Reminiscing about College

I know that I'm not the only one who looks back on my college days as a wonderful time in my life. A time of learning and debating and exploring. Most of all, of growing. Of responsibilities that are a lot less important than those of adulthood. Clearly, the stress of missing a deadline for a paper isn't exactly that of caring for a sick child or simply providing for them. It is a time in which in a sense, we get to recreate ourselves. When you arrive on a college campus, chances are you don't know anyone, and no one knows you, which is an opportunity to start fresh and make decisions--for once, independent decisions about who you want to be. When I arrived at Davidson College in the fall of 1999, I was in a very particular place in my life. I arrived on a campus I had only seen in photographs, in a part of the country quite different from where I grew up. I had just come from an entire year in Europe, first in France and then in Italy, with side trips all over the place from Budapest to Stockholm. I even had difficulties with my first assignments because I hadn't written in English in so long it felt like writing in a foreign language. It was an "alone" time, in which I had the chance to reflect a lot about who I was and what was important to me. Not that I decided it all in those few years, but certain decisions I did make. I listened to other opinions and agreed or disagreed. I've been thinking a lot about that time lately, I'm not really sure why. Doug and I often reminisce about how fun it was to just discuss philosophical issues into the night, just because you could. Not necessarily for any resolution but just for the mental exercise of thinking your brain into exhaustion.

All this just to announce that I've signed up for a non-fiction writing class next month at the Center for Literary Arts at Miami-Dade College with one of my dear, old friends. I'm really looking forward to learning a little more about this whole new world of writing and publishing that has changed so much thanks to the age of the internet. Now that blogging has me writing again, I'm looking forward to improving the quality of my writing. We'll see how it goes.