Pages from the Past (5/20/01)

May 20, 2001

College, the great wide open, the Sodom and Gommorah of our youth. The rules were different then. We were tiven the freedom to mess up our lives as much as we wanted.

These were new people, people we didn't know or have any misconceptions about and they seemed just as lost as we did, just as confused or misguided, at any rate they were just as ready to mess up their lives as we were. It was a new exciting world. Unlike high school, we didn't feel quite so alone or isolated. We had our common goals and dreams... and suddenly the playing field seemed much more level.

We'd go home for vacations and scope out how things were going, get the local gossip. We'd see our peers, our old friends and wonder to ourselves, "Were we ever that young?" "Were we ever that idealistic?" And then, then it dawned on us, to get that special sheet of paper we'd given up much more than 12 years of our lives, 12 years of blood sweat and tears... When we were given that piece of paper, that passport into the adult world, we were trading in our youthful idealism and our innocence to get it.

The adult world had seemed so bright, shiny, and new. We'd been duped into believing in "The Grand Illusion (thanks Styx). Unfortunately, that piece of paper we'd paid so high a price for had a "no-return" policy attached to it. We'd bought our one-way ticket out of youth into adulthood and we started regretting it.