lots and lots of paperwork

One thing they don't tell you about growing up...the paperwork.

Holy Crap. (sorry Megan)

College applications, financial aid, scholarships, work, church, school, bank. And I'm not even handling my own finances yet. It just pours in, letters, mail, e-mails, it doesn't stop! I get to my glorious senior year, and what do I spend my time on? Paperwork. I asked my mom if this was a real world thing or just a getting ready for college thing. She laughed at me.

Senior year is actually a lot less exciting than I thought. Besides the fact that my friends and I can drive ourselves places, and the freedom that comes along with that, it's really low-key. Naps are big when you're a senior.

"Guess what I did yesterday!"
"What?"
"I took a two hour nap."
"Oh man, I haven't had a good nap in what, three days?"

Then there's shoveling. When you have a couple of hours to kill and you don't feel like a nap, you make your family happy and shovel. Going to people's houses for movies, too. Turn the gas fireplace on, pop some popcorn, make some hot cocoa, put in a James Franco or Channing Tatum movie, and you're set. What more could you want? School is just about the same. I'm taking three AP's, but I'm also taking minimum credits so I'm hardly ever stressed. In a desperate attempt to keep our attention, my AP teachers talk about sex a lot; Frederick the Second's soldier thing, Napolean's love life, the origin of Kamala's name in the novel Siddartha, and the red light quails in Psych. My senior class has known each other for at least 4 years now, sometimes 12, so the whole clique/stereotype thing doesn't really fly anymore. We know who we get along with and who we can't stand, so drama is pretty low. No one actually gets dressed for school anymore, hoodies are big, gym pants, too. We're running out of people to impress real fast.

It's fun, in a relaxed, comfortable, almost lazy kind of way. We've just outgrown a lot of things. Life is exhausting enough, we know how to mellow out when we can, and we know how to handle stress when it comes along. Everybody knows everybody, so trying to be something you're not is pointless. So we coast along through classes, and come home and shovel the driveway, file some paperwork, take a nap, and have everyone over for a movie. Maybe we finally have some perspective on life. Maybe we've finally settled into being real people. Maybe we're soaking in all of the comfy we can before we go into the big and mysterious college world.

It's not really the kind of exciting I had in mind, but I'll take it.