I already know how this show ends.

Have you ever been watching tv, and you realize that since you're coming close to the end of the alloted time for a certain show, you must be getting close to the climax, or that there must be some plot twist soon?  You realize that, and then you're kind of disappointed, because you've figured out what will happen next.  That's how I feel about high school right now.  Everything I do has this fatalism to it because I know soon I'll be done with high school and I'll be moving on to college.  Some people call it senioritis, but it's sort of more pervasive than just "oh I don't want to do my work" and it's not that I don't want to do my work.

Soon we'll have our apps in (and it can't be soon enough) and there will be a lot less stress, and then eventually we'll know which colleges we'll be going to.  After that I feel like there's just a waiting period, where we'll be awkwardly between worlds while we wait to go to college.  And going to college really will be entering a whole new world.  Maybe it's just my impression because of the classes I'm taking, but I feel like I know almost everyone that I'm going to know in the high school.  Interactions have been played out, and now a lot of my friends have settled into comfortable couples.  Not that that is a bad thing, but I'm just starting to get really impatient for change in my life.  That's part of why I did drama this year I think; I wanted to try something really new and different (and I'm really glad I did).

Going to college will give us real opportunities to totally reinvent ourselves.  Maybe I'll try being Martin McCool, and speak with an Irish accent, just to see how it works (I doubt it will).  We'll meet totally new people, people who are completely different from the people we've gotten used to.  I've lived in New Jersey all my life, and I've hung out primarily with my particular brand of nerd-friends for as long as I can remember.  Who knows how different I'll be, and the truth is that I probably won't be different at all, but the point is that I can at least try out being different.  Maybe I'll still hang out with nerds, but I'll at least try to hang out with different kinds of nerds.

All this is part of the reason I want to go to a bigger school.  And when I say bigger, I mean 5000+.  Our high school is around 2400 people, and that's only in 3 years.  If I'm feeling socially claustrophobic here, then I'd definitely like a bigger school when I go to college.  I understand though, the danger of getting lost in a big school.  Maybe that's part of the problem at EB.  It's hard to join different groups of friends, because I just don't know anybody in those groups.  Drama was doable because I knew I could hang out with Kat or Alex at least, and now I've found that I really like everyone in drama.  I'm sure that would be the case for a lot of things, but it's really difficult to just throw yourself into a group of strangers.

That's the beauty of college though: everyone starts out as strangers.  For the first year at least, there aren't groups, there aren't cliques.  You never have to worry about feeling like the odd person out in a group of people who are really close, because there aren't any groups like that yet!  I remember my first few days at UPenn last summer, I surprised myself with how outgoing I was.  It's amazingly easy to just go up to whoever you want and say hello.  No one knows your history, no one knows how weird or awkward you were when you were a little kid (because we all really were).

I guess though that I shouldn't wish Senior year away.  To be fair, I am enjoying it so far, even though it is a total pain sometimes.  And while I'm looking forward to change, I'm sure that in a year (or even a few months) I'll be wishing that I had a little more time to spend with these awesome people in EB.  For better or for worse, I'm stuck with you people for another year, so I might as well enjoy it!

And hey, even though we know how the movie will end, it can still be fun to watch.