College, Young Love, and Autumn

I was sitting in a professor's office at FCCJ North Campus today and I could see out into the quad where there was a nice young couple engaged in a thirty minute hug. When I got home and told MJ about it she commented that college kids think they're busy but don't really have a frickin' clue. This is so true, but what I took away from it was an emotional reaction that ranged from nostalgic to highly annoyed. I was nostalgic for the time in my life when I had hours of free time in the middle of the day to do nothing but complain about how much I had to do. I was taking twelve hours and not working. It was so hard going to three classes in a day. That was almost three hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays that it was suggested I might want to show up someplace and pay attention. That's so much pressure. I also miss that I could spend most of the day trying to sell MJ on the idea that there were better things we could be doing than studying -- like the male youngster out of the professor's window. I was highly annoyed because I was jealous and I'm old. I was thinking about these kids not taking full advantage of the third best library in the city. I was thinking "get a room". I was thinking, "Buddy, this doesn't look like it's going anywhere, and you could do better anyway." I was wondering why this professor was so pompous. It's Florida Community College at Jacksonville, not Harvard. You may be teaching some smart hardworking students, but none of them is going to figure out cold fusion. Don't get me wrong; I spent nine years at FCCJ before matriculating to the Oxford of St. Johns bluff, and I haven't figured out cold fusion. I think my reaction had to do with yesterday and today being the first days since last March that I couldn't smell hot asphalt, but I could smell the weird mix of trees, books, and under twenty fascination with cologne that screams college campus. I would say that this made me want to go back to school, but I thought I was young five years ago when I hit the Florida State student union, and was shocked back into the truth that thirty is not -- and will never be -- the new twenty.