time stops for no one...in college

all this college talk has gotten me thinking of the good old days.

ever notice how 24 hours at school can somehow seem to pack in 48 hours' worth of stuff?
in one day you easily could:

• * stay up the night before a test, trying to read all the chapters from the last 6 weeks
• * on the way to the test, run into a boy you had a major crush on in junior high who wants to catch up. you haven't bathed, have on glasses and a baseball cap, and are still wearing your pajama shirt with jeans
• * fall asleep during the exam and discover the jerk sitting next to you who didn't bother to wake you an hour ago went to your damn high school
• * have a mild panic attack while making patterns on the answer form because you won't be able to even read all the questions in the ten minutes you have left to finish and you're screwed because you've been skipping this class so a participation-point boost is out of the question
• * have an epiphany on the bus: the driver knows when to stop when you pull on the yellow cord
• * sneak into the dorm through the laundry room because your psycho exboyfriend has driven three hours and is sitting on the front steps, stopping everyone you know to find you
• * scramble to still catch lunch at the dorm only to find out the only things left out are crusty chili and cereal and you've completely missed the chicken fingers
• * show your friend the hallway you have made a point to routinely walk through in hopes of running into the guy you like who lives there. as you pass by, some other person walking behind you turns to go into your guy's room after hearing your entire conversation. it's his roommate.
• * go with your roommate to the library to study while she meets a group and put your head down for a nap. hours later you wake up wondering what the hell kind of study group takes this long, only to find she's very nearly called campus police when she didn't see you and you never came home
• * sneak three tupperwares' worth of homemade chocolate cookies out of the cafeteria after dinner
• * go to a bar dressed in a tank top and black pants, no coat (febreeze hasn't been invented yet). it's 22 degrees outside.
• * go to the basement of the afterparty in search of jungle juice and only casually notice that the ceiling is bulging downward in time to the bassbeat
• * see some skanky broad making out with the guy whose roommate now knows you like him
• * find someone new to like but spend the entire evening avoiding eye contact
• * discover some slimy guy has absconded away with your tipsy friend and destroy your buzz in the effort to preserve her dignity, get her sober and home
• * run into the new boy you like on the way out and blow him off. then obsess about it all the way home
• * get your fix for latenight grease and the scoop on who hooked up/broke up/shacked up with whom
• * recap what the new boy you like did and how you handled it. discuss what he was thinking, what you were thinking, what his buddies were thinking, what your friends will think. strategize on the best policy for damage control
• * have to think fast when your roommate's parents are calling from the lobby and she's at a boy's room in the other tower and would have to pass them to get back -- damn that laundry room is handy
• * sleep so late that you nearly miss the sun entirely

all of the aforementioned items actually happened to me my first semester (stuff from later involved a great deal more drama that has, over time, become significantly less interesting). granted, they didn't technically happen all in the same day. but they could have.

my list for today will most likely look like this:

• wake
• eat
• dress
• chat on the phone a few minutes
• work
• watch tv
• sleep

but i'd never want to go back; it just wouldn't be the same.