In three hours, I will be driving an hour and a half to Caldwell, TX, the halfway point between Huntsville and Austin. I'll discover, as I do with all the others, that it is a charming small town with a rich history that would bore most people but will interest us. We'll walk the streets, gawking at old buildings and contributing around $5 to the local economy in some way. Then we'll head back to our respective homes at around midnight, and continue our week as usual.

It's a Tuesday afternoon, and tomorrow I have my second stats exam. So what am I doing, and why am I doing it?

I'm meeting up with my best friend (He happens to now be my boyfriend, but that's not really important.). We haven't seen each other in four days and for some reason, that means we need to. Why?

Because exploring the world is better together than apart. And if something keeps us apart, our job is to fight it until it dies, except maybe not in this case because what's keeping us apart is education and education is necessary for both democracy and fulfilled living.

But there's an inherent difference between being alone and being with someone you love. Going to a new town and meeting people is scary for most, but add in someone you're comfortable around and it becomes so much easier.

We're both lucky and unlucky to have the ability to use people as comfort zones, lucky that they're portable and friendly and molded from similar experiences, and unlucky that they're ever-changing and that if we blink, they might be gone in an instant.

I'm not going to pretend that this is long distance. We're at most a three-hour drive away from each other at any time, and what we go through does not even compare to what people living states away have to endure. Talking to my friend who's dating a girl in Ohio just makes it all the more important to appreciate what I have.

But I also find a small sick irony in the concept of being seemingly so close, but still experiencing life as if we're far. Different schools, different friends, different breakfasts, lunches and dinners almost every day are the things you may rarely think about, but things I think about often.

Because we could meet up every day. It would be physically possible and not that difficult.

But we don't because there are tradeoffs. And that's where it gets iffy.

I've had this long-distance friend problem since my sophomore year of high school, and I haven't gotten any answers as of yet. What I do know is that constant communication with someone far away may make you happy for a minute, but eventually prevents you from stepping into the real world.

And no matter how much you talk, when you see each other in person again, it's almost like they're a stranger.

I'll never understand why humans build relationships in the first place--or maybe I will since I'm taking a class on it next semester. Do the positives ever outweigh the negatives? I think so, but I guess time will tell.