The last time I remember being happy, not merely laid-back or content, was during the last snowfall in February, when we had the whole day off school and I spent the day sledding with friends in pirate regalia, hoisting my skull-and-crossbones flag, broad-rimmed feathered hat, and plastic hook hand. None of us had actual sleds, so others used recycling bin lids, shower curtains, broken pieces of plastic. I took my painted cardboard Roman legion shield ("SOL INVICTVS") on the last joyride of its short life. We spent the night watching Return of the King1, cocooned by the swirling fury of a blizzard, me shouting joyously at the TV screen during battle scenes and reciting all the lines by heart, thoroughly making a fool of myself and not giving a damn.
Things I'm Nostalgic For
- Taking two hour lunches and sitting around with a mug of coffee knowing I have the whole damn afternoon to eat lunch.
- The big Sunday dinners we used to do with the guys, which Jose constantly missed out on. K, wielding lemon juice and Mrs. Dash, would bust out his Italian cooking skills, pesto pasta with pine nuts and sauteed red peppers and asparagus spears wrapped in prosciutto. There was that one time we baked a pineapple ham with cheesy potatoes, and the time when we did a barbecue and introduced Zaira (the foreign exchange student) to sweet potatoes ("Why is it orange???") and completely destroyed Brian K's free promotional frisbee.
- Studying in the library and falling asleep in their comfy chairs.
- Going out with K and Chris and Jose to every big-budget hack-slash-n-explosion PG-13 comic book movie that came out at Muvico and K insisting afterwards that the movie was "so totally awesome!!!" even though it really, uh, wasn't. I would go bonkers because it's the only opportunity I get to drag guys to the mall. Then we would go to the Olive Garden or somewhere because despite the fact that K is Italian for some reason he doesn't ever get sick of Italian food, and Niall would order some drinks he'd regret in the morning.
- Sitting and reading pulpy fantasy novels on the steps by the UC, surrounded by smokers, punks, lesbians, and smoker-punk-lesbians. I'm nostalgic for lying back on the bricks and staring up through the leafy canopy of the solitary tree, my novel long forgotten.
- Pushing all the tables together in the dining hall into one big uber-table, in freshman year when everyone would converge at the same time so that we didn't have room to fit all the trays on one table, as if some big mama in the sky had rung a college-student dinner bell.
- Flying my rainbow-sailed pirate ship kite in Erickson field and getting the damn thing stuck on the library roof, and the string entangled in the newly budding spring saplings.
- Walking through Erickson and randomly yet consistently finding dropped ballpoint pens, and thinking it was my lucky day.
- Our roleplaying games at Triangle frat house, where I'd wonder how many taps and bottles could possibly be in one apartment, and Curt would microwave hot dogs and ramen, because that's all the food the place has. The hyper demon puppy would slobber all over me, and we'd loaf around rolling ten-sided dice in the basement on comfy, discolored sofas smelling like dog drool and car seats plundered from minivans, complete with intact seat belts.
- Roleplaying Sundays in our apartment, when we'd take turns cooking and throw things at each other (mostly at Jose, who'd fallen asleep). Curt would flirt with Katie and pinch her and give her foot rubs, much to her half-hearted protests. Halfway through, despite the cool white light of the energy-saving bulb, it'd get way too hot and stuffy in the room and we'd have to throw open the front door for a refreshing gust of night wind.
- Walking down the hall of my dorm and seeing every boy in their room with their bigass earphones, playing either Counterstrike or World of Warcraft.
- Sitting around in a lecture hall in class, staring at washed-out slides and paying attention to something genuinely interesting.
- Being able to walk around randomly on campus and hearing music, drums from the upper open windows of the Fine Arts building, a man with a guitar and the sounds of laughter from a balcony in the cool evening air of summer, spring, or approaching autumn, a violin and flute duo on a courtyard bench.
One of the things I think sometimes is that if I die, heaven will be like a perfect college campus where bells toll the hour on the quad amidst august buildings and leafy oaks, with none of the sturm und strang of living, and all of the good things memories are made of.
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1 BTW, I believe the funnest way to watch Return of the King is to be interactive. For example, when they're thundering on the gates of Minas Tirith with that giant beast of a wolf-headed battering ram, chant "GROND! GROND! GROND!". When Theoden yells, "RIDE NOW! RIDE NOW!", clattering his sword against the Rohirrim's extended line of spears, shout back at him. Bonus points if you also blast on a ram's horn. More bonus points if you have an entire theater's worth of people to do it with you. If not, fuck 'em and do it yourself.