Growing up isn't necessarily fun. Sure there are late nights, run to Denny's, occasional drunkenness, and no more juvenile sexual tension. With age comes a greater appreciation for Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, and Peggy Lee (jazz in general). I have found that with getting older, the respect for good comedy increases as well as the respect for shows in the '70s (MASH, Three's Company, Fawlty Towers). Aging creates of new found dignity and wisdom that often mocks our lesser high school selves and gives us reason to believe we have changed for the better. For the most part, we move past the beliefs that every boy or girl we kiss is the love of our lives, and that our parents only conceived us to kill us with twisted tasks.

However, it is not all kisses and candy. I have three exams in less than a twenty four hour period. I nearly vomited for the first time in ten years due to the amount of stress I feel. Each day, I trek to the university library, even if it's minus forty weather and an hour away from where I live. The field I'm in seems so dead-end for me all of a sudden, and any small encouragement I receive strangled by my lack of knowledge on socio-economic demographics. I feel like I have an ulcer, and I am about two hours away from a brain aneurism. Growing up creates a new bus loads of problems. Now late nights are not used to sing songs at the twenty four hour Denny's, but are used to go over countless of scribbled notes. The lack of sexual tension becomes filled instantly with even sadder sexual rejection, and the only reason not to drink is because the pressure to become an alcoholic, once reaching the age of responsibility, is too great. Sounds heard now are tone the prof sets the lecture and the repetitive word failure. Certain guilt slowly creeps into ones soul if they even glimpse at a television because that minute could be the difference between a 4.0 GPA and a 2.0. The loves of our lives are drowned out by cynicism brought on by the lonely-heart singles valentine's party and our parents try to provide some level of support that virtually goes unnoticed.

University, much like life, does have those moments. Those moments that somehow make it worth it. The things like friends who do understand and share the same sentiment, copious amounts of tea, all seasons  of love (summer, fall, winter, spring- you really can't go wrong as far as romantic clichés are concerned) birthdays, anniversaries, even some of the goodbyes one says to the past to create a better future.  To quote Friedrich Nietzsche, "To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures." And while it sounds incredibly harsh, I believe the message to be sound. Endurance is the true test of life, and without these inevitable hardships we cannot be who we are today.

Much love,
Ashley