here’s to 100 nights

“There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.” -Bill Watterson

You know you’re nearing the end of college when most of your friends are drinking out of bottles instead of cans and Tyler (who once taught you the basics of beer pong) passes on a free drink because he has to go to work in the morning.

Senior Thesis Day is less than a week away, your landlord notifies you that she’ll be showing the apartment tomorrow and the toast of the night is “here’s to 100 nights until graduation.”

The conversation has changed over the years, from figuring out which core classes to take together to cleaning up Twitter accounts and applying to jobs. Sometimes it seems like you all met yesterday and sometimes it feels like you’ve known each other since 4th grade. Time is weird like that.

In the midst of side conversations about internships and grad schools, Krista wins the poker game, because she has no clue how to play and you’ve come to expect that kind of thing. You sit back and look around at the people you’ve grown with, grown apart from, and grown closer to on any given weekend.

You think about all that’s happened since these people first came into your life. Jackie deals the last hand and you remember meeting her the first day you moved in, praying you two would be friends and taking the fact that you both used Herbal Essences as some kind of sign. You wonder how different your life would have been if you hadn’t been roommates, and you’re grateful it’s not.

You realize that even though you’ve all had your ups and downs, the people around the table have come to resemble some kind of eclectic family that will always come to mind when, years from now, you think about college. You know you’d be someone else if these people hadn’t come into your life, and you wonder if you would have liked that other you. You decide you probably wouldn’t.

You think about the seniors you met when you were a freshman, and you wonder how they seemed like they were so much older than you are now, and how you thought they must have it all figured out. Now you have to laugh to yourself because although you know a lot more than you did at 18, you know that 21 is not the year you figure it all out.

More than anything else, you think about how you only have 100 nights to do things like sit around and play poker with your friends until 2 a.m., and how you’d better take advantage of every one because the “real world” is coming, and it’s nothing like MTV.

Here’s to every night til graduation, and to making it count.