Moving On

Columbus, Ohio has been quite the tolerant host to my antics over the past four years. In fact, I cannot believe that it has put up with me without so much as an arrest or broken bone. I think you can all join me as i release a massive sigh of relief, although i did end up taking home some serious scars as souvenirs. But in all honesty, if the city of Columbus were a human being, I would give her a great big hug, maybe even a parting gift. It has been a good run, Columbus, and now that I have gone for good, I know that I won't forget ya.

Packing up four years of college life is quite the experience. First of all, I cannot be the only one who has acquired an unbelievable amount of useless shit over the course of my time in school. By the end of the year, my living room was packed with items leftover from our ongoing festivities, sort of like a live scrap book. A quick glance at the mess would tell you everything from what we wore on Halloween to our drunk habit of taking things off the side of the road. One time I walked into our living room to find a shopping cart that my roommates took from a local bum, frankly I'm surprised the bum wasn't taken with it. And of course there is no mistaking what school we went to, as our house displayed so much scarlet and gray that you would think we were opening up an Ohio State gift shop. After all, OSU is not just a school, it's an internationally recognized brand. You may think I'm being presumptuous by saying internationally recognized, but I was in Tel-Aviv one time when an Australian man in an Ohio State Football t-shirt came up and hit on me. No joke. The guy had never even been to Ohio but apparently "dug the shirt, mate." You can honestly find an astonishing array of Ohio State memorabilia out there. I mean, I enjoy a good OSU serving bowl just as much as the next guy, but OSU toilet seats, really??

Anyway, my point is that there are hundreds of things I would have rather done then sifting through the contents of my living room. Moving is definitely one of the most inconvenient and physically draining things to do in life. I should know, I have moved every year in school. In the freshmen dorms, I even hated the idea of moving. I was so against moving out that my parents were halfway to Columbus from Cleveland before I even started to take down my Jack Johnson poster, you know the one. I was SO against moving out that I was the very last kid on my floor to leave. At one point, I had both parents, both R.A.s and the dorm manager helping me load the car. Of course it's never comfortable opening up your armoir doors to reveal half the year's empty liquor bottles to the people that were supposed to be monitoring your underage drinking. At that point however, they were just elated to get me the hell out of there and back in Cleveland where my parents had the pleasure of housing me for the summer.

Packing up your stuff is an unnatural feeling for so many reasons. While we rent off-campus housing, after an entire year of living somewhere, it truly becomes a home. You come back to the same place night after night. You collapse on the same furniture, turn on the same t.v., snuggle under the same covers in the same room that becomes your own personal safe place. No matter how drunk you are, your body becomes programmed to stumble back there, and never fails to do so. Even on major holidays like Cinco de Mayo or St. Patrick's Day. Then one year later, it cheats on you with some new, hussie tenants. The nerve.

The sheer number of tenants that come in and out of these houses would make one scratch their head in disbelief. Many of the houses were once quite beautiful, but are now falling apart after too much commotion and debauchery. One time I was dancing on a table at an annex house when the entire floor busted in and the basement ceiling near collapsed. That same Realtor rented out to my girlfriends and I the following year, elated that for once they were saved renting a big house to boys. Little did they know, the condition of the house after we were done with it forced them to perform a complete reconstruction of the insides, turning our security deposit into an investment for future college kids to do the same.

Off campus houses are so old they remind me of a grandpa that cringes every time their grandchild wants a piggyback ride. A porch can be hanging on by a plank and yet, we will still find some way to balance a game of flip cup on it. Most of the houses have significant historical value however. At one point many of the fraternity and sorority houses were plantation homes, that are still connected by an underground tunnel that was part of the Underground Railroad. Now, those tunnels are caved in, and I can imagine that the old conservative plantation owners would not be happy to know that some of these places are now known to foster quite inappropriate actions of unmentionable Ohio State quarterbacks. Oh, and the antics and hormones of several thousand other people.

As I packed away my college memorabilia, it brought back so many great memories, though some a bit void of details due to alcoholic intake. In contrast to my lethargic moving out, the boys moving in were so enthusiastic that they had arranged to move their stuff in before we had even moved ours out. To ease on their move, they purchased a couple of cases and were basically having a homecoming event going before we had even said our goodbyes. Nothing made me more nostalgic then watching the seven of them walking into my house holding an empty keg shell in each hand. These guys were ready to party, and a part of me wasn't quite ready to leave college. So I had a couple beers with them. This last move was definitely the hardest. I wasn't only moving to a new house, I was moving to an entirely new state. While I am excited for what's to come, I am going to be sad about the end of college for a long time.

It is about that time for my summer in-between to end, it is September, after all. For me, September usually means back to school shopping, and while this time around the only pencils bought will be part of Banana Republic's Autumn line, it still represents a new year and a fresh start. In my first post, I mentioned that I refuse to be that alum who think the glory days are over. In fact, the term "glory days," (like the term, "real world.") is meaningless and redundant. As I move to Chicago and begin to work on my career, I will strive to attain personal goals, and strive to stay out past midnight as my alcohol muscles will be quite weak after my college hiatus. To me, college was a necessary stage in life and a vast pool of stories to utilize in my everyday banter. In the summarized words of the great Mark Twain, it was the best and the worst of times, the age of wisdom and foolishness- the period was so far like the present period, that some of its nosiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. If you have no idea what i'm talking about I suggest you forget going to grad school all together and go back to 10th grade English class ("don't mind if I do, meem.") And if you DO know what I'm talking about, then you know that we needed college to get us through to the next stage of life, and every learning experience was relevant. Mark Twain, knew his shit, he understood that life is a cumulative final. College was ultimately the path to take to get our diploma, and the fact that I learned more on the east side of High Street than the west side, was simply the extraneous benefit from my tuition costs.

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