Friends Forever?

            On August 18, my best friends and I all had a tearful last embrace before departing off to college.  We went through the “of course well talk all the time!” and “it can’t ever be the same!  No one else knows me this well!” and then we left.  Now, more than two months into it, I am surprised at how few of those girls I still talk to on a regular basis.  Everyone says that college changes your relationships, but the degree caught me off guard. 

            At first, when many of my friends were still at home, it was easy to talk to them.  Conveniently, I would call them as I walked to class or to meet some new potential friends for lunch.  Short stories were swapped with a I’ll call you later to explain more.  It became difficult, however, when everyone went off to school.  We all have our own class schedules, meal times, and not to mention, time zones.  Those short talks got converted into voice mails.  No longer were they daily, but then weekly.  Now, I’ve gotten to the point where I talk to two people on a regular basis.  Going from nine to two – wow. 

            Now that’s not to say I don’t talk to anyone else.  I love the random call when someone has time to kill.  It’s great to catch up on everything that’s been going on, but it is harder than I originally thought because the knowledge base is so different.  We hang out at different places with different people; our class schedules involve different classes on a different GE curriculum with different amounts of work.  A story that could be an easy “I was hanging out with the girls in Mac’s” needs to be “I was hanging out with my three friends, their names are . . . and I know them from . . .and Mac’s Place is . . . “ -it just takes longer. 

            In addition to that, I’ve become closer with my friends here in a much shorter time span that imagined.  People say that you bond with your college friends in a way that can’t be matched by those from previous walks of life, and I really find that true.  Through seeing people all day and night every day, you learn about them quickly.  They become a huge part of your world; they become your new support system. 

            Has anyone else felt that the contacts you keep and the new ones you make are turning out much differently than you expected?  Am I the only one that really doesn’t stay in consistent contact with all my best friends from high school?  

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Underage Drinking or Saving Lives

            It’s a Thursday night.  At around 10:30pm you decide to go for a walk.  When walking past the intramural fields, something catches your eye.  There are about five large coach busses there, with crowds of funnily dressed students surrounding them.  What are these busses doing, you may ask.  Well, they are bussing SMU students to bars. 

            On any given Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night, it is basically guaranteed that there will be multiple busses lined up by the intramural fields.  These busses are supplied by the fraternity houses, and their job is to bus students back and forth from the houses to bars.  Many students love the busses.  This is a convenient way to get from the first part of the party to the second without having to worry about paying for a cab or finding someone with a car.  Also, with busses running all night getting either to the bar or back to campus is easy.  It works with your schedule, with minimal amounts of waiting.  This also helps to reduce the amount of people driving to a bar, drinking, and then driving home.  In this sense, it saves lives.

            Some people, however, see a downside to the busses.  By supplying a reliable form of transportation, more students are given the opportunity to drink.  Since worrying about a designated driver isn’t an issue, it is much easier to pick up a beer and relax.  This poses two issues: underage drinking and mass consumption.  Without having to drive, many students get the idea that hey, I’m free, I can drink as much as I want! and take it overboard. 

            I think the busses are great – they offer convenient transportation and stop kids from driving drunk.  So what would we rather?  More underage drunk kids walking around, or drunk drivers?   

Time Wasting or Time Management?

            As I sat down to write my blog tonight, I glanced at the clock.  2:30am.  Not bad.  My sense of timing has been completely warped the past few weeks. 

            Back home I had a consistent schedule – in bed by 10:30, maybe 11:30 at the latest, up every morning at 7:15.  I functioned well on those eight or nine hours each night, and in the rare event that I got less than that I made up for it on weekends. 

            Ever since I got to SMU, my sense of timing has gone out the window.  I no longer find it strange to look at the clock and see 2:30am.  True, my earliest classes all week start at 10:00am as opposed to 8:15, but with busier days sleep is needed now more than ever.  I began to wonder where all my time goes.  I wish I could say I spent it all in the library, studying, keeping my GPA at a flawless 4.0.  I can’t.  I’m not involved in sports and I really don’t work out either.  I participate in a fair number of extra curricular activities but nothing that keeps me up to all hours of the night.  So where does my time go? 

            I realize there are two primary ways that I spend, almost waste, my time: Mac’s Place and friends’ rooms.  I find that every time I walk into Mac’s, I sit down with my meal, and hang out as people filter in and out.  Even after I’m done, I end up staying because I know the next wave of people making their way through.  Before I know it, three hours has gone by.  In regard to my friends’ rooms, I seem to find every night basically like a sleepover.  By not living in a traditional freshman dorm, I consequently don’t spend a lot of time in my room.  I don’t have a hall where students are constantly walking around, talking, and getting to know each other.  The majority of my friends, however, live in the same hall, so I end up spending much of my free time there.  If I lived there, going to sleep would be much more convenient because my bed would be just down the hall as opposed to across campus. 

            The good news: even though I spend a lot of time just hanging out not necessarily being productive, I still get my homework done and show up to my classes.  Time management has come out of these first few months, to an extent, but I would like to assume I am not the only one that is learning these lessons . . .