College, cigarettes, and surrender

I just went out for coffee and the crisp fall weather that has settled in made me instantly nostalgic for college. Oh, it was so nice at Hunter, between classes on days like this, to go wait around outside the entrance on 68th and Lexington and smoke a cigarette and check out all the other kids. Some people would look busy on their cell phones; then there were those hot 19-year-old couples nuzzled up groin to butt, pretending to carry on a conversation with whatever group they were appending themselves to; there was always a circle of dudes playing hacky sack; and the students with day jobs darting through with brief cases and skirt suits, and the TAs and professors trying to get through unnoticed; and then of course the hobos making the rounds. And then lots of onlookers just like me. It was even fun when it was freezing outside. When I had 8 AM classes I would get up at 6 AM and go to Neil's Diner beforehand, where the waiter--now I can't remember his name, I think it was Jorge--knew what I would order (and who, when I went back a few years later with my parents, still remembered my "regular"; my parents figured that it was my unkempt 'fro that he recognized, but he told them it was my smile), which was two scrambled eggs, hash browns, and a toasted corn muffin, light on the butter; I would eat this three times a week. And this is exactly what cigarettes are good for, for after you eat a breakfast like that while simultaneously annotating something by Eliot, and you're making your way back to class but you have five minutes to burn, and you stop outside the entrance and see all the people who you will forever recognize but whose names you never get, and you smoke a cigarette and wonder how could ANYTHING get better than this!? Man, they used to taste SO GOOD! Parliament Lights! And cigarettes were the boondoggle of college--I got executive privilege with some of my professors, bonding with them as I did over cigarettes (and how cool is it when you're 21 years old and you can bum a cigarette to your professor?). And then to get orgasmic about Virgina Woolf, and to sincerely use the word "heteronormative" fifty times in an hour, and to have undying curiosity and ambition, nothing would ever get in your way. . . . .

I was talking recently to one friend about a mutual friend, we were discussing how things have changed between me and said mutual friend, and the only way I could think to describe it was by saying that "there's just not the same surrender between us." It's probably a combination of several things--getting old, career slump, shifting obligations and priorities--and it's very likely a temporary thing, and I'm clearly romanticizing it a little bit. But I think this idea of "surrender" is something that goes hand in hand with youth. The surrender probably won’t ever return. It's a hybrid of idealism, complete trust, mutual vested personal interest, not being proprietary with feelings. It's a bit life choice, a bit of unexpected circumstantial paradise. It can't sustain itself for very long, but god it's great while it lasts.