Last Saturday night, my friend and I had resigned to have a night in — typical for both of us these days. We had both had exhausting days of sleeping in and existing in the world, but, at around 9:00 p.m., we decided to not be lame and go out. We walked around campus for about half an hour.
On our walk, we passed the illustrious PVTA bus stop; it was teeming with excited and intoxicated Smithies.
I turned to my friend and asked: “How many people do you think we know here?”
Without so much as surveying the crowd, she replied: “Not a single one.”
She was absolutely correct. It’s not that we know everyone at our college (I, for one, am not that popular); it’s simply that knowing everyone — at the very least, within one’s own class year — isn’t all that hard to do at Smith College. But, as a senior, realizing that I didn’t recognize a single person at that bus stop told me a truth I had already known, but hadn’t fully come to terms with; that is, that I am old. I mean, like, old old. Ancient, even. I had better start making funeral arrangements.
In all seriousness, though, towards the end of my junior year, I began to get the sense that I was simply getting a little too old for this shit. It’s not that I don’t fondly remember the bygone days of Saturday Nights on the PVTA (we will get to that later); it’s more so that I have been there, done that, and I am now, at the ripe age of 21, ready for retirement.
Unfortunately for me, the “work hard, play hard” grind does not let up as one attempts to happily settle into one’s early twenties. Rather, my worries seem to have multiplied: job applications, graduate school applications, figuring out what I want to do with my life and before I get to all that, I have to actually finish my degree.
It is difficult to imagine Sisyphus happy when one is (still, after three years) heaving the boulder uphill.
So, with bittersweet nostalgia, I turn towards reflection on my early days at Smith. Back when there were zero expectations for me to have even the slightest inkling as to what I was going to do in the post-grad real world, I spent my weekend nights blissfully inebriated as the PVTA hobbled along the poorly maintained roads between Northampton and Amherst. Nine times out of ten, the bus rides were the best part. So, while I feel that I’m not actually missing all that much by staying in and nursing a hot toddy on my couch on Saturday nights, I can’t help but reminisce about what were perhaps my most formative days (nights) as a Smithie.
I am struck by a peculiar dissonance when I reflect on how much I have changed and matured throughout my time at Smith. When I arrived on campus as a shiny, green first-year, I truly thought I was the shit. I had worked tirelessly all throughout high school, and here I finally was; all my hard work had paid off. But, like many recent high school graduates, I was so overcome with the relief of being finished with the dog days of late teenagehood that I’d forgotten the fact that it doesn’t end there!
No; in fact, it never ends.
And here I am again, about seven months out from exiting one hamster wheel and entering another one — the perpetual hamster wheel of adulting.
But, returning to my exigence for this thought dump of an article, a great way to avoid obsessing over the future is to ruminate about the past, and there’s no time like the present to do so.
My first-year self — so self-assured, yet so detached from reality — seems like an infantile version of who I am today. I can still remember the immense pride I felt hooking my carabiner to my belt loop for the very first time, and how cool, unbothered and quintessentially Smithie I thought I must have looked.
Fast-forward to my senior fall, and I am drunk and standing in the middle of a “Hot to Go!” mosh pit on Chapin Lawn at my last Convocation and feeling painfully aware that I have become, perhaps unwillingly, perhaps of my own accord, an NPC.
I’m grateful for how I’ve grown, but I envy that first-year Barbara. Passing the wide-eyed Smithies cheering for the long-awaited arrival of the B43, I think to myself, I miss that. Not the sweaty, vomit smell of the interior of the bus, but the glee, the sheer sense of anticipation of the incredibly mid frat party awaiting us at the end of the ride.
Sometimes I wonder if it would be even remotely fun to do one last Saturday night on the PVTA, just for nostalgia’s sake, but then I remember that the average age of the people on that bus is probably about 18.5. And so I say, with all the love in my heart, no thank you; I hope they have fun. I’m ready for bed.
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