Self-Indulgent for sure

The Friedmans

Sterling, darling, more college musings for you.

I can't actually say that I miss the drama of college. Although I also can't say that I don't. It's been a while since I've shown someone a picture of a group of friends and had that person tell me the number of times she fucked each one of them. It's been a while since I've had people wait for me--without my knowledge--in my bed figuring that I had to come home sometime. It's been a while since everything seemed to matter so much right at the moment it was happening.

I'm not a very dramatic person. I'm kind of slow moving and I don't tend to say too much that will get me in trouble. During my college years I found that I was the recipient of a lot of crushes--mostly young women looking for a safe way to question certain things about themselves. I was sometimes interested but never really acted on anything. It didn't ever seem quite appropriate and I didn't want to be counted off as a number on anyone elses snapshots.

I remember sitting on a bench on the lawn between the new dorms and the old dorms and being able to hear both sides of a heated relationship talk between two of my friends. They were each in their rooms, on their telephones, the sounds of their shouts echoing through the snowy night. I could see her light on in the new dorms and his in the old dorms. My friend and I smoked cigarettes and tried not to listen. We didn't try so hard as to move our of earshot, though.

I remember making out with some girl in the bathroom at a party in the coffeehaus and being surprised to see flashing lights. We opened our eyes to someone taking pictures of us and saw the slides projected onto the side of the new dorms at a student-organized end of the year "retrospective."

I remember walking up to my dorm freshman year in a crappy mood and hearing Jen shout down the lyrics to Buffalo Stance. She was leaning out of our bathroom window smoking a cigarette. That was all it took to lighten up a bit.

I remember eating dinner for two hours every night freshman year. Ten of us squeezing into a table and eating our food, going back for seconds and thirds and then bussing our trays and grabbing our coffee or dessert and sitting in the faculty lounge to smoke and chat another hour. I remember telling Briar that the cords that were hanging down from the collar of my dress were drawstrings, and that tugging on them would pull the dress up to my tits. And that I wasn't wearing any underwear. Ten minutes later I felt a tug and looked over to see Briar concentrating very hard on trying to make the mechanism work, blessherheart.