Old?

It was brought to my attention over the weekend just how long it has been since I was in college. I met up with a few Kappa girls on campus to hang out and visit some of our old haunts.

I was early, so had a little time on campus by myself. Of course the first thing I noticed was how childlike the students looked. Then I saw one of the girls go by on a skateboard. Yeah, I guess I'm officially "old".

So anyway, over the course of the day, we discovered several things that have changed in our lives since we finished our college careers:

We now carry handbags instead of backpacks. This is also a dead giveaway to anyone who may not otherwise have noticed our age that we no longer really belong on campus.

When we were in college, there was no internet in our rooms. Really. I can't fathom it now, as I sit here on the couch with a laptop magically wirelessly connected, but it's true. We had to go to the computer lab to check our email.

And speaking of computer labs, several of us didn't even have a computer, and could only write papers in the computer lab. We wrote a lot of papers, so some of us became very very familiar with the computer lab.

Cellphones. We don't remember using these. We had them, but only for emergencies. And I remember vividly that we had regular phones in our rooms because I was the answering service for my roommate who was dating two different guys with the same name. I had to get to know them in order to tell them apart and give the correct messages, but had we had cellphones, problem solved.

Campus seems smaller to me now. Kind of like things that are big when you're a little kid that are no longer big when you're grown up. Except I wasn't a little kid when I lived there. Maybe I'm just used to walking farther now? Or maybe it's those new buildings that have taken up much of what used to be parking lots or open green space, making everything seem closer together.

A couple of things were the same: my hair, which looks just like it did when I graduated, and my footwear--I fit right in in those flip flops. Oh also my car. I drive a car that's about 20 years newer than the one I drove in college. But since it's been 11 years since college, I still drive a POS, granted not as big a POS as it would be if it were still that car I had in college that my dad traded in exchange for some guy hauling the tetherball pole out of the driveway years ago.

So it's been a little while since we had someone to cook for us, always had someone to eat with, had balcony/vestibule things to throw things onto, the library across the parking lot (where you actually had to go to do any research) to suck up any free time, and interesting jobs like ceramics department aid, zoo gift shop clerk, and house cleaner. Campus is still beautiful and the students very focused on reading period, even on a beautiful spring day.

I don't miss the studying, and I would never trade my handbags for a backpack.