The difference between freshman and sophomore year is the familiarity with which each day passes. Last year, fall semester was one of the most novel, most empowering and exhilarating experiences I could remember. Every week of the semester I learned something new, did something different, participated in an event that I'd never done before, or exercised a freedom I'd never before had. I learned to schedule, to plan, to take charge of each minute of my life, responsible for the manner in which I spent it. The experience was so novel, so unique, that so often I found myself pouring my overwhelmed thoughts to a blog post, to a journal entry, to my mom, just to be able to synthesize and evaluate it, to take it to heart and to apply it the next time.
This year, on the other hand, is solid and familiar and easy. Living in a dorm, walking across campus to class, scheduling out homework times, meeting up with groups for projects, studying for tests... I've done it all before. It's like reliving freshman year with all the knowledge and experience of having completed it already; only my classes are harder. There was nothing baffling at ROTC, nothing new in the dorms. It's been easy and repetitive- little wonder I've had little need to journal! My life has taken on order and regularity. I know what I do each day of the week, what I have time to add and what I can afford to miss. I know which afternoons I'm busy and which afternoons I'm free.
Monday is a busy day. With hour-long squad meetings at 4 and work at the observatory at 7 until 11, there isn't time for much more than a couple hours of homework. Tuesdays too are busy- ROTC lab lasting from 2 to 4 and with ROTC class going from 4:30 to 6, the remainder of my evening goes into finishing the Engineering homework due each week on Wednesday morning. Wednesdays are my sigh of relief day. At long last I've reached the hump in the week, and I've a day on which my responsiblilites end at noon. I can go to the gym, get ahead on homework, get off-campus chores done, or kick my feet up and relax a bit. Thursdays are my enigma day- they never feel busy until evening rolls around and I realize I've been busy all day. With 2 labs, I spend most of the day beneath the fluorescent lights of a classroom, and spend my evenings perfecting the math homework always due bright and early Friday morning.
Unlike last year, however, my weekends now are often filled with activity. Last year, I worked studiously Saturday, after spending most of the morning in a deep, weekend sleep, on hours' worth of homework saved explicitly for those empty weekend days. And then Sunday, after church, I'd drive down the street to the wonderful, two-story Barnes and Nobel and indulge in multiple happy hours sitting on the hard floor with my back pressed against the bookshelves and my feet tucked out of the way of the occasional passerby, reading the first few chapters of book after book, creating long mental lists for myself to someday read in their entirety. This year, however, I don't do homework on the weekends. This year, a significant portion of my weekends are spent in Chicago, where I get to spend two smiling days with my wonderful boyfriend Cody after a fortnight or so of text messages, phone calls, and stunningly horrible-quality Skype conversations in which often both picture and voice pixellate and distort so as to be unrecognizable. Instead, we get a special 48 hours or so together, in the flesh, face to face, though not quite eye to eye as his chin can rest on my head. It's been almost a year since we met, last Thanksgiving, when I spent the holiday far from home at a friend's house in Chicago. Almost 12 months and countless text messages later, we can finally watch Fight Club together again, the movie which brought us together, henceforth our Thanksgiving tradition. Yes, I'm very much looking forward to this Thanksgiving. In the meantime, I've another week and a half of following my schedule, of filling my social life into the patterned skeleton of scheduling I've developed for myself this sophomore year, of PT and lab, of classes and homework, of gyms and laundry, of work and of play. And afterwards, a mere two weeks until my third round of college finals, my third week of exams, and my second December as a college student. Yes, sophomore year is not too hard at all.
