These are my friends, and this is my life

How a grad student has time to blog regularly, I’m not sure.

If you’re a bored teenager, a stay-at-home mom, or an anti-social computer geek, there’s a good chance that you are also a blogger. However if you’re a typical grad student, then there’s a good chance you have little time or interest at all for this silliness. Not me. The stay-at-home mom in me will never allow me to quit blogging.

I’m constantly studying or working on projects or on the move, and because of this I’m eternally drained of energy. For the past two weeks I’ve been averaging between 4 and 5 hours of sleep a night. It’s disgusting. And even if I took my website out of my life altogether, I would still only get 6 hours of shut-eye.

As you could guess, I haven’t had the social life that I’ve been accustomed to in years past. The stress of grad school has changed me, and if things keep up I expect my temples to gray by next fall. I went from being colorful and laid-back just a year ago, to now being world-weary and neurotic. In my previous college career, I was John Belushi meets Quentin Tarantino meets Tupac Shakur. Now I’m just Michael Richards meets Nicholas Cage meets Britney Spears, whatever that means.

The worst part of grad school has been trying to go out and make new friends. Sure, I’m outgoing enough to always be surrounded by a good number of acquaintances, but that’s just what they are and always will be: acquaintances. The people I hang out with here are all squares from my grad-level classes who have little else to talk about other than what we’re currently studying, while everyone else in this school is, well, too young for me to be good friends with. You know you’re getting old when talking to a 19-year-old feels pretty much the same as talking to a 15-year-old.

Which is why it was a godsend for my good buddies Roy and Dave to come down this weekend. Since graduating from NIU last year, we all haven’t gotten together as much as we should. They say that when you move away, you’ll find out who your true friends are by seeing which ones actually come out to see you. Well, there was Roy, selling one of the textbooks that he needs for this semester so that he could finance his trip down here to Champaign. And then there was Dave coming here in a rental car because his other car was being repaired. Both of them live three hours away. I thanked them for coming to visit, and Dave answered, “Dude, we’re just doing what friends do.”

The weekend was a good one. We watched and made fun of Predator, we ate burgers, we ate burritos, we ate omelettes, we went bowling, we threw darts, we listened to the Beastie Boys, we listened to techno music circa 2000, we worked out at IMPE, we took turns stinking up my bathroom, we got rejected on the dance floor, and most obviously, we drank.

The most classic part of the weekend was Saturday night at the bar when I pitied the sight of Roy sitting quietly in the dark on the couch, so I went downstairs and told girls it was his birthday so they would dance with him. Roy wasn’t too thrilled about my lying tactics, to which I replied by saying, “Dude, I’m just doing what friends do.”

At the end of Saturday night, as the three of us musketeers took our drunk march home towards my apartment, it felt like it was 2002 again. I realize that I may never make any new good friends here at U of I, but the truth is I really don’t need to. I looked at my two homeys — two of the guys that will one day flank me at my wedding table — and I looked at everything else around me, and at that very moment life became easy to appreciate.

These are my friends, and this is my life.

Out of nowhere, Roy screamed his favorite Denzel Washington quote as loudly as he possibly could into the middle of 5th street: “KING KONG AIN’T GOT SHIT ON ME!” (Listen to Denzel’s version here.)

It was random, and it made absolutely no sense at all, but we all pretty much agreed that that was the best way to end the weekend.