Why does Dunkin Donuts Express exist? Who thought regular Dunkin Donuts was too leisurely?
I tweeted this while I was waiting in the airport last week, coming back from the East Coast on one of those interminable delays where that too-perky voice keeps cheerily informing you that your plane will be half an hour late, and then another half hour, and then another, until you look up and realize that the sun has set entirely while you’ve been pretzeling yourself in an uncomfortable airport chair trying to squeeze the last few minutes of battery out of your dying phone.
That delay feeling is such a strange limbo – you’re stuck in this place that feels out of time but the planes and currents of people are constantly moving around you. It’s a lot like how I’ve been feeling at school recently (as I’ve expressed to some of my teachers’ chagrin), like I sit through my classes waiting to go somewhere else.
I think that somewhere else is college, or at least the coming summer.
It’s a place outside of the same stretch of Ventura that my car knows so well, a time not broken down into 45-minute classes and five-minute passing periods but extending forever, for me to do with it as I will.
Time has felt so untrustworthy lately: sometimes it’s faster than I could have imagined, the way March flew by in a blink, and then it’s slow, when I felt like I’d been away from school for weeks but it had only been three days.
Right now, the hours are slipping away. By the time this is published, it will be the last day of April, and then 24 hours later, May 1 (yes, I realize this is how time usually works, but hold on).
May 1 is College Sweatshirt Day for the seniors. It’s the day deposits are due at most schools, and thus the day by which we have to decide which path to take.
In celebration – or as reassurance – we each wear the T-shirt or sweatshirt or loudly branded material proclaiming where we plan to spend the next four years of our lives.
May 1 is my AP Physics C: Mechanics final, which culminates a very significant part of my senior year. It’s a class I never saw myself taking when I entered Harvard-Westlake in seventh grade.
Mech took a lot of my time, yes, but it also expanded my horizons intellectually and has made me consider myself more capable in certain areas than I ever would have thought, although John Feulner may disagree.
After that, I have more finals on May 2 and then APs and then the bulk of my senior year – and with it, high school – is over.
It’s a strange realization, and made even more so when I think about seniors all over the country feeling the same way. I wouldn’t call this nostalgia, and I’m not sure I will be nostalgic, but I can sense the change coming.
This sort of reflection has taken up a lot of my time lately. I haven’t come to any groundbreaking conclusion about my emotional senioritis (or about the myriad varieties of Dunkin Donuts), but at least I’ve distilled these somewhat cheesy, quintessentially senior-esque feelings enough to put them into words. If you’ll pardon the sentiment, I hope the next month, my last month, will lead me to some answers as I try to catch these days that are so quickly drawing to a close.