College

August is shaping up to be official Boltgirl Is Fucking Old Month. My girlfriend's daughter is gearing up to go away to college in less than two weeks, and I'm increasingly dumbfounded by how different it all is now. I can clearly picture every detail of my dorm in my mind, from the layout of the rooms to the cereal dispensers in the dining room (Lucky Charms at every meal!) to the smell of untold years' worth of stale beer soaked into the hallway carpet. When I close my eyes I can go right back to ivy-covered Willard Hall. So how can it have been so long ago?

And so freaking different. I hauled along the baby blue Smith-Corona Selectric typewriter I'd pounded out my high school papers on and hoped the phone my roommate mentioned in her summer letter to me would work. We met for the first time in the dorm room and sat nervously on the edges of the beds while our parents bustled around with the provisions they'd picked up for us at the decrepit Dominick's a few blocks away. The roommate turned out to be a cheerleader (!) and creationist (!!!) from Minnesota; not having yet developed a combative personality, I spent a lot of time freshman year keeping my mouth shut.

Now the step-daughter is leaving bristling with electronics. She's gotten to know her dormmates over the summer, courtesy of FaceBook, and has lists of everything she will need, courtesy of the university's helpful e-mails (encouragingly, "contraceptives" is on the list). I assume they'll all feel the same sense of separation we did, despite being able to instantly contact parents and old friends on cells and IM rather than having to trudge down three flights of stairs to the single pay phone to make a collect call, grouse, grumble, curmudge. They'll still glom onto each other and make friends right away, although if that will be more difficult without free-flowing beer (thank you, universe, for putting me in college in 1985) I do not know.

Substance-free dorms! They have substance-free dorms now! Meaning recreational substances, both legal and illegal. What the fuck? Who wants to live there besides... well, besides people vastly different from me? Kids these days. Imagine the fun we could have had if Northwestern's Sanctimonious Stone Cold Sober Hall Healthy Living Unit been open back then. Points of Wellness? You have got to be fucking kidding me. Jesus. Do people who live there own up to it in public without getting punched? Evans Scholars, you would have been off the hook; even though we obviously would not be able to steal beer from the keg-lacking Clean Livin' Dorm, our post-Halloween pumpkins may have found it a better target than your front porch.