College Itself Was Awkward Enough On Its Own, Nevermind Reading About It

Ever look at an old picture and feel awkward for yourself?

No, I'm not talking about that picture of you that time your mom dressed you in a sweatsuit when you were 10.

No this is not me, just a special something from AwkardFamilyPhotos to prove my point and shine some light in your life.

I'm talking about the one during recent a time when you should've known better, and there's that awkward feeling in your stomach and you think, "Oh God, I'm still friends with people who were friends with me then. I hope they don't remember this awkward period in my life...  that happened like a four years ago."

Again, this photo is not of me, thank you AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com But I feel like all of these people are old enough to know better.

I had that moment tonight.

Except it didn't happen with a photo.


I found my old "livejournal" from my summer before college/ early college years.

OH JEEZ.


First off, I forget why I started it or the purpose. I think it started out as a way to journal my thoughts and, in a teenage angsty way, see if people connected with them.

As I read through the entries I noticed a few things:

A. My writing had no purpose. It was like a crazy person's ramblings.
B. My grammar was icky.
C. I only updated it when my emotions were at a certain heightened emotion, whether very happy or the very opposite.

I also noticed that my entries were about one of the four following topics:  1. How much I loved my friends,  2. how much I loved Dave, 3. Vague statements about drama with my friends, or 4. Vague statements about drama with Dave.

Most of the posts concerned the latter two topics, and I was never specific.

It was very much, "I'm not going to listen to the haters, I'll do what I want" <Insert emotional Coldplay song lyrics circa 2005 here>. Or it was, "Those who are closest hurt you the most, I don't know what to do.." <Insert even more emotional Coldplay lyrics circa 2005 here.>

And as I read these posts I was reminded of certain feelings towards certain friends, how others felt, and parts of the situations that caused these altercations to come up.

This is the part of the story where that awkward feeling pops into my stomach.

Here's the thing, I don't really remember much of anything that I wrote about.

I sat there racking my brain trying to think of who said exactly what and how the arguments were solved and how that affected our friendships but I could not think of any of it, whether it was between myself and friends or myself and and the Mr..

When I remember my first few years of college and my friends I remember running around the hallways in our towels making sure everyone was ready for our shower parties. (Don't worry separate stalls, but of course one boombox with old school tunes.)
I remember making jungle juice with 8429834 different drinks and real fruit. And that jungle juice sitting in that dorm room for a week. And people drinking it for a week.
I remember trips to walmartand the local pizza place.
I remember running from the bathroom screaming that I just cut my bangs to a half of an inch, running into my friend's room about to cry, watch them try to hold a straight face for a second, and then we all busted out laughing.
I remember getting stuck in an elevator with 11 other people.
I remember the sketchy rest stops and laughs after wards on the 24 hour ride to Georgia.
I remember group birthday's at chain restaurants.
I remember riding up the back of a pickup up a major route to the ocean and up a mountain screaming and laughing with my partner in crime the whole way.
I remember taking walks around campus late at night because the whole world was out there, you could and those books weren't going to go anywhere, so why not come back to them in an hour?
I remember going to dive bars and letting townies buy us drinks.
I remember dancing around during Rugby practice singing Fergie in just my spandex and t-shirt with my teammates just so the men's team could shake their heads at us.
And of course I remember those mornings where I couldn't quite remember so I had to ask my friends to remember for me. And then untagging the photos that they posted on facebook that I didn't quite want to remember.

I remember a lot of little moments like these:

This my friends is a photo of me. And of two of the most fabulous ladies I know when we were just babies, freshman year.

Please excuse my bangs. They were having a crisis. And my makeup. I was still learning.

My point of that photo, and half my other tagged photos on facebook is to show the unabashed ridiculousness that we participated in.

I guess when you're living on top of one another all of the time, your friends at school become a lot like your family. And in a dorm news travels fast down the hall, for better or for worse. When you're in such conditions your emotions are just bound to jump from one spectrum to another.

So I'm not surprised that the posts on livejournal seemed so bipolar. While they're not the ones I can actually remember, they were the ones I needed to write about at the time.

But I think the memories that we choose to carry with us and define our relationships are the ones that were the best, because those are the memories that we want to define us.

I was able to get together with some college friends I hadn't seen for a couple of months the other night now that a some of us are within a half hour radius of each other.  After catching up and gossip we reminisced. We talked a little bit about how much we missed college sometimes and how a song on the radio would push us back down memory lane.

We also yearned for the days where we could partake in beverages on a weeknight and not struggle the day after.

We reflected on the fact that we don't know how we, or any college student is able to survive some of the poor choices they make during college.

Without looking at that old "livejournal", (which I am no doubt going to be obliterating soon, don't you worry) I'm pretty sure I could probably pinpoint how we pulled ourselves out of those sticky situations that we put ourselves into.

My fabulous friends.

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