Well, just as we packed up all our sweaters, wool socks and winter coats, loaded them in our cars and dragged them home with us for Easter weekend, or sent them away with our parents, the cruel Iowa winter completely ruined our visions of spring sun and threw us back to our poorly heated rooms to suffer for another week.

Oh well. Soon warm weather will be here so don’t panic.

I was busy looking at my resume, sending out cover letters and all the other pre-graduation, pre-real-life crap that plagues us all at some point, and I got to wondering where in the world all the time has gone.

I mean, it seems like just yesterday I was struggling to find where the Union was and remembering all the new found freedoms that come with attending college.

Now I wonder: “What the hell have I been doing all these years?”

I’m sure most of you have the same feelings. You remember the first time you went and got all your textbooks before classes even started.

The time you stood in a line for an hour holding 100 pounds of books that you later found out were not even required.

And when you tried to return them, you had lost your receipt and were stuck with some worthless book full of meaningless mathematical equations.

Now you sit and wait until long after syllabi have been passed out and sometimes even after the first test.

There used to be a time when you could stay up until 4 a.m. drinking some grotesque concoction of cheap alcohol and stand on top of tables and tell all the party-goers below you exactly how much you have had to drink and that you never get sick so they needn’t worry.

As you performed some tipsy acrobatic dismount, you felt a little dizzy and headed off to say “hiralph” to the toilet, sink or roommate’s plant.

Now, if you stay up much past midnight during the week, you’re dead the next day. Even though you didn’t drink. And on the weekends, you know exactly which mixtures of booze to avoid just by the initial smell that sends that nauseating tingle rushing through your brain.

You try and recount stories with your friends about dumb things you did and you get tripped up on whether it happened last Veishea or two years ago. Everything kind of blends into one.

Semesters roll into semesters and the only thing you can recount without fail is your 21st birthday just because it’s not a tough date to remember in the first place and you were bedridden for two days.

There are thousands of things you wonder about as the years go by. Like what happened to that one roommate that used to lock himself in his room and play Nintendo all day?

Or the one that would spend all day Friday trying to figure out what to wear to some party?

It all goes by in a cosmic blur. We barely remember classes we’ve taken but we’ll never forget that bad date or that great party. Somehow this doesn’t show up on my resume and dammit, I think it should.

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J. R. Grant is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Ohio.