May 31, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Eaten alive by jealousy of college kids
by JENNIFER NAGEL

For the past two years, at precisely this time of year, I have gone through what I like to call “college lag.” It’s like jet lag, but it lasts much longer. In other words, I desperately miss my carefree college days, and it’s depressing to know there’s no way I can ever get them back.

I am fairly productive through Villanova’s graduation and St. Joe’s graduation. I do okay when I see the cars on the Blue Route loaded up with laundry baskets and trash bags, lamps and mirrors. These things don’t faze me. But then comes the magical weekend when my friends who have gone on to work at Widener University mention that they can’t stay out late; they have to work commencement.

And then something is triggered in me. I swear that it’s something chemical, something real that exists in my blood. And this past Saturday, Widener commenced. (Is that even the right way of saying it?) They graduated. A couple hundred kids I don’t really even know, but I actually envy the fact that their college memories are still undoubtedly so fresh in their minds.

The logical part of my brain (small though it is) tells me I have to get it together. I’m not in college anymore. (I’m in grad school, but that’s no more forgiving than the real world itself. I have to go in the summer!) I don’t have friends in college, I don’t live in a college town, so realistically speaking, I have no excuse for feeling this way. But nostalgia pulls me back into the days of watching soap operas and going to the beach before Memorial Day, when you had to start buying beach tags.

How sweet it was to mooch off my parents, work minimal hours in a day care center and go to Phillies games or the bar at night. But I look around my room, which is not littered with college stuff I have yet to unpack, but is instead littered with professional clothes and papers to grade and earrings and makeup — all reminders that I have to keep it together and be a big girl.

Big deal, you say. I have all summer off (since I’m a teacher). Yes, but it’s like getting used to running five miles a day, and then one day someone tells you that you have to run 10 miles today. And you have to do it, there’s no way out of it. No adult way out, at least. It’s like spending a few weeks in Europe and then realizing that no matter how tired and cranky you are, you can’t go to bed at three in the afternoon. You’re not in Europe anymore. And I most certainly am not. This is true enough. But the biggest truth in all of this is that once college is done, those years are gone.

Even if you go back as a full-time grad student and spend every waking moment studying, discussing and dissertating, you can’t possibly recapture those days of goofing off and living in a fantasy world. The one part I do not miss is the nights in the library studying Joyce, days in the library explicating Donne. But overall it was a much better life than going to work every day and clogging up the bars and shopping malls. I feign anger, but really, I’m being eaten alive by jealousy of the kids still in college.

I give myself Sundays now. I tell my brain that Sundays are my chance to pretend Monday isn’t coming. Sunday is the day to take Huck the dog to the park, to lie on the couch and watch baseball, to meet up with my writing group or my friends. Sunday is the day to have a barbecue or a wiffle ball tournament and to stay up later than I should, all the while pretending in my sweatpants and t-shirt that tomorrow isn’t coming. Mine is a system based entirely on denial.

My Sunday system makes Mondays painful to face up to. There is the waking up in a panic that I’ve overslept because I was up too late. There is the snoozing of the alarm and waking up again to find I actually have overslept. There is the intensive analysis of the weather for the day to decide length of skirt, length of sleeve, open-toedness of shoes. There is the preparation of the hair — blow-dried and down for the morning, but a rubber band on my wrist for the afternoon when it gets humid. And the thought looming above my head that, while my college friends are partaking of dollar dog night, I need to be sitting through Teaching Grammar or Adolescent Psych for a couple of hours. Mondays are hell!.