It's time for school.
Maybe I'm alone in this regard (though I doubt I am), but now that August has begun, I think it's time for summer to end. It's not that I don't enjoy being at home. I obviously enjoy not having the stress of classes or just college life in general, and I even enjoy having to work nearly every morning at seven. But it's time for all that to end.
I'm ready to get back to the grind. I'm ready to see those people I got to know so well this past year and make new memories. I'm even ready to go back to class, to have to wake up early and to be stressed out. I think, for me, the reason I'm tired of summer and looking forward to September is that I feel like I grow more, as a student and person, during the school year.
The challenges that come with school and living on my own seem much more satisfying than the challenges that come with sleeping in and being coddled by my mom. I've looked at what classes I want to take in the fall, and just reading the description is making me excited.
I lived the high school life for four years. I played sports and was in the band; I hung out on the weekends and did homework on the weekdays. I lived through the drama that is so often connected with being in high school. But now that I've lived a year away from home and from the weird, bizarre (but fun none the less) life that is high school, I don't want to go back. I have no interest in living a life I've already lived. Yes, it was my choice to come back to Moab and work all summer to make some money, and I don't regret that decision. But now I want to go back to the life, my own life, I was starting to create at school.
Leaving has, however, given me a different perspective on my hometown. Coming back home, more so this summer than during Christmas and spring break, I felt like it was a different place. I was coming back, not as a student, but as a member of the workforce. I was doing nothing school related, whether that school was Yale or my high school, and this gave me a different perspective on my town. I'm able to better appreciate the tourist town that it is and can even acknowledge (and become increasingly alarmed) by how big a part the Mormon chuch plays in a rural town of Utah. There are two visions of Moab I now have in my life: the town I lived in for all of my life, and the town since I left.
Despite this new found appreciation, what's old and familiar is now being replaced with the excitement of the new and unknown. I have no desire, outside my family and the few friends still in town, to remain in Moab for more than I need to, and now that that time, as great as it was, is almost up, the anticipation is killing me.
