instead of coordinating class reunions, we were living an eight-month pre-union.

The past three days have been so silent...he's taking time, my mom's in brazil, my dad and brother in geneva...my phone never rings anymore.

I've felt surprisingly not alone though, somehow feeling safe in the temporary nature of this silence. Everyone's on vacation and in turn, giving me one.

I set my alarm for eight today, got up at 10:30, and felt a surprising lack of stress--I would work all day and not worry about anything because it would all be ok. It's been weeks since I gave myself that reminder.
But... I pretty much had no desire to go to starbucks AGAIN to try and write my column. So, I decided I'd take the day to wander. I tried searching the internet for good writers' cafes, but no such luck...so in my attempts to take the subway and get off anywhere and go to the first cafe I saw, I gave up around 50th street realizing I knew every single stop on the 1 really well and it wouldn't be random at all, so I just came to the City Bakery, where I write if I'm at my mom's. I sat next to John Leguizamo and had my gross concoction of mac and cheese avec guacamole that's actually so good...you don't even know.

I spent hours upon hours doing my usual--ending up with a word document of 2600 words of pre-writing and an intro that I've rewritten about 178 times and still makes no sense.

If there existed such a thing as an active “reverse alumni” network, we would have been it. Instead of looking back on our Columbia days with nostalgia, we were a group of “friends” looking forward to them with such enthusiasm, that before even going to our senior proms, we were already planning the adventures we’d go on together in college. We all met on the “Columbia09” community on Livejournal.com, where we made promises to take each other to the Guggenheim, or wander the streets together with our cameras and notebooks—some of us took it so far as to fall in love with each other. I bet that if a reverse alumni coordinator had called us up and asked us to donate to a “pre-frosh fund,” a lot of us actually would have.

This website became a space that let us collectively create and be happy with a life we hadn’t lived yet. “August!” became our motto; we actually spent valuable still-in-high-school time on our computers getting to know each other and awaiting move in day. It was a tad bit ridiculous (even if I didn’t realize it at the time): instead of coordinating class reunions, we were living an eight-month pre-union.

I realized that this was the first column that I hadn't a slightest idea what it'd be about when I sat down to write it. I just knew it would be my "end of freshman year" column, but a) that's really broad and b) that's really hard to write without being cheesy, let alone interesting. So after much deliberation, much guacamole, much jenny lewis, and much staring at John Leguizamo, I decided that I wouldn't try to make some great big comprehensive observation about all freshmen and what this year meant to us. Instead, I would write about something personal, and something very un-predictable. Once I'd picked my topic I spent the rest of time worrying it'd be too much like my first column, but then I tried to supress those worries and just went with it. I think it'll be good. I just have to write it...