Why am I not in college yet?

I am sitting in a hotel room in Sturgis, Michigan, a small town just north of the Indiana border off of Route 80. We had dinner in Shipshewana, an Amish town in Indiana, and drove back alongside horses and buggies.

We spent the day driving through Pennsylvania and Ohio, with lots of time spent looking out the window and taking pictures like this one. Luckily we were prepared; we brought a good supply of folk music to carry us through the heartland of America.

We were going to try to make it work out so that Daniel (UChicago) and his family would stay in the same place as us tonight, but apparently his dad is obsessed with getting to Chicago as soon as possible and refused to ever let them stop the car so they could get to Chicago by tonight (or so claims Daniel). Tomorrow we will each show up at the University of Chicago and finally, finally be in college. It took long enough.

I doubt I have anything new I can add about how it feels to be going away, I imagine I'm feeling what you all felt when you were on the road to your school. The only difference, I suppose, is that I'm doing it so much later than everyone else, so I have the benefit of learning from everyone else's experiences. It's scary to think about how much responsibility I am going to have to take. I've been making jokes about how I'm scared the RAs (or whichever acronym it is) will be coming around at 10:00 telling us to go bed. But the truth is that I don't know how I'm going to get myself to go to bed at all, let alone early enough to not be totally dead the next morning. I don't know how I'll get myself up in the morning, something I have always been bad at. I don't know if I will do all my homework if it never gets checked. I suppose everyone else has been able to manage it so I probably will be fine, but I still feel nervous.

I'm nervous about everything. How is the food? Am I going to get addicted to coffee? What am I going to do if everyone is smarter than me? Will all my classes be full of pretentious kids who keep saying things like "I think what Plato meant was that we are all subject to the ephemeral injustice of the human condition as it applies in a thoroughly neolithic media-based community-centered society. Paradigm."? How will I watch "The Office", aside from on the DVDs I bought myself as a going away present? What if it's true that Pierce Tower rooms are actually smaller than a prison cell?

Of course, I do have Chicago's legendary 9 day orientation (can you imagine how late in the year I'm going to start next year?) to get used to things. Hopefully I will not spend the entire time curled up in a ball under my bed making incomprehensible noises.

I am very glad that Daniel is going to be going through this with me.

And now, I am going to eat my chocolate and peanut butter pie from the Blue Gate Restaurant ("Where if it ain't fried, we don't got it!").

Ezra supports cholesterol research!