Most Recent: Chickens are done, people are finished

Whatever.  As of five minutes ago, I am DONE.  I just finished my last final.  The final was in jazz.  I think I might have ended up with over 100% in the class.

The last two months have been a bit surreal.  I felt like I’d already won the game and was just waiting for the clock to run down.  The professors kept trying to score points against me, but there really wasn’t anything they could do that hadn’t been tried before. 

It really hasn’t sunk in that I’m graduating.  Everyone will leave for the summer as usual, and I’ll be working in the same lab I have for the last two summers.  The only difference will be my relentless search for a job.  Everyone seems confident that I’ll land one without any problems.  I of course have my doubts, but I always do.

When I started school at KU, I had already been in the work force for 8 years.  For at least 8 hours a day, I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off, taking orders and carrying stacks of dishes.  Waiting tables is hard work – you earn every penny.  When I had the crazy idea to major in chemical engineering, I’d never taken a physics class.  Or calculus.  In fact, I hadn’t had any math classes in 7 years.  While most of my classmates breezed through general chemistry, I had to relearn how to convert units and read the periodic table of elements. Then the hard classes started.  I always knew chemical engineering was a difficult major, but I had no idea just how hard.  I was off by a few orders of magnitude.  I wasn’t smart enough to know how hard it was.  It was such a drastic change – instead of all that running around with dishes, suddenly I was sitting quietly in rooms filled with hundreds of kids, trying to form as many new neural pathways as possible.

College broke my brain.

I can’t wait to get back to the work force.  I miss earning money and not having homework. And I really miss the people.  When I started school at KU, I never imagined being almost constantly surrounded by so many overeducated, immature, lazy spoiled brats.  But I digress. I found the few friends I want to keep.  To hell with the rest of them.

I’m looking forward to picking up my hobbies again.  I haven’t exactly been prolific over the last four years, but I have accumulated about a billion ideas.  A lifetime won’ t be enough to see them to fruition, even if that’s all I did from here on out.  Might as well try, though.

I guess it’s time to get started.