back into action

Classes are again in full swing, and it feels like no time has passed at all. I've said this before, but I find it so odd, and yet so necessary, that we are able to compartmentalize the different aspects of our lives and our experiences in other places or situations. We fill up the shelves of our lives with carefully labeled groups of friends, trips, or circles of influence, and the shelves are stacked and excluded from one another. People can tell I'm a little tanner, but beyond that they really aren't interested in sitting down and including themselves on a shelf of my life that they don't exist in. It's the same way with camp. I occasionally hum a song or repeat phrasology that isn't significant for my friends at school, but it's not to mesh the two worlds, it just slips out.

Every college freshman learns this coping skill the first time they come home, usually at Thanksgiving. You create the 1-minute answer to the inevitable question of "how is school going?" You learn to say that classes are going well, and you're making a lot of friends. And unless you surround yourself with people who have a genuine interest and patience to learn about one of your shelves, that's the only piece of the school world that is allowed into the home world. You begin to live two almost mutually exclusive lives, because it's the only way to not always be in want of the life you're not living in at any given moment.