Now you know you know it now

It's finally begun to dawn on me over the last, oh, week or so, that I'll be graduating college in the improbably immediate future. Graduating college. Graduating college. Graduating college.

For many people, the mere feat of earning a bachelor's degree is cause for wild celebration. I know at least a handful of students who will be the first person in their families to attain a post-secondary education, and for them, graduation day will be an event of pride and dream-realization that, like a good birthday cake, a wealth of people outside the individual recipient can heartily enjoy. As for myself (as I commented when my sister graduated), members of the Martin family have been receiving pieces of paper denoting bragworthy intellectualism for generations. While I consider attaining my degree no small feat, I come from a background of privilege and achievement such that, frankly, I saw it coming. I'm not particularly surprised to have a diploma coming my way.

Surprise, though, isn't entirely a bad characterization for what I'm feeling in general. Think of the surprise you felt in the moments immediately after you received your first kiss when, mentally comparing your experience to the romanticized notions embedded in your mind by years of Hollywood and daytime TV, you thought to yourself, "Oh. So that's what it's like." My current sensation isn't dissimilar. So, I find myself thinking, that was college. Neat.

And just as whoever locked lips with you the first time probably didn't do so after a car chase and wasn't Brad Pitt, my college experience hardly resembled Animal House or most other popularized college representations (Gilmore Girls, actually, wasn't terribly far off the mark, minus the bourgeois lifestyle and the mommy complex). It's not that I'm disappointed. At all. I'm almost apoplectically delighted by how the last four years have passed and I'm pretty sure an actual Animal House experience would have driven me to military enlistment. It simply feels strange to have such a landmark life stage--a time in life that, in the past, I imagined and worried over and wondered about--be over and done with.

It's a little sad, but only in the extremely abstract and vaguely illogical sense that I feel as though my possibilities have been narrowed. Four years ago I had no idea what awaited me in college--who I'd meet, how well I'd do, what sorts of unanticipated coming-of-age life experiences would attack me. Clearly, these questions have been answered. This inevitable movement from multiple possibilities to single occurrence, if I think about it too much, starts to feel like a loss.

On the other hand, besides the fact that I'm not overly prone to mope-face, I essentially have a semester's length of college experience, minus the actual burden of receiving an education, awaiting me come January, so I'm going to go ahead and take this opportunity to officially drop the recherche du temps perdu for a little more carpe diem.

(Incidentally, the most important thing I learned in college is that the random and unnecessary insertion of Latin or French phrases is the key to making sure everyone knows how epically smart you are.)