Alma Mater

On this brutal Sunday afternoon, I'm missing my nurturing mother. My alma mater.

This is partly due to my hangover. It's funny that a hangover reminds me of LSU. Most of my mornings there were spent in that state, with an iced coffee sweating bullets on my desk while a red-faced, militant German professor bellowed his reasons for hating the department. The coffee took the bulk of his anger while I wondered idly what happened the night before.

After my six years there, it's strange to miss the place, because I never thought I'd have to miss it. Those six years felt like eternity--a pleasant eternity, in which I was a college student and would always be a college student. LSU spit me out in May, and all of a sudden, it was over. I got so comfortable in that desk with my iced coffee. Now I've got to figure out what exactly I learned there.

What am I qualified for? Did I learn anything of value, or was I just hungover all the time? These are questions I'd rather not answer right now, because all I want to do is be forced to wake up at 9:00AM and trudge my dehydrated ass to class, where I can drink iced coffee and wonder what I did last night. Sometimes I wonder why they gave me a degree at all.

Oh, LSU, I'd say you had me at hello, but you never properly introduced yourself. You just kind of cracked the door open a little and I ran inside, and didn't come out for six years. You failed to explain exactly how much $22,000 is, or that my years with you would cost so much. And that's not including all those bar tabs. You didn't tell me that most of my friends would move away after graduation and force me to re-evaluate myself and my ambitions, and what I always said I'd do once I was free from you. I said I'd leave too, over and over and over again.

My head hurts.