There they go – teens and twentysomethings packing up their cars to head back to university; little kids deciding what kind of lined notebook paper to get (regular or *college rule*?!) and back packs. It is that time of the year again: Back to school. It rolls around every year around Labor Day and whenever it does a little something deep down inside of me is envious it all.

Why? I wanna buy new pencils and pens and stuff. I used to get such a thrill going to the store and preparing for the upcoming school year. Especially when you got to the college years. Those were the best. If you go to Target or Bed, Bath & Beyond these days you’ll see that they’ve started catering to kids who live in dorm rooms. Damn, I miss buying new stuff for my room/apartment. Back in my day we had whatever crappy posters we could find, cinder blocks, 2×4’s and milk crates as furniture. These days college kids get to buy all the comforts of living at home: sofa’s, fridges, coffee tables, storage shelves/bins, dinnerware, entertainment centers. It was always interesting seeing people’s rooms and who were the “have’s” and who were the “have nots”. I miss the excitement of going back to school, too. Face it, as an adult you don’t gt that kind of rush anymore. Well, not on a regular basis, of course.

In the United States you typically start your school year around Labor Day in September and then it ends in June and you take your Summer vacation. That’s not so bad. 3 months without school? You would normally spend 2.5 months trying to figure out what you wanted to do for your Summer break, but it still rocked. It was pretty carefree and good times until school started again and even that was neat. Why? Because the vacation months would begin to get boring and school let you see tons of people and live the drama of being a kid. When you’re an adult your Summer Break is about two weeks, maybe a little longer. There is no anticipation about what the first day of school will be like. The closest feeling to it is starting your first day of work at a new job and you definitely don’t want to do that every year. Would I trade my life now to go back to those times? Not in this day in age. I’m probably romanticizing the whole thing because it happened so long ago.

I still want some new school supplies, though.