I check the time on the dashboard as I slam my car haphazardly into a spot on Shady. Swearing loudly to no one, I put next to no effort into caring about which direction the ‘No Parking’ sign is pointing. It’s 9:25 and far later than I would have liked to be on the first day of junior year. This is just the first of many occasions in the next few weeks that will lead me to the following conclusion: Living off campus doesn’t necessarily make it more difficult to convince yourself to get up and go to class. It does, however, make it far more difficult to be on time.

Bounding out of the car, I flout oncoming traffic and rush across the street to the small pathway that will lead me up onto campus. Sure, it was dangerous. But when being late makes you more anxious than you really care to admit to anyone, you tend to live your life a bit further on the edge than most. It’s not even that I’m running that late—but I still need to buy books, etc., and as a scholar, it’s also my duty to be almost disturbingly early for every class. It’s an unwritten rule in the non-existent handbook. You can look it up. I clutch my coffee to my chest as I half-run, half-totter in my three-inch heels. Yeah, heels on the first day of class. Now that I’ve had caffeine, I recognize what a poor choice that really was. Oh well—with home over twenty minutes away in good traffic, I’m just going to have to deal with that particular decision (and beg the post office boys for band-aids later).

Twenty minutes and almost seven hundred dollars later (you think I’m kidding), I stumble out of the bookstore in shock. I keep glancing down at the bags in my hands, giving a particularly nasty stink-eye to the French book and workbook set that made up just about half of the total cost. (I will later learn that I have bought the wrong workbook and then spend approximately half an hour metaphorically patting myself on the back for not removing the shrink-wrap.)

For the rest of the day, I enjoy the feeling of being a first-semester junior. (Mostly since I know that the euphoria will vanish instantly as soon as spring semester and tutorial planning rear their ugly heads.) It’s a great feeling—that of knowing where you stand and what to expect. As a first-year, I think I was so confused and overwhelmed that most of the time, I didn’t even know I was confused and overwhelmed. Sophomore year, I made a lot of changes to my plans and my major and had to deal with the aftermath of all of those changes. I feel as though while I still may not be the best hitter on the team—at least now I have a bat. And a helmet.