Summer is finished

Summer is finished.

Say it with me now, all together, deep breath. “Summer is finished.”

That’s it. It is done. If you’ve been keeping track, we are actually more than a week into the fall semester. I’m just as surprised as you are.

Starting the school year isn’t something we can just ease into, though. You have to do it all at once, in one clean sweep, like ripping off a Band-Aid. It’s like getting back on a horse after you spent your entire summer repeatedly falling off and being trampled.
 
There are plenty of clichés that apply here, but hold your horses. There’s still more to learn.

One morning your biggest decision is whether it’s worth it to get out of bed to go to the pool. The next you’re bombarded with syllabi, supply lists, textbook orders and the concept of your own mortality. 

The once-quiet streets of Bloomington are suddenly flooded with new faces. You start to play a secret game in which you try to spot the nervous freshmen in crowds of students. It is a very easy game.

It’s not all so bad. Most of the time, the dread everyone feels is coupled with the excitement to begin a new year.

As a senior, though, you experience a new kind of dread. With only one or two semesters left to finish, it will probably cross your mind that soon you will be violently ripped from the womb of your relatively comfortable undergraduate life and thrown naked and screaming into the world.

From what I understand, post-graduate life is like being a tiny, helpless, useless, still-naked baby hacking through the jungle of the real world with a dull machete you can barely control with your dumb baby arms.

Some of your friends, the ambitious, lucky ones, are already out there. There are least a few people you met your freshman year who are now working dream jobs at companies you’ve read about in magazines.

They’re probably making a billion dollars a year, and they have a real credit card and gym membership and a long-term significant other. They probably own two cats together.

It is okay if you are not this person. They are, in most ways, largely a myth. Anyway, if you learned anything from reading “The Great Gatsby,” it is that most incredibly wealthy, successful people are probably deeply unhappy.

If you never got around to reading Gatsby, don’t worry. There’s a new movie version coming out soon. It will explain everything.

­— alliston@indiana.edu