Life After College: Holding On For Dear Life

"OMG! I forgot I packed all these empty Bacardi bottles!"

At the end of senior year I shoved all my belongings into boxes and garbage bags without using any kind of rational order or logic. Whatever could fit in my boxes went in — and whatever couldn’t fit got thrown away.

Perfectly good pots and pans ended up in the dumpster (and soon after in a dumpster diver’s kitchen) while perfectly useless items like homemade off the shoulder t-shirts got rolled in bubble wrap and packed away.

This past weekend I moved into my new apartment and began unpacking all my boxes. It was like 8 nights of Hanukkah all rolled into one. I had forgotten I owned half of that stuff so each time I reached into a box and pulled something out it was like winning a raffle. The kind of raffle where you win prizes that are good for a laugh, yet have no purpose…a broken shower radio, a dirty mug, stolen freshman year dorm posters, a lime green shoe bag, 75,000 dryer sheets.

Basically nothing useful or even decorative for my new apartment. But they come from college and even though they should have been thrown out months ago, I can’t bear to part with them now. I held up every item and explained to my mother what each one meant to me. However she was increasingly less entertained as my stories got more personal. She finally cut me off at  “oh here’s the pregnancy test I – I mean my roommate – used one time she thought she was pregnant.”

My inability to throw anything away made me realize that I’m officially one of those old people who won’t ever get over college – or anything related to it. If I can practically sing the praises of a pregnancy test that originally gave me angina, there’s no hope left. I’m a few more trips-down-memory-lane away from tattooing the Syracuse fight song onto my face. Once I do that there’s even a chance I might actually follow the basketball team’s season.

Will I ever be OK with real life? Will I ever start stories with something other than, “This one time in college….”? Will I ever understand the concept of “Just one drink”?

Who knows, but in the meantime I’m trying to find space in my jail cell of a room to fit all my Syracuse memorabilia. NYC apartment bedrooms are roughly equivalent to a fourth of the space of dorm bedrooms. I have my bed on risers on top of my dresser on risers on top of my underbed storage box. So it’s an understatement saying it’s going to be hard to fit everything from my old life along with everything from my new life. Especially with the giant box of costumes I unearthed this morning.

“I can’t get rid if it, mom! You never know when you’ll need orange rubber wading pants in NYC.”