Home?

For Quin's shallow interests only (others please ignore): PARTY QUIN FUN JOKES!

I apologize for being a serious (and late) blog post this week, but hanging out at home this weekend has been a very strange few days. This trip home has solidified my intuition that college is truly a transformative experience.

When planning my trip home, I neglected to realize that very few other college students would be home for the weekend. The only friends still here are those attending community college and living at home. And these friends and I have grown apart drastically over the past couple of months. Granted, I grew up with these kids, and some are still my close friends. But I sense a difference now.

Something about going away to a four-year school changes you. I suspect it must be the independence and being able to live somewhere where EVERYONE is as nerdy as you, no matter how hard they try to hide it. Because so many people at USC have such similar interests to mine, I'm a little taken aback when I remember that friends back home give me a hard time for liking indie music and webcomics.

While we college students may party and act irresponsibly, I feel like most people have a relatively stable family life and a certain amount of control. For example, the gossip at USC is all about random hookups, who got written up, and how Hollenbeck used to play World of Warcraft. Whereas at home, I hear about teen pregnancies, emerging psychological disorders, hard drugs, and saving up money at crappy jobs to move out of parents' houses. In short, hanging out with exclusively community college kids basically makes me feel like I live in Oklahoma (at least according to how Quin describes it).

So thank you BK4, for being a friendlier place than the real world could ever be.

-- Drew Nollsch