So this is the end

I've been writing this column since before I wrote columns.

I read the DP's graduation issue for the first time as a freshman, and I came away struck by the sheer banality of just about every graduation column in it (present company excepted, of course). I'm no great writer, I thought, but I can sure as hell do better than this.

So I gave it a shot and got my foot in the door, though barely. And while it would be petty to count the number of semesters I've spent as a columnist (six) or the number of columns I've written (72), I think it's safe to say I've had a pretty good run. What I learned through it all was that column-writing, much like being president, is "hard work."

Let me rephrase that. Consistently having something pertinent and interesting to say week after week is hard work. Writing diatribes about the campus social scene or Penn Dining isn't. Anyway, obvious moral: To those who cringe at the DP's editorial page every day, I say apply for a column. In your mind, you won't do worse, and objectively, you just might do better.

But now I'm graduating, and I'd like to thank the Penn Bookstore for putting books like Don't Retire -- Rewire! and 101 Places to See Before You Die in the "Suggestions for Recent Grads" section. As if I didn't feel old enough already. But in a way, they're right. I am old, and I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Or as the kids these days would say it, I still rock my khakis with a cuff and a crease. But perhaps the best indicator of my newfound geriatric status is my dad's recent comment: "Hey, you have an almost-normal haircut."

And just like every other sad-sack senior with an AIM profile, I've been contemplating what I will and won't miss about this place. Personally, I won't miss drivers who always try to run me over at 38th and Walnut when I have the right of way, the unbelievable rudeness and incompetence of Subway employees, the unbelievable rudeness and incompetence of the Freshgrocer, polo shirts, Smokes', $300 umbrellas, Natty Light, techno music and hangovers.

I will miss, well, pretty much everything else.

I had a blast at Penn, but I also never really got comfortable. For four years, I've basically felt like an imposter, like the people around me were real Penn students and I'd just snuck in while no one was looking. They worried about summer internships, agonized over the errant A-minus and aspired to be lawyers and doctors and, of course, investment bankers. Me? I enjoyed a good drink, stayed up all night for no reason and played guitar. I thought college was about people, not personal ambition. Right or wrong, this ideal put me squarely in the minority.

But, of course, freshman year I found people who had a similar (although no doubt less extreme) attitude. They remain to this day my closest friends. They know who they are. And having to move away from them is one of the main reasons I feel so distraught about ending this four-year experiment.

When I think about it, I realize I've felt like this at the end of every year. For me, feelings of nostalgia arrive as regularly as the two or three days of good weather that hit Philadelphia right before you go home. You have to be of a certain disposition to start feeling nostalgic about college right after freshman year, and I am most certainly of that disposition. But I never really thought about why.

Now I know. It's because institutions endure where individuals do not. Because without missing a beat my old room becomes someone else's, college nights stop belonging to me and another body replaces me at the bar. And as sad as it sounds, that's a tough thing for me to wrap my 22-year-old ego around.

Time is slipping away, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. Events like graduation simply make this more obvious. And so far my only consolation is the thought that, though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, you kids just don't know how good you have it.

Eliot Sherman is a senior English major from Philadelphia and former editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. Diary of a Madman normally appears on Tuesdays.

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