2003-05-20 - 8:28 AM

Walking out of your last final for the semester is like walking through a dream. You see people, places, stuff, floating around you, but it's all background, it's al peripheral. You feel caught between the before and after, you can feel the realization taking its time to sink all the way in. No more classes. No more staying up until 3 in the morning to finish assignments or projects, no tailoring the logical answers to written problems to circumvent your instructor's particular eccentricities. No more panicking over grades, calculating percentages for hypothetical A's and possible B's and unacceptable C's.

It took a little longer this time to sink in. Maybe because I was going straight from the final back to a 3 minute packing job, then off to Pheonix with Matt for the weekend to celebrate. Maybe it didn't feel quite like summer yet, because there was still a plan, there was still something in front of me, still something to do.

On 2 hour drive, we listened to Tenacious D, and I thought. Not entirely sure about what, general pointless mental meanderings from god to frisbee to comic bits by Denis Leary. But at some point, a question routed it's way to the forefront of my mind. "What now?" My inner self posed as the thinker, chin upon fist, looking off into the distance. Pondering. "What lies ahead of you?" Almost as quickly as the question entered my mind, it answered itself. The answer was right in front of me. Quite literally. Gleaming off the asphalt littered with cigarette ashes and broken glass and dead rabbits, off the wisconsin license plate of the beat up vehicle in front of us, off the street signs that told us how close we were to McDonalds, or a rest stop, or our destination.

That's the moment summer hit me. That's the minute, the second I realized I was free, when scheduling vacuum that was the next 3 months sunk it's sweetness into my soul. What lied ahead?

The open road.

-Alex

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