College, a fresh new stage of life! All the fun, the possibilities, the wonder and the workings that will change your life forever…if the commute doesn’t drive you insane first.
Let me point out a few things here, right off the bat. I’m a freshman. I drive. And I hate to do it. Driving is what any sane person would classify as “the opposite of fun.” Due to the need to drive, time is always an issue, and my life is divided into three parts, and little else. Being at school, being on the road, or working at home and sleeping afterwards.
Put simply, my commute takes 50 minutes under the best of conditions. Conditions the like of which have yet to been seen this year. Everyday is an arduous journey through the wastelands of construction, traffic, bad drivers, and usually some adverse weather conditions just to “mix things up” so to speak. The average trip takes about an hour, and to be absolutely sure I’ll be on time, I have to leave my house in excess of an hour and a half of whenever my first class begins.
If I survive, I’m thinking of writing some memoirs about it. I’ll call it “There and back again. And again. And again. And again.” It’ll be a wonderful and moving tale about drunkenly swerving drivers, obnoxious pedestrians, the prep school, and a couple of killer jeeps hiding in the bushes waiting to ambush a poor, unsuspecting, defenseless Camry like my own.
Plus, I seem to get stuck behind about 16 of the 18 or so lights on my way home every single day. Woo. But that little green arrow, blinking blindingly into light and allowing me safe passage, and vanishing before I can thank it is my only aid. I was going to write a haiku about it and give it to my Japanese teacher, but in the end, I decided I was too damn busy for it.
By the end of each day, as I start driving up my road, I almost wish the snotty neighborhood children would still be screaming and playing in the middle of the street so I could scare them. But, no. The poor little dears had a tough day in elementary school and need to kick-back with Nickelodeon and Game Cube so they can be nice and rested for tomorrow. Meanwhile, I need to have an Energizer battery stuck in my back, because I have no choice but to keep going, and going, and going…
But the aggravation of the drive and the time it takes up don’t really explain how tough it can be. Meetings for clubs, as well as any speakers are conveniently scheduled for six hours after my last class. Trying to go to them is usually a question of “Can I afford to wait?” and “Do I have a choice?” The answer to the first is almost always a loud, clear “No way in hell.” The second is usually a “Crud.” Because I know the answer is “No.”
To be fair, the clubs are trying. Though I have rarely felt as awkward and inadequate as when I was stammering out apologies for my inability to attend a meeting. However, clubs at least, are student run. They understand and establish ways of communicating with you and that at least relieves some pressure.
On the other hand, teachers, as you no doubt are aware, love to require you to attend certain lectures or literary readings or something of that nature. The earliest of these start at 7:30 p.m., it would seem. And most start at 8:30 p.m. If you had to wake up at six in the morning after getting to bed at two, be at school by nine, spend four hours in class, and then wait until 8:30 p.m. to listen to these speeches, would you be in a good mood? Probably not. And most likely, you won’t even care what they’re saying anymore.
Then, when it gets out an hour and a half later, you get to look forward to driving an hour home in the dark, in the wind, on the Merrit, while the drivers around you are rip-roaring drunk and couldn’t stay on their own side of the road if the whole road was their side.
Within the first week of school, I was told by various classes that I had to go to four such late night events…none of them coinciding of course. Aside from my over-protective mother’s bickering, I still don’t want to be coming home at 11 p.m., tired, hungry, dehydrated, and with work still ahead of me. But, “them’s the breaks.”
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