good times, good times

last night i drove out to my alma mater to be part of a panel about biochem majors and careers in biotech, in which i was invited to participate. it felt strange to have reached a point in life where other people want my advice, opinion, and perspective; the same way it was weird to finally have been "of age" to get married. i'm still not sure i'm over that one. i expected to be the youngest panelist there, sitting in my frayed jeans next to a bunch of pharmaceutical bigwigs with matching pearl sets. nope; i was the most senior. by 4 years. yikes! people deferred to me. i did a lot of talking. i hadn't prepared anything, nor had i thought about being nervous; and i wasn't, but speaking in front of 40 young women who are all paying (or pretending to be paying) rapt attention to my every word inexplicably made my face feel extremely hot anytime i said something. i bet it was really red.

so, that was cool, and weird, and oddly rewarding; and i wanted to have a disclaimer that read "no really, i am just a kid too, i may seem like i know a lot but seriously, i'm sure you guys are doing just fine." i bet it was a little unexpected for them to hear me talk about how i nearly flunked out of freshman chem and how i never did any internships because i was lazy, and how i had been a classics and then english major way before i ever gave a damn about science. i guess i would have felt a lot better if i had heard someone "successful" show signs of weakness to me when i was 18. but maybe i was just not as cocky as i should have been.

anyway, afterward i got my real treat, which was half the reason i allowed myself to be roped into this 17-hour day with 4 hours of driving: dinner with my freshman year roommate, courtney. she was what i'd consider to be the only good friend i made in college, and i haven't seen her in about 5 years, maybe a little more. we didn't talk at all until about 6 months ago. and we all still look the same; it's messed up. and it was like not a day had passed. over beers and burgers with her and her sister, we relived a lot of memories (and lack of memories) from our first semester of drunken debauchery. my, my - were we ridiculous. i realized i need to see her, or at least email her, far more often. i think sometimes we forget all the good times while we're in pursuit of new ones; now and then it's just so nice to be reminded of the good and the bad, and how far you've come, and the journey along the way.