Orientation

So as you well know I went to orientation Monday and Tuesday. Of course it was all a joke and pretty worthless.  Still I got a feel of the place, which is what I wanted to write about.  My overall impression of the place was pretty wary. Much more wary than when I went to St. Louis.  Don’t know why I felt that way, maybe because there were streets in the middle of the campus, which I thought was strange. 

I don’t know why I felt that because whenever I go to these situations, I always feel it isn’t reality.  It is a break from my normal daily life that I know will go back to normal again in two days.  In that circumstance, how can I think of it otherwise?  I don’t care about what I eat, how much sleep I get, who I talk to, because in the end, my life will be back to normal and all that stuff will not matter anymore. 

But there is a difference between this case and the others: UVA will be my home for four years.  In that sense, orientation isn’t productive.  It gives a false sense of living there.  The fake reality we all created for those two days, where everybody is joyful and talkative to everybody, where it feels more like a vacation than a place to go to school, all of it is just wrong. 

This is the seed of my worry.  I don’t want to be miserable my four years of college, and I don’t expect myself to.  But I hear people praise college and over exaggerate it so much, it is hard to know what it really is like.  I go to orientation and see people act that way, even though I know that can’t really exist.  I guess people can’t really come to terms with reality until they realize later they are in it.  I am probably going to be the same way so I guess I’ll wait until August to see what college is really like.