Some poet probably once said ""to every season, a song,"" and right now you can almost hear Vitamin C's ""Graduation"" fading into the soundtrack of our lives. It's hard to savor schooling when you're in the thick of finals preparation, all aflutter ""finishing"" term papers and tracking down lecture notes from lame-os, but for those who will have filled out their last blue book by the 15th, there's a feeling that we should somehow stop and bask in the moment. A lot of stuff has gone down around here in four years, and so to recount it all I wrote a song of my own, to the tune of Billy Joel's ""We Didn't Start the Fire"":
""Said goodbye to Mom and Dad, entire floor goes to Mad Ave, hurricane in New Orleans, Badgers beat the Wolverines. Sneak into the Nit-ty, dorm food tasting shit-ty, Barrett's 9-11 plot, student jumps off parking lot.
""Find a major if you can, football starts to suck again. No more Mickey D's off State, fake IDs and the Jin's wait. Parties up in College Court, Halloween gets stopped short, I-35 bridge drop, Mifflin loses co-op.
""We couldn't find the lighter, we knew we just had it, but it's not on the mattress!
""We couldn't find the lighter, but we shouldn't have worried, 'cause it was already cherried!
""Ogg goes down piece by piece, Lucky rises in southeast. Go abroad (not to Iraq), subprime mortgages collapse. Sig Ep burns, tuition hikes, YouTube, snow drift bikes. Hello Biddy, density plan, football seating, Scanner Dan.
""Norovirus roommates, Obama, prez of the States. Union South, Biz students cheat, Badger fans take back the streets. Library Mall, Twitter, Chris Brown hit her. Pirates on the high seas, Class of '09 and degrees!
""We couldn't find the lighter, we knew we just had it, but it's not on the mattress!
""We couldn't find the lighter, but we shouldn't have worried, 'cause it was already cherried!""
You can finish the song in your head (the refrain repeats thrice at the end). Obviously, even if we are Facebook friends with only 300 of the 8,000 or so in our class (and even if we're actually friends with only 30 of those) we've all been through a lot together, and that doesn't even include the important stuff, the personal stuff each of us went through. So it'd be nice to take some time to look back and recollect all that has happened to get us where we are today.
But that's not going to happen because tomorrow is Mifflin, the greatest day of the year, Sunday will be spent recovering, and Monday through Saturday will be spent either scrambling to get your shit together or scrambling to hit every spot on your epic week-long bar crawl, depending on how seriously you take your senior slide. Come next Sunday, our society is atomized into finals mode for a week, and then before you know it you're just a broke bum with problem drinking habits and a liberal arts degree thrust into world filled with skill sets and swine flu. For those lucky enough to survive the latter, the only chance we'll have to look back on our college careers will be when we're so old the thought of them depresses the hell out of us.
I don't know if I'll still be on Facebook at that point, but I know it's going to be pretty hard to pry myself away from it. If I haven't, it will be a strange thing indeed to one day page through all the photos I've been tagged in over the years and literally see myself age. Maybe that can be my motivation to leave it.
Luckily, I'm not graduating this spring, because I already did, so I can take all the time I want at my sexy government job reminiscing and writing rhyming couplets about college as I type up TPS reports. For those of you about to be on the outside, the best advice I can give you is to stop reading newspapers, buy some sharp-looking clothes if you can and act way too cool whenever Asher Roth comes on. As we've grown, we've always had to revise what age we thought people got old at. When I was little, college was old. Ñow that I'm almost out of it, you little freshmen seem so young. Shit's weird.
This is my last column in the Cardinal. I thank all of you who bothered to read these, in class or online, it's been cool.
David can be reached at DaHottinger@gmail.com.
