Next Tuesday I’m going to pack up all my things, drive across town to unpack them into a tiny dorm room and meet the person I’ll share said tiny room with for the next year, spent a couple days in training, and then walk off into the wilderness.
Yup, that would be COR, the three-week outdoor trip that WCC freshmen get to start the year off. I think the reasoning is two-fold:
- When they say “immerse you in the outdoors” they definitely, totally mean it. Just throw students out the door into the outdoors, like the sink-or-swim method of swimming lessons.
- Starts the year off right. You just survived three weeks in the wilderness, cut off from friends, family, and civilization alike! At this point, having toilet paper is a return to ultimate luxury! Things can only go up from here.
Having (most likely) survived that, I’ll move straight into the rest of my freshman college year. It’s a very definitive chapter break in my story.
These have been my high school years:
Dancing on pointe, and fighting my way to TKD blackbelt; dabbling in gymnastics and tasting international travel for the first time, wrestling with math and swing-dancing with literature and dipping my fingers in half a dozen sciences. Giving a feisty little Arab mare my heart for two years – she was never even mine – and tumbling out of bed before the sun rose to take care of abandoned cats and hurt dogs at the pet shelter for a year; saying goodbye to Sunflash and Snowball (feathers and fluff respectively) and walking on. Reading a mountain of books (there’s a planet-full still waiting), writing a slew of stories (I’ve only just begun), and all four years figuring out just what living should look like, anyway (still working on that part, too).
It’s been good. I’m ready to find out what comes next.
…mostly.
(Actual footage of me in my book-fortress. “What do you mean, I can’t bring all my books with me?”)