But the horrible thing about having all your friends be the same age as you is that you all have to experience new things at the same time. It's quite terrifying, since you can't learn from any of them.
Look! I'm pulling a Brendan.
Side note: Another interesting example of the subtle but still very much existent difference between the words "get" and "have". "You get to experience this together" vs. "You have to experience this together." Thanks Mr. McCants!
My paragraphs are too short and they look weird. Side notes screw everything up. Anyway. College is probably going to be the biggest, most life changing experience that any of us have gone through together yet (lol juice). We're (most of us) moving away from home, living in weird one–room apartments, doing, like, other things by ourselves, and just generally being somewhat more independent than normal. It sounds rather trivial typed out, but it really isn't.
But I'm not ready for that.
I'm sort of ready. But I'm not ready ready. I bought everything I need (or think I'll need; I'm sure there's more). I paid for school. I filled all the paperwork. I got into the honors program two and a half months after the deadline. I bought books. I bought my Klean Kanteen. I completely overhauled my wardrobe and pretended I'm some halfway preppy guy (but let's be honest, my favorite outfit is still a pair of athletic shorts, a white tshirt, and nothing else. Even socks sort of annoy me. I'm not sure how this is going to work out).
Okay, cool. I have all the tangible things I need. But I'm still not emotionally ready, or experientially ready, or mentally ready, or just ready in the "dude you're going to college and you can barely function as it is" sense. I have no idea what I'm doing.
But I guess that's just how life is. We figure it out, we fake it til we make it, we pray about it, and generally treat life as one big trial and error experiment. Or at least I do. I dunno what the rest of you do.
Since the age of 7 I've been involved in the BSA, and they continually reminded us of scouting's motto of "Be Prepared". By now it's pretty ingrained into my head to be prepared for whatever I do (but somehow I tend to not be very prepared), but I'm not feeling very prepared right now. But similarly to how Blake is going to share his crock pot and truck, I guess we'll just have to rely on each other. We're all going to have difference experiences and learn different things, so it seems best to share these in this crazed new world we're about to enter. I don't think there's any other way to stay prepared other than to prepare as we go.
And I think that's why I think it's so cool that so many of us are going off to school with friends. These are people that we already know, and we've all been through a lot together. And now we get to figure this new life out together too. For the past four to six years I've constantly been told "You won't be friends with your high school friends in college," or "Once you get to college you'll forget about anything that happened in high school because no one cares anymore," or "You shouldn't go to college with your high school friends because you'll limit yourself socially."
But they're wrong. Usually, when someone who has an entire live's worth of experience tells me something, I'll be like okay, they probably know more than me and I should probably trust them. But this time? Not so much. I think college will be that much better because we get to do it together. As Jack Johnson says, we're better together.
I'm not just talking about me and Brendan and Blake either. Cameron has Mary Christine and Becker (who aren't in the tribe but basically are anyway), Cassidy has like, the iMessage group and stuff, Lucas is with Dan, etc. But on top of all that, I really do think we'll all still stay together as a group through college. We'll meet up on breaks with too much frequency, we'll probably have skype calls every other night, we'll text more than we do now (and they said guys never text each other).
So I don't think there will be any issues there. We'll all make other friends, which is good. It would be stupid of us not to, and honestly I don't think we could not make other friends if we tried. Cause we're the cool kids, right? But the tribe will continue to exist, and college is gonna be great.
The next four years of our lives will probably be the best four years we've ever had, and I'm glad we get to do that mostly together.
