Rewind

Holy shit, you guys. It's already December. The countdown to Christmas has begun, the first snow in Chicago graced the earth today, and we are at the peak of the hockey season (my new favorite obsession. Go Columbus Blue Jackets!) On this beautifully frigid day, though, I am cooped up in the library, alongside other diligent students because, well, along with this fascinating precipitation, December also brings the ominous black cloud over all universities: Finals Week.

Oh mah god. Where did the time go? Yes, yes, so cliché, I know. But seriously. In exactly ten days, I will have (hopefully) successfully completed my first college semester, and that freaks me out a little bit. For the past sixteen weeks I've been just hanging out in Chicago, going to class, meeting an abundance of random people who I'll probably never talk to again, and not paying attention to the rapid passing of time. Back in October, Thanksgiving and Winter break seemed like light years away, but now that it is almost here, the time will come all too soon. After turning in my last final, I'm hopping on an American Airlines flight home, and I'm staying there for five weeks. Those thirty five days will be full of absolutely nothing. No homework, no studying, no real worries; rather spending all my time with my best friends back home. But if these fifteen weeks went by faster than I can even comprehend, these next five will seem almost nonexistent.

Time is a strange phenomenon. You can never control it, but you can manage it. You never have it when you need it, but it is always in abundance when you least want it. (I feel like Alanis Morisette could have included this in her song ironic in which everything she sings about isn't actually an example of irony... but whatever.) We simply cannot control the passing of seconds, minutes, days, years, and that kind of sucks. A good friend of mine once said, "I wish we could live in a never ending summer after senior year", and although we can hope and pray, it will never happen. Why can't we make it happen, though? Keeping track of time is a man made idea. This earth didn't evolve with clocks and calendars, so we would have been perfectly fine just winging it day to day. Time makes people anal, myself included. Like my mother, I am always ten minutes early to everything. We would all be so much more relaxed and peaceful if there were no tracking of time. No deadlines, no curfews, nothing.

But since we can't eliminate time now in this day and age, we just have to deal with it. We'll never be able to live forever in the summer after senior year. Unless, of course, we all find and drink out of the magical spring in Tuck Everlasting. I can't elongate the time before finals week. But I can go and make the most of the little time I have. Maybe summer after freshman year of college will be even better than summer after senior year. We can only wait until the time comes to find out, though. That time will be here before we know it. If these past four months flew by, the next four are bound to, as well. I only hope I'm not lying on my deathbed wondering where all the years have gone. In the short lives we lead on this earth, we can only make the most of the small time we have. It is bound to speed by, but, well, shit happens, right? Even though its always changing, we just have to live in the now. And right now the time I have to study for finals is slowly dissipating and will be gone before I know it. Instead of watching the hands on the clock tease me of the slowly approaching end of each day, I'll battle them and make those minutes worthwhile.