lightness

The minutes of my college career are ticking away. It's almost over, and yet here I am, and I still feel as if i'm waiting for it to start. I hate those movies that make college seem like this crazy time in your life, that is so radically different from high school and the rest of the "real world". I'm so envious of those characters, and I often wonder if I ended up in the wrong school because college is nothing like that for me. Or maybe i've just gone about this whole thing wrong.

I think if i were to look back onto the narriative of my life, my college experience would look strange. I was talking with a professor the other day, complaining about my thesis, and then complaining about the fact that I wqas old enough to have a thesis. I told him that I couldn't believe it's already my senior year, that I was waiting for things to pick up and i felt as if i had wasted all this time and not accomplished anything. He just stared at me like i was a lunatic So then it hit me. My activism really defines who I am here. And as much as I really feel like i haven't accomplished anything, like i've wasted my time, perhaps I haven't.

We can never truly know how other people view us. For example, I view myself as being extremely shy and awkwardly reserved. I actually mentioned that to one of my friends the other day and she replied "what the fuck are you talking about? you're the most outgoing person I know". Pretty weird. But my point is that i guess I shouldn't be too worried about the external impact of my experience here at college. Yeah, maybe i'll be remembered. Chances are I won't be (i mean, look what happened when I went abroad for a semester!) but what really matters is the internal impact. I left my boarding school with a generalized idea of who I was and what direction life was taking me. That idea got completely obliterated when I got back from spain. Now, I guess I"m just sitting around, watching the seasons change and hoping for some epiphany to smack me on the head so I know what the hell is going on.

I feel like i'm living in a hazy dream, like my life is on hold and this day to day reality i experience is part of someone else's life. I've got so many things piling up: my thesis, my grad school applications, my internship applications, my watson application, plans for speakers to come to campus, shuttles to protests, drop beats not bombs etc etc. I don't know when I'm going to get all these things done. And i really don't know why I'm not panicing. The old jess would be freaking out. But for some reason, it just doesn't feel *real* to me.

Maybe I should stop drinking so much coffee.