Yesterday afternoon, after our disappointment of a fitness class, Heather (my roommate and cousin, in case you missed that part) and I went to the University Bookstore on campus at the University of Oklahoma to get the ISBNs for her books because Half.com is where it’s at. I actually bought all of my books on Amazon for $70.55 (with shipping) compared to the $400+ it was going to cost at the bookstore. Incoming freshmen of the world! Let your first semester be the last that they rob you!

Anyway, the actual story. We were leaving the bookstore and let me tell you something, it was CROWDED. Much more so than I have ever seen it. Probably because freshman enrollment is up quite a bit, but who knows. So we were walking up the stairs (the bookstore is underneath the stadium) and something kind of odd happened. I recognized two individuals who were walking towards the stairs from different directions. One female, the other male, neither of which ever were nor are they currently my friends. But nevertheless, their faces will always been in my brain. Because my second day of classes at OU back in the fall of 2003, they both sat beside me. Dale Hall Tower, top floor, the huge room that has windows all the way around so that you can see clear to Kansas on the north side, Dallas/Fort Worth on the south, Arkansas to the east, and Amarillo rising out of the dust in the west.

The course held in this room was fondly referred to as “Gateway.” Gateway to what? Well, that’s up to you. “Gateway to the best days of your life” or for some “Gateway to the one semester of college you’ll ever attend because instead of going to class you decided that it would be way more fun to sit in the dorms and chat with your 30-year-old internet girlfriend 24/7 and survive on ramen, Dr. Pepper, and the occasional Whopper from the WAY AWESOME Burger King located IN your dorm on the first floor.” Gateway is a freshman student’s introduction to university life. We were given tours of everything, had to log our study time, talk about our feelings, and towards the end of the semester we had to interview our favorite professor that we’d had so far. But the thing about Gateway was that it was put in place to help retain students and to get them started on the right track. And the right track was “finishing in four.” We were encouraged to always take a good number of hours so that we could all be done with our degrees and out into the world by the end of our fourth year. Well, as any college student or grad knows, very few people finish in four anymore. Some do. And some finish in 3 or 3.5. But you know, it’s just not that common anymore.

A course at OU costs around $500-600 I think. So, my dad paid that much for a course that was supposed to save me a few semesters. And there we were, the three of us, incoming freshmen in 2003 who were SUPPOSED to graduate in May of 2007, crossing paths at the bookstore — during our first semester as fifth year seniors.*

Thank you, OU.

*I did check Facebook to make sure that I was correct in assuming that both of them were still finishing their undergraduate work. They are.