Sophomore summer turns 35 days old today, with 3-4 days remaing.
Already it's middle-aged, more has been than will be. And just as the summer is more than half behind us, so is our time at Dartmouth. The clock on Baker Tower is ticking loudly.
I suspect that I'm not alone in my denial. It is easiest to think, "It's sophomore summer, and as long as we're sophomores we have plenty of time."
Even though it is our sophomore summer in name, officially speaking, we '96s are juniors. Sophomore summer is only so called because the alliteration is catchy.
Maybe this impending reality explains the summer funk that so many of my friends and I have felt. It can't be summer term itself.
The weather is great, the Class of 1996 is together for the first time in a year, and the Green is actually green. Then why so glum?
The obvious is that we are studying in July. This is not generally a happy thought. Making it worse, apparently my professors haven't been told that summer classes are supposed to be laid back.
But I think it's more fundamental than all this. Like allergies and sunburn, summer has brought with it an outbreak of early-life crisis.
Two summers from now we will be on the edge of that precipice called "graduation," beyond which is that strange land known as the "Real World."
The recent news that two '96s got married was my first wake-up call. As much as I wanted to dismiss it as weird, I realized that my parents were dating when they were juniors in college.
In three years they would be married, and in five I would be born.
Yet I can't conceive of myself as a husband, a father, a full-fledged adult shuffling off into early morning commuter traffic.
Can it be that within a decade I will be teaching my child to ride his or her first bike, investing in a pension fund and looking through wallpaper and carpet samples?
I hope that I'm just neurotic, that it will all work out with time to spare. Progress is being made.
Last month I finally decided to be a government major with a minor in economics. Within a year I will be applying to law schools, doing corporate recruiting, or whatever.
But am I ready to make these decisions and confident enough to chart my life's course?
All these decades of schooling are intended to be the dress rehearsal for real life, but I'm losing confidence that real life is what I've been preparing for all along.
I am told that life cannot be planned. Circumstance, common sense and a little luck will make things work out and keep life interesting.
However, I think it's only natural at this point, half-way through the summer, and half-way through Dartmouth, to look back and then forward.
The fact is that we really are in enviable positions. With the talent and privilege we enjoy, life should treat us fairly well.
Yet it's also natural to fear unknowns, like death, marriage and the "Real World" that contains the first two.
I bumped into a prospective '99 the other day. A '99!
I also found out that the person who sits besides me in government class fought in the Gulf War. Not only that, but he's a Sergeant.
He tricked me. Wearing the costume of a college student, a kid, he was actually an incognito adult. I couldn't tell the difference.
