One where I am more like Paris Hilton. One where, as the sun shines into Van Pelt at dawn, I am not one of those strange creatures drinking fruity, fluorescent water, nibbling at protein bars - a half hamster in the ever-present darkness surrounded by hyperactive freshmen, pre-med, and pre-grad students. You are either freshly here, opening all the doors for the first time, or you’re looking for the shiniest way out. I call the latter the pre-gone, pre-out-of-here; they are the zombies that walk among us, already gone from our little Undergraduate World.

 I used to want to go to graduate school, or medical school, or whatever else I had to say to get my parents’ friends to realize I am infinitely better than their kids. But lately, I’m just not feeling it. I’m in complete existentialist mood - rid of all that fresh-look-excitement of the first year, and not quite at the “I have to figure out the next ten years of my life” point yet. I’m a sophomore, I’m turning the wheels, looking for something more than the Van-Pelt-Pott-Truck-Star-Bucks-Red-Bull-Wine kind of life. In the cocoon of the middle, the everlasting limbo - I want more. I’m imprisoned like a spoiled heiress in a California jail and all I can do is think back.

The Penn experience can be summed up as follows:

You arrive overly-excited on a September evening or morning, brimming with IKEA boxes. In the background, welcome to Penn, welcome to Penn, welcome to Penn. You meet ten people per second, until you find your sisters, roommates, lovers and friends. Then comes the first walk home – stumbling down Locust Walk, laughing it up, knocking from house to house, a strange liquid on your shirt, suddenly you’ve met your first love, and what a shame you don’t really remember it, it had brown hair and blonde hair too. It was magnificent, shiny and Italian. It spoke Swahili and had silk worms in the back of its apartment at the tippy top of 40^th street. Then came course selection so you went to see your advisors: all kind, reassuring, round faces. You would think they would get tired of people spilling their dreams at their feet, asking for the keys to the palace, laying out all these plans, snippets of a future reality. They watch us dance like we’re from a high school musical: “I’m triple majoring, double minoring, and I’m pre-med! I’m in Wharton AND Engineering.” They let us hop around knowing we’ll get tired of it and end up like them: smiling in a nice office with a nice view. They push and prod a little at our plans but in the end they laugh and go back to their already fitted perfect lives.

The rest is all repeat, year after year, except “the welcome to Penn” transforms into “Penn is great.” You learn stuff along the way. You look for that mirror - the one where you’re wearing the lab coat, the lawyer’s suit, handing cash to the poor, the one where you’re glossy and primed and ready for life. You see it in all your classes – true, you try or you don’t – but the name pops out of your name like a white pigeon - Penn. You’re gonna run out of here with a Penn DEGREE in your pocket: the thing you’ll wear around your neck forever. You may throw away your life’s savings, your parents, but you’ll have it. We have an advantage. Ivy League. Old School. Ben Franklin. I promise.

We’re all aiming high or higher - change the world, travel around it, save it, own it - how we all want a piece of this world! We’re way too busy to look around - to look around at it now to realize this is it. The first wrinkle will come when you pay off your student debt. When you own your house you’ll wish for your double in the quad, when you finally never have to write a paper, the Pen(n) will rise from the ashes, the minute you get married you’ll remember what’s-her-face, oh what a loop and you’ll look back on the debt-stressed-caffeinated world and desire it OH SO BAD. You’ll be thirsty for the tingles down your legs when you approach the midterm room - you’ll want the rush when the paper you half-assed comes back or when a teacher croaks your name in Spanish class, you’ll open a book of French and remember where accents fell like autumn leaves. You’ll walk down the street and remember the spot on Locust where your buddy vomited. You’ll take every flyer you’re handed. You’ll stop by your local “Oh” Bon Pain and wish it seemed more expensive. You’ll refuse coffee because of your impending heart attack. You’ll watch the kids play Frisbee and think of your back pain. You’ll be back and hungry for yesterday. You’ll replay graduation and how your friend almost fell!  You’ll listen to all the dreams, running down this place, constantly morphing into more, all the little children becoming young professionals, writers and presidents and you’ll want to strip off your black suit and the Dr. attached to your name to be unmade, fresh clay from the earth instead of an immobile, gold statue. You’ll want to be alive, elemental, pliable, changeable, springing like a cougar - reading for it all.

So I enjoy this peace in no man’s land, the eye of the storm, this pit stop on the buzzing accident-ridden highway, before I forget. Soon I’ll want to earn three degrees, star in A Boys’ Life, build a robot, learn how to properly tie a tourniquet, pole vault higher than my Princeton rival, paint the new Guernica, start a business in France because the dollar is worth less than a theater degree: own the world in its totality instead of living in it.