End of Year Dash

So right now it is 3:20 in the morning and I'm sitting in my school's 24-hour computer lab, which is in no way empty. I just polished off a redbull and the line "someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny" from Bruce's Rosalita just played in my headphones. Incidently, that was also my senior quote when I was in high school. And, being from New Jersey, I was not the only one in my class of 66 girls to quote Bruce (there are a few stereotypes we Garden Staters actually meet).
I guess its althogether fitting that this song is playing now. I'm stuck writing paper number three, during all-nighter number three of the week. And I've still got two papers standing inbetween me and my final Luaupalooza on Friday afternoon. As stressful as the paper deadlines are, its not anything I haven't faced before. Last spring I wrote a 15 page (semester long) paper on the trial of the soldiers involved in the Boston Masacre, worth 50% of my grade, in one night. At 5 a.m. I was flipping through print outs of a scan of John Adam's original closing argument notes. It was not pretty. But I digress...
I think what has me stressed out is the other stuff I have to do. I have to apply to UNC-Charlotte and fill out the FAFSA by Friday, get an FBI background check, get fingerprinted, make a doctor's appointment and actually apply to work in the Charlotte-Mecklenberg School District. Not all of that has to be done this week, but it needs to be done really soon. And graduation is looming on the not-so-distant horizon.
I keep saying I'm ready to graduate and, in a lot of ways I am. You get to a point where you know you've outgrown a place. These days I walk around campus on my way to and from class and I look at the people walking around me. Not only do I not know most of them, but they all look like they belong in the back of my sister's junior history class. That's how I know its time to gradduate. But at the same time, I'm comfortable here. I've spent four years becoming friends with a lot of these people and we're all really close. This Sunday I went to a senior history major reception put on by the department and we all stood there talking about how we want to go out as a group one more time before graduation. The department only has about 40 seniors in it, so we're all really close and have been through a lot together. After that, I had my end of the year banquet for APO.... my last APO banquet. We were given our APO cords for gradduation and they were the first set any of us have received. Talk about reality hitting you in the face. It's all very bittersweet.
I know this will all be done in the next two and a half weeks and soon enough I'll be in Mississippi training and making tons of new friends and in Charlotte actually getting to do what I've been planning for for over a year now. And that is beyond exciting.
I may not be quite that ready to leave college behind, but I know that the next two years are going to be great and I'll eventually come to accept that it was all for the best. So maybe, in the end, I got it right four years ago. Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny....