Earlier today, I was sitting on the Uprise Bakery patio, nursing a Trops-induced headache with a [non-alcoholic] fruit smoothie and wondering why I thought it would be a good idea to come to Columbia this weekend in the first place. Within about two hours of my arrival last night, I realized that everything was the exact same as it was when I was in college except that all but three of my friends have moved away.
The good news is that in the middle of my angsty scribblings (in a black Moleskine, no less — how collegiate of me!), one of the aforementioned three remaining friends met me for lunch. I remembered that I didn’t come back to this town to go to really boring parties and drink crappy beer and try to engage in conversation with people who were in middle school when I went to college for the first time and pile into a two-door sedan with six other people because somebody forgot to take their car keys out of their pants before jumping in the pond. I came back to see a few good friends and eat a lot of good food and, if I’m lucky, take a really big dump right on the steps of the J-School before leaving this town most likely forever.
The other good news is that I’m sitting next to a table of three guys with way too much gel in their hair and a girl that looks sort of out place and they’re passing around grainy pictures of “ghosts” and planning some kind of paranormal field trip, honest to God. One of them said he was a “priest of Ra” and the other said he had an eight-year-old kid come up to him a few days ago and ask if he was a demon. One of them (the one wearing all denim, BTW — the “priest of Ra,” in fact) also mentioned that he doesn’t “like people” and that he would be “totally content living on a desert island.”
Awwwww. I really miss all the pseudo-intellectual conversations you get to overhear in a college town!
