I discovered the complete joy and magic of listening to audiobooks in my car in November, when I was driving from Pennsylvania back to DC after Thanksgiving break. Since then, you will be hard-pressed to find me not listening to something as I make my treacherous commute across thirty miles of Capital Beltway every god-foresaken morning. Audiobooks, one might say, have changed my life. The Beltway is notorious for being disgusting when it comes to traffic, and my beloved books have made the commute bearable if not somewhat enjoyable. 

Recently, I listened to Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan. This novel details the collegiate and post-collegiate lives of four Smith College graduates. A few parts of the book recount the women going back to their alma mater, and, of course, feeling as though they have outgrown the campus at the ages of 25 or 26. This made me think about how completely different the experience of attending a city college is in comparison to a small college like Smith. I wonder if I will ever feel as though I have gotten too old for DC because Washington was my college campus. Will I feel too old to go to a Georgetown restaurant or a bar in Adams Morgan because I did those things in college? 

It’s interesting how, a year after my own commencement, we already intend to avoid certain areas of DC because those are where the college kids go, yet plenty of people who are not college kids frequent or even live in those places. It is merely the fact that we went there as college kids that gives us this idea, and yet we all still feel just a bit wrong ending up at a bar we went to while we were in school. Of course, we do wind up in those places regardless, but sometimes I feel like a 40 year old man retelling everyone the story of how he almost won the state high school football championship senior year. 

And now I will get ready to go out and try to avoid winding up anywhere in the general vicinity of FB, probably with limited success.