As I prepare to stand in the cold air this Sunday and hurl my sneakers into that tree on the west bank, I can’t help but look back rather than forward. People are asking me a lot these days how graduating feels: frightening, exciting, inevitable. The thing is I’m not too sure how to feel about it. I suppose my emotion was something that I thought would just spill out, but it hasn’t yet and I don’t expect it to. The idea that homework is about to become a thing of the past is comforting, obviously, but the feelings are conflicting. I will miss things like this publication, which has put up with my shenanigans for much longer than I may have deserved.

My feelings on the environment again, are divided. On one hand, this place is full of politically like-minded individuals. On the other, whilst waiting for the bus on University, you can look across the street and see the frat-children square dancing in their big common room. In my post U world, I will probably overhear far fewer conversations about gas mileage and just how much the bros drank the previous weekend.

Regarding this, every semester I was in college some kid died from alcohol poisoning. Two semesters in Montana, one in Rio de Janeiro and five here, each time we got word, as a student body, that one of our own had fallen. Sometimes there was more than one. Once a dude in my History of Rock class fell out from the parking garage on Washington. We played a Tom Petty song in class and sat silent for a moment. After that, I never heard his name again. In Rio I lived with a guy who had witnessed a multiple stabbing incident during a high school Halloween party. Then there was that girl last year, on her 21st birthday.

It’s hard to make sense of any of this. I came into this world twenty-two years ago and am nowhere closer to understanding it than when I was a gelatinous infant who refused to cry. With little to nothing of a demand for Portuguese-speaking loudmouth writers, I think I can expect to continue moving furniture for a while. This notion is all right with my head and not all right with my shoulders, but whatever.

To all of you with anxious, shattered nerves regarding your upcoming tests, if you’re still reading, I’ll give you the little I’ve learned about this place. First of all, ask yourself if you really want to be here. Seven semesters from now, if your GPA reflects a portion of the interest compounding upon your debt from student loans, you’ll wonder about that geometry proof from class, the one that compares someone starting at a company, working for four years, and you, newly graduated from this institution. Not all of us should be here. Most of us can admit to that.

Next, as far as your family’s concerned, there’s nothing more unforgivable than an accidental suicide by way of the bottle. That kid in my class who did a nosedive from the roof of the parking garage, I can’t remember his name. Whoever he was, he lost his chance to leave his mark on this world to say who he was, that he was here.

Lastly, get out and see this world! It sounds corny, I’m sure, but the vast majority of us who are descendants of Midwesterners who take comfort in shared accents and common traditions, it’s scary as hell to step outside of what you might call home. I was totally freaked out to move to Brazil without knowing a soul, but in the end I wound up wandering up the Amazon River on an overcrowded boat sans spoken English save my friend, and we ended our journey at a jungle commune with an indigenous shaman, and nothing was ever the same again.

Whoever you are, don’t let anything stop you from whatever you’re going towards, because if you came into this world, then it’s at your feet right now and God only knows what’s ahead of you.

Tags: contemplations