I head to college with the knowledge that my mother met her best friend in her Freshman dorm. They were randomly assigned to be roommates and further my faith in fate. All of my mother’s college stories involve Jeannette – either as the comic foil or voice of reason. My favorite picture of my mother from these years was taken by Jeannette.
I’m ready for Robyn to be my new best friend.
Robyn moves out within a month of school starting.
Scott and I are drawn back together and are boyfriend-and-girlfriend again within a month of starting school.
My much-anticipated first election is in November. I vote absentee in my home county, but get up early that fateful Tuesday to go to my local polling place to get an “I Voted” sticker. I’m exploding with civic pride and want all the perks that go with it.
Tuesday night falls and we don’t know who our next President will be. The resulting is-it-Bush-or-is-it-Gore? will clearly be the defining moment of my newly-minted adulthood, so I keep every newspaper I can get my hands on. They join a pile of unread Wall Street Journals in the corner of my dorm room. I feel so guilty for not reading the WSJ that I don’t let myself recycle them.
Late in the second semester, there is a fight in one of the dorm rooms on the third floor of my building. A girl named Megan is now in need of new digs and moves down to share my room on the second floor. I haven’t had a roommate since October, so I’m nervous. No need, Megan is pretty awesome. Together we shame the girls who wash their dishes in the dorm bathroom and leave the sinks full of noodles and food scraps. Really, some people.
I audition to be in the Illini Marching Band the following Fall. As I leave the audition, I know it went quite poorly. This is confirmed in a letter a few weeks later.
(What to start with Kindergarten? Go here).