written on 02 Oct
at 1124 hrs

It's so weird being this age. When all my friends are graduating college and moving across the country and leaving their friends like we left each other four years ago.

The day my friend Lauren left four years ago was strange. I stayed at her house 'till 1am helping her pack. My contribution was hiding some lingerie in her bag when she went upstairs to say 'bye to some other friends. I'm a good packer. I remember when she called about the lingerie. She was cracking up because her friends found it before she did and hung it across the ceiling. I wondered why an 18 year old who had never lived alone or had a boy spend the night had lingerie to begin with.
The next day I woke up and went to the airport with Lauren and her family. We'd known each other for six years at that point. We'd been in the nerdy kid classes together. She graduated 10th in our class; I graduated 10th from last. Our friendship had gone in phases, from acquaintances to pals to friends to best friends to enemies to friends, ad infinitum. Something changes, though, when you know you're going to be apart. When suddenly you won't be driving to school together in a giant blue station wagon anymore. A year later my family and I moved into a house four away from Lauren's. By that time she and I had almost completely lost contact. And even though she's been home a fair amount in the last three years, I've seen her a handful of times for no more than 2 hours at a time.
Lauren graduated from a fairly prestigious university this year. We were twelve kinds of excited that she'd be home and we could hang out whenever we wanted and catch up on four years of nothingness. ... That didn't quite go as planned. I saw her at the beginning of the summer and she came running up the hill as I went running down it and we cracked up as we hugged each other and spoke in mile-a-minute sentences. We didn't catch time together again and now she's moved to the Bay Area.

Today I received an email from a mutual friend of mine and Lauren's. She wrote [after more than a year of silence] to give me/us her new contact info. She's moved to Chicago for grad school and sounds uber-happy to be where she is.
My inital reaction was to write her back saying, "Dude, what's up? Remember when we were going to hang last summer and you never called me or returned IMs or emails? Yeah. That rocked." But instead I wrote her and told her how I'm engaged, will be moving soon and am planning a road trip to Chicago sometime next year.

When I hear my friends telling me stories of going to grad school and getting super jobs and being excited about all the prospects that await them, part of me yearns to be back in college. But I don't miss college, I just miss what I had. My job ruled. My friends were fun. I did what I want when I wanted, and I met cool people everyday. There's no doubt that college isn't for me. I hate the work, and I hate the importance placed on things I could not care less about.

Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'.
That quote has always represented an attitude adjustment for me. I could have written my friend a snotty email about missed connections [dyin'], but instead I wrote her a nice email about now [livin'].

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