Wait...I Actually Have to Learn Stuff?

So I was just raising my sleepy head off of its comfy resting place (my astronomy text book) when I thought to myself: How many times have I done this? Eyes closed, open highlighter in hand, a variety of different soft bound text books beneath, snoozing away for a few minutes over the course of 3 or so years of daily reading assignments. Is this any different from high school?


When we come to college, we think we are going to celebrate the best four years of our lives and party our newly independent asses off. This is by no means untrue, but we often forget that there is also a tremendous amount of work invovled, and ignore our parents' frequent reminders of their own collegiate struggles. (After all, I went to boarding school, didn't I? I can handle this...) It is only until we walk into a class (I dunno, say, Gov 224) where fellow freshman are far and few and where we are handed a piece of paper telling us that our entire grade will be based off of an oral project, an exam, and two 5-7 page papers that we start to think "Oh...Fuck."


But I am going to keep telling myself I can do this (after all, astro seems like a breeze). And like I said before, It is by no means untrue that I do plan on celebrating the last fleeting years of my youth. It's all about figuring out what's necessary, a skill that, sadly enough, can really only come with time and experience (If I ever learn, at that).


So is this really any different than highschool? I'd like to think so. Though once again I have found myself feeling studious and a little on the outside socially, I've also found myself in underwear and bunny ears drunkenly screaming at convocation, and running to hide shot glasses in my dresser in a pitch black room after the pseudo-lesbian dance party was broken up by rumors of a roaming Area Coordinator. So yes, regardless of how much I actually like my new found friends or how much time I spend passed out over a text book, I would like to think that this will sure as hell be better than high school. And if I learned anything from my Astronomy reading today, I learned that if the entire history of the universe was condensed into a calandar, I was born about .05 seconds ago, and I'll have graduated in about another 1/90 of a second. So even if college isn't all it was dreamed up to be, in the big picture, it's not the end of the Universe.