Adulthood--Here I Come

By a lot of accounts, I am an adult: I can vote. I can get a drink with dinner. I could go into the military if I wanted to. I could get married if the opportunity presented itself.
By my own account. I'm about half of an adult: I have a part time job (and, trust me, it's very near a miracle). I am still working towards paying my own bills and the parentals still pay all my rent. I spend most of my time doing school things.
As of this moment, the school things dominating my time are trying to figure out if the plan I've had for the past six months is actually going to work out in the end. Just a pro-tip, it's really hard to get into English classes at Western if you're not an English major. Being a Creative Writing minor, I now have to worry about whether or not I'm going to be able to get into the classes I need. Luckily, Western's professors have been historically wonderful about helping me out when they can so, for now, I just have my fingers crossed that something works out.

Don't worry, Mom, I'm registered for a full schedule. I'm just hoping my classes change over the next two weeks.

This is what I find crazy, though: up until classes start and even for five days after they start, your schedule could change completely. I remember last September there was one day where my roommate walked into her room then came out a few hours later and announced "I'm adding a French minor to my coursework." In college, it seems like things can change in the blink of an eye. I'm sure life has its own curve balls but at least I won't be changing the classes I'm taking every ten weeks. 

Before coming to college and while I've been attending school, I've heard a lot about how "you'll never be in the same place with as many of the same-age people doing roughly the same thing as you are than in college". True and, I admit, it is nice to have a standard set of questions to ask anyone I run into on campus:

1. What's your name?
2. What's your year?
3. (if they are an underclassman) How are GURs going? Do you know what you'll major in?
4. (if they are an upperclassman) What is your major? How is that going? Do you have a minor?
5. (if they have a minor) What's your minor?
6. (if they happen to have some departmental overlap) Have you had Professor X or Y? What did you think? I've heard a lot about Professor Z and I'm taking my first class with them this quarter. 
7. (if they happen to have no departmental overlap) What kinds of things are you interested in within your major? What drew you to those?
8. Do you have post-graduation plans yet? 

...I could probably go on but then I'll spoil all of my scintillating small talk questions and, really, who wants that?

Back to what I was saying, it's nice to have all of these cards to play. But I usually want something more than their academics because, let's face it, no one is just their academics. 

I don't feel like nearly enough of my life is explained when I tell people: "Oh, yeah, I'm a Linguistics major with minors in Creative Writing and Spanish." Sure, it gives a pretty good idea of the fact that I like to think about languages but it doesn't tell you anything about why or what else I like to do.
This is all a very long winded way of saying that I am very much looking forward to graduation this spring. I'm almost chomping at the bit to see what the world outside school is even like. May I point out that I have been in school for sixteen years? Sixteen years. I have no idea what the real world is like but I know I'm getting bored of this one.
I started hitting this wall probably halfway through sophomore year, this wall of "Wait, shouldn't there be something else that I'm doing?" and I'm just about to start senior year now. I'm an intelligent, attractive twenty-something with dreams of traveling the world, and finding the perfect street side cafes in which to write my novels and ordering chai tea after chai tea. I want to learn how to weld or woodwork or both. I wonder what boxing is like. Could I run a marathon? Could I walk the Pacific Crest Trail? This seems like a prime time to be exploring everything I want to explore and, yet, I'm going to be sitting behind various school desks until June...

T-minus ten months to being a real adult.