What I Would've Been Doing

Since the husband is out on a work activity tonight, I had dinner alone.

I chose an old college standby that I picked up while grocery shopping yesterday:

Yep.  Ramen Noodles.  All 18-cents worth of them.  Nevermind that they're probably coated in asbestos and STDs before being fried and shipped off to the market with their sodium-filled friend, The Seasoning Packet.

(I know you're giving me side-eye for consuming these babies, but I also know you want to eat them, too. C'mon, they're downright delicious!)

Tonight's meal got me reminiscing about The College Years, and with good reason.  I'll be celebrating mildly remembering my 10-year anniversary of graduating high school and heading off to Western Michigan University this summer.

So then, between bites of slimy, powder-covered noodles, I thought, "What would I have been doing on a typical night in college versus a typical night in the Adult World?"

Perhaps I would've been studying.  Or writing a paper.  Or reading something useful.  Something to help get my graduation on so I could get a teaching job right away work in Corporate America and suffer in small, grey cubes while waiting for the right teaching opportunity to come along.

Perhaps I would be snuggling on the couch with some of my favorite ladies, watching the early (read: good) episodes of Grey's Anatomy or reruns of Sex and the City.  Or maybe we'd be hitting the sack early to wake up at a ridiculous hour on a Saturday morning for a typical tailgate.

Perhaps I'd be getting out my shortest Abercrombie skirt and preparing for a 50 Cent Draft night at Wayside.  Because nothing tastes better than a beer in a plastic glass that costs only $0.50.

So we poured our plastic cups of beer into real glasses, but it didn't change the fact that it still only cost 50 cents.  And it doesn't change the fact that, yep, I wore that skirt out.

Perhaps I was out getting some atrocious highlights.  Hair dying was an obsession in college; I constantly changed the color of every strand.  

I'm not doing any of those things tonight.  Nope, tonight, I'm hanging out on the couch, with my Ramen and my Ritz crackers (another yumtastic college pantry staple) and watching So You Think You Can Dance.

While I miss the easy-peasy days of college (save for the highlights and the many, many too-short Abercrombie skirts), adult living sure has its perks.

I finally put all of that studying to good use and got a teaching job.

While I don't get to see them as much as I'd like, I know that my friends are always a phone call away.

I can afford a decent beer once in a while.

And I finally learned to stick with (mostly) one hair color.

Weigh In: What do you miss most about your college or high school days?