Meeeemories...

From a long New York Times article on the state of college and college students...or something:

STUDENTS have names for certain days. Tuesday is Boozeday, Thursday is
Thirstday.

At 9 p.m. on a Boozeday last fall, Robin Bhalla and friends are downing
shots of vodka at his off-campus apartment. "We save money that way," he
explains to a reporter watching the ritual. "Get a buzz on at home, then go
bar-hopping." Sufficiently buzzed, the students who are of drinking age drive to
a popular bar near campus, where they chug beer and do more shots. "I like to
get drunk, not blackout drunk, but I like to get drunk," Mr. Bhalla says.
"You're able to talk to girls a lot more. And I like girls." By 1 a.m. he is
"fubar," which politely translates as "fouled up beyond all recognition," and is
asked to leave the bar. He spots a student who he is sure insulted him earlier
that evening and rushes him, intent on fighting. His friends pull him away, and
Mr. Bhalla reels around the parking lot, cursing.

Late the next morning, Mr. Bhalla wakes up on the floor of a vacant
building, a shuttered fraternity house. "I was so depressed, and I looked at my
face and my hands," he recalls, now sitting in a dormitory lounge for an
interview. "I was just like, 'What am I doing with my life?' " But that moment
of reflection soon passes. "If I sat there for days like that, what good's going
to come out of it?" he says. Mr. Bhalla professes not to remember the
altercation the night before.

About the purpose of college, he says: "You go so you can get a job and
make money when you're older. But at the same time you get life experiences that
are priceless, like networking." He expects that to pay off: "I've made so many
connections I never would have been able to make without it, and these are all
my friends and people that I know from the bars and from classes and, you know,
people that I've hung out with that later in life I'm going to be able to call
on and be like: 'I know you have a job with this company. Do you know if they're
hiring, or can you get me an application? Can I use you as a reference?' "

Mr. Bhalla, 22, a psychology major with a minor in business (grade point
average 3.0, on a 4.0 scale), says he stopped going to most of his classes after
sophomore year and drank excessively four nights a week: usually Tuesday,
Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Nonetheless, he made the dean's list last spring. He
says he has rarely given more than an hour a night for all his courses.
"Teachers say, 'For every class you should do a certain amount of reading,' but
I never do that," he says. His routine: toward the end of the semester, scan the
readings, review notes to see what the teacher said was important, get the
teacher's study guide. He believes he is not alone. "A lot of people just try
and coast by, and don't do the readings. They try and cheat off the homework,
copy their friends'.

[snip]

At the end of a three-hour interview, Mr. Bhalla is asked if he regrets
anything he has done at Arizona. "These are the years that I'm not going to have
back," he says. "And I don't want to be 30, 50, looking back and wishing I'd
partied then because I can't do it now."

But all ends well...

A month after the interview, in December, Mr. Bhalla graduated after four and a half years in college. He moved to Miami to room with a college friend. He has
just started working for a pharmaceutical sales company (base salary: $30,000).
For the most part, he says, he goes out only on Friday and Saturday nights. "I
definitely miss my college days," he says. "They were the best four years of my
life!"

Damn, he's making more than I did right out of college (even after adjusting for all those years of inflation) and I think I tried a little harder in school. Slacking pays!

I hate it though when early 20-somethings foresee turning 30 as being the end of their life. Did I do that? I don't remember. I don't think I thought that much about it. So listen up kiddies, you're still young long after 30. In fact, I whizzed right passed my 30th about 15 years ago and hardly noticed. Now, 40 is another story. But you have a ways to go and too much to do to worry about that right now.