BAM! It’s here. The most important day of your life so far. You’re graduating from high school. It’s so exciting. You get teary-eyed. You hug all your friends, throw your cap into the air because that’s what everyone has always done. And in one day you transform. You are no longer a kid. You have become something more. You have begun.

You run into your fifth grade teacher over the summer. She smiles and asks are you a senior now? You react in one of two ways: the expression of disgust or the tolerant laugh. And you say no, no, I’m a college freshman now, then you watch and see how impressed she is. You really are something now. You feel so cool. That feeling lasts right up until moving-in day at college. Then it hits you: you’re a college freshman. You suck.

Now you begin your period of Chaos. This lasts longer for some than for others. I’m still in mine. Chaos is when you try to adjust to your roommate, the lack of space, the sixty weirdoes you live with, and the food that doesn’t taste anything like mom’s cooking no matter how similar it looks or smells. Slowly, by trial and error, you learn important lessons. You have to remind yourself to put sunscreen on if you don’t want to look like a lobster. Stick a jacket in your backpack if it’s cloudy in the morning. Don’t count on your roommate to wake you up for class. Staying regular is not a problem only your grandparents deal with. Leftover pizza for breakfast will not get you through the day, and might make you barf if you didn’t get it from the fridge. After a month or so, if you’re lucky, you begin to feel "well-adjusted." Now a whole new world of trouble opens up to you.

In high school, you had a thing called Focus. It made you do your homework, it made you study for your math tests. It reminded you constantly of that amazing dream you had called College, and what you had to do to get there. But once you get to College, you go through Chaos, and sadly, Focus often doesn’t survive that difficult process. Once you’ve lost your Focus, things move downhill at a pretty steady rate. Your grades start to slip, kinda like what your eyelids do while you’re sitting in lecture. You enter a period of unproductivity, what you call a "slump" but your roommate knows is a bit more serious than that. Soon, however, something happens that changes everything.

You meet someone. For some of you, it’s a girl. But for me it’s a guy, and I’m the one doing the writing here, so just try to follow along as best you can. Now, somewhere in your mind, you’re aware that you’ve lost your Focus. But once you meet him, you don’t notice it as much. The reason is that you’re not letting your eyelids slip during lecture anymore. You’re thinking about him. You smile at people you don’t know while you’re riding your bike because you know that, somewhere, he’s thinking about you and smiling. You forget why you came to college in the first place. You rationalize. I don’t need to study. I’ll study Later. But Later is a mirage that turns out to be Should Have Done It Yesterday. And then the test comes and you barely pass, but you don’t really care because he loves you and that’s all that matters in the end.

Now, if you’re doing things the way normal people do, he is a guy from campus or town or back home or somewhere else close by. But if you’re me -- which you obviously aren’t but let’s hypothesize here -- you do things a bit different. Stupid is also a good word to use here. My him was about three thousand miles away. Two thousand, eight hundred and seventy-five, if I remember correctly. Yes, groan and sigh and smack your forehead, I fell in love with an internet man. In North Carolina. Who was eight years older than me. Needless to say this created some tension with the parental units. It also created some tension with the roomie, the best friends, the grades, and the mental stability of my own mind. You see, my Chaos didn’t fade out into Well-Adjustedness like most people. It put down roots and grew into Depression. That made life just a tiny bit more complicated than I knew how to deal with. But I’m learning. After all, college is an institution of higher learning, ain’t it?

You learn a lot in college, let me tell you. There’s the stuff you learn in the classroom, like the history behind the political instability in South Africa, the four theories of democracy, the basic elements of the short story, and how to take the third derivative of a polynomial. But there’s also the stuff you learn outside the classroom. Like not to eat the stroganoff in the dining commons, always keep a supply of chocolate in your room, don’t try to read Shakespeare and rush downstairs at the same time, don’t throw food away in the bathroom trash can, and know when you can’t do something on your own and you need to get help. That last one took me awhile to figure out. And at first, when I did figure it out, I was headed in all the wrong directions to get help. I tried him. Big mistake. Get a depressed, lonely, older guy to help with depression? Don’t ask me what I was thinking, because I wasn’t. At any rate, I did get help, and the relationship with Mr. Lonely Depressed Guy ended, and I started learning a lot better after that. I learned more IN class and OUT of class. Some of it was even fun. Like learning how to kiss with my best friend. Yes, it was a guy. Had you going didn’t I?