Farewell from your fair-weather editor

It’s difficult to explain how much work it is to be a senior in college without sounding like a lazy jerk. But I am a lazy jerk, so here goes nothing.

Like most students tend to do, I began this semester rather bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I was a senior in college, finally turning 21 and arguably the happiest I’d ever been in my life. I was taking only 12 credit hours and was ready for this mythical and magical senior year I was always promised.

For years, I heard tales of Tuesday night bar crawls and the routine of occasionally showing up to the three classes you had left to take. This sounded quite enchanting, especially given the fact that I was usually knee-deep in Ramen noodles and an episode of “the X-Files” most Tuesday nights.

Alas, this was not the first semester of my senior year.

Looking back now, it’s easy to say it went by faster than one of Mariah Carey’s whistle tones. But you couldn’t pay me to relive the last four-and-a-half-some months.

Was I content a lot of the time? Yes. Was I also miserable all the time? Yes.

Maybe I was just ignoring my older friends before when they talked about it, and it seems like the stuff of white girl problems, but becoming an adult is scary.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, I’m daydreaming of running away to Disney World and leaving all of my responsibilities behind. I guess I could technically apply to the Disney College Program and do such a thing, but that’s an internal debate for another quarter-life crisis.

So before this becomes another column about a senior complaining about becoming a real adult, let me cut to the chase and leave my time as your Opinion editor with these parting words.

We’re all going to be OK.

We might not exactly believe it now, but I know that eventually we’re going to be OK.

Something I think many of us tend to forget is that everyone who’s currently an adult was once exactly where we are now. And they seemed to survive.

Sure, circumstances may have been different. Many adults don’t go to college and have successful careers. Many may have known exactly what it is they were going to do with their lives from a young age.

The point being, we’re all living our own stories. We are the leading men and women of our own feature films and epic novels. We are the less sadistic and manipulative Walter Whites of our own hit cable series.

And what fun would it be if we were told exactly how it’s going to work out for us in the end?

I’m not saying everyone is going to get a happily ever after, because that would be unrealistic and boring. Plus, everyone knows the most interesting stories tend to end on the bleakest notes.

So in these last months of the last semester, do me and favor and don’t live them like they’re already over. That time will come soon enough.

For now, gather ye rosebuds while ye may. Because by this time next year, who knows what rosebuds ye will have left to gather.

­— wdmcdona@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Dane McDonald on Twitter @W_DaneMcDonald.