What's Your Life Made Of?

I sat in the back seat of a car Saturday afternoon, staring out the window next to me, tuning out the blasting "scremo" music and hanging on to the handle of the door as the guy driving the car blasted down the street, racing his friend next to him. The guy in the front passenger seat made faces at the driver that we were racing and the guy sitting next to me was quiet, saying nothing. I assumed he wasn't pondering the same thing I was.

What was on my mind was a line that my friend had pulled on my best friend and I on Friday: "You two must either have low standards or love each other for no reason."

Love, I thought, struggling not to fall to the left as we turned right. What does he think love means? Was is this? Speeding down a street, laughing as you cut people off, making stupid jokes, after seeing a mediocre movie that only 4 people out of a group of 16 liked? This might be fun but it certainly wasn't love.

My two best friends came into town this weekend and wanted to meet the people that I hung out with. As per usual, it didn't go very well. One isn't a geek (and I hang out with mostly geeks - hence the D&D) and the other one is very shy. However, the one thing the three of us have in common is that we love one another despite our many differences; we see past everything to the true beauty that shines beneath. I don't know how many people can say that they can do that. Although we made have our bad times and our fights, although we live 10-15 hours away from one another in any direction, although our hang-out experiences maybe mediocre, we still love each other's company.

Living here, away from my best friends and my family, I realize how the college students view the best times of their lives. It is the times when they had the most fun. In this town, it's drinking. Today, I was ashamed to read an article that was specifically meant for the new students of this town. It described a typically Thursday in the life of this college girl and it basically went like this: beer pong (8-11pm), alcoholic tea(11-12), shots and beer(12-2), and more beer pong (2-4? 6?). The girl writing this article described these years of drinking every Thurs-Sat night as the best years of her college life and that she felt young doing all of this.

Myself... I can't imagine throwing my weekend nights away on black-out juice. The best times in my life have been spent with the ones that I love: giggling with the girls, watching a movie with friends, doing homework next to my boyfriend... I find it so sad that people don't really appreciate those things in life. They want their next high or their next buzz or their next... well, you get the point. This is why I don't drink or do drugs. I'm trying to appreciate the things that matter.

Do you?