the first cut in this game, the ones who steer clear of academic probation make the second. If you manage to obtain higher than a 3.0 GPA, you're on the right track, if you actually keep your original major, you just might make it to independence one day. If you can graduate in 4 years and still know one person from your freshman year of college, you're phenomenal. If you make it into graduate school, you're set.
But how many times do you have to drag yourself up in the morning before you get there? I'm not counting... if I did, I'd go crazy, if I'm not crazy enough already. I'm just powerwalking through it, one step at a time.
