How the other half lives

It’s funny about this weekend: I drank a maximum of like three drinks per night, was in bed before midnight, and slept until noon. I’m also staying in my practically married friends’ home: complete with cats, a mortgage, and kitchen appliances—so maybe that has something to do with it?

That’s the trouble with being a student, it’s so easy to forget that there is a life outside of books, dumb committees, club sports, and esoteric conversations that, to be quite frank, really wouldn’t past muster at most cocktail parties. You become self-absorbed into this contrived life, except, there really is no way for you to make your mark, as with every year the group leaves and a new one replaces, once again with the same archetypes: party girls, the socially awkward, stoner crowd, jocks—all of them having some part of themselves that wishes to recreate an undergrad experience they feel they missed out on.

For me? I just want to be smart.

When I landed in Oxford a little over a month ago, I was so tired with the “real world” that I jumped at the chance to regress to the last time I felt as free, my undergrad days—except this time with boys, alcohol, and no seasonal depression weight gain. I slid into life quite easy here: dress up like a slut at the appropriate parties, developed behavior that showed no regard for social norms or polite society, and adopted the attitude that the only thing that matters is my work. You know, thinking about it, I guess not unlike many I-banker friends I know, money providing this freedom to do what you want. Except my I-banker friends pay with their time and I pay by signing my life away to the US government.

But it was great getting out of Oxford and being exposed to the life that I am missing out on right now: one filled with responsibility, long-term relationships, and other forms of permanence. Sitting around the restaurant at my friend’s twenty-seventh birthday, feeling the one-glass-of-wine-too-many drunk instead of the seven shots of vanilla Stoli in thirty minutes drunk, reminded me of just how different my life is here than in NY. And also how there is a part of me that feels slightly uneasy, being reminded that I’m really not feeling bad for “missing-out” on it either.

So I got to play dress-up for the weekend, sit amongst the three cats who are making me sick, sip tea, and watch cable television—and tomorrow I re-submerse myself into life as a student: complete with irrelevant books, rugby practice, and a train ride where I get to pontificate on the future when I ask myself, once again, what is it exactly do I want to be when I grow up?

And by the way, did you know I am deathly allergic to cats? I am dying right now. I’m going back to bed in my sealed off area, that is supposedly cat free. Except, by sitting in the living room, my clothes are a magnet for cat hair—hence I’m fucked once again.