In just another semester and a half, I'll be done.

It's weird sitting back, turning that word over and over in my head: "Graduate. I'm going to graduate."

"Graduate college."

By summer of 2006, my undergraduate career will come to an end and I will exchange a 25$ fee for two pieces of paper, a news-editorial diploma and an international studies diploma.

That's something to think about, right?

When he was my age, my father was on his own, had already been at work fulltime for 5 years, and had bought a motorcycle and a lavender colored Pontiac GTO with 395 horsepower (That light shade of purple was called "Irish Mist," and it still makes me laugh to imagine my dad behind the wheel of a car with purple paint).

As for my mom, she had finished her undergrad, and was already out teaching fourth grade in a little town called Malcom, where she had grown up.

Grown up.

Grow up.

I guess the point is, this is the age when kids like me start to do that growing up thing.

I mean, that's what I've been told.

But I still feel very much like a kid.

It makes you wonder when that day is actually going to come, that day that you actually have the transition to "adult." Does it just happen one morning before work when you are brushing your teeth and look up into a foggy mirror, and upon seeing your reflection exclaim, "Holy shit! I'm a grown-up now!"

When I was in high-school, I often would imagine the the future as a dark blob sort of looming off in the distance of my mind. I would try hard to wrap my mind around the years and to guess what I would be doing. I saw the year 2000 move by slowly in my head, blurry, and I would dream about what kind of life I would be living. I would make up fanciful stories about myself and the things I would have accomplished by then...

Though it never became clear, and always managed to remain dark, even when it loomed just on the horizon, and even when I passed into it.

I remember getting to the year 2001, and thinking to myself that I really wasn't that much older, despite how I had imagined it as a high school student, when it seemed like graduating would magically lift me to that place called adulthood.

Not that I really wanted to go to that place.

But it had always just seemed like that dark, blurry future full of unknowns contained a grown-up version of me, living a life like everyone else.

Then when I got there I realized, wait, I'm not an adult. I'm still a kid. I'm still me. I'm still dreaming crazy dreams about flying planes over the clouds into the great unknown.

As everyone else is getting married, growing up and graduating, I still feel rooted to the ground as a kid.

I'm going to graduate, yes, and I'm looking ahead to the future just like I did in high school: I see the large black blurry numbers of 2007 and 2008 and beyond, and I imagine things about myself. I look at the idea of turning 30 the same way that I looked at turning 20 when I was back in junior high; by then I'll be an adult! Right? I'll be settled down and have things figured out and live that life that everyone lives.

But I think--no, I know--that that kind of life isn't going to attach itself to me. I don't think I will settle, and I don't think I'll grow up. I'll probably be writing the same tired crap on the Internet, opining about who knows what. Perhaps I'll be living in a strange city, or perhaps I'll be in Lincoln.

But I can't know now.

Some people tear themselves up about the future. Believe me, I'm in the College of Journalism. I know. I see it every day. People who've been planning their entire life since age 15. They go to the right school and talk to the right professors, get the right internships, make the right contacts, and soon they will be graduating and headed off to the right city to get the right job.

There's nothing wrong with that.

But I'm not too worried about my future.

If the past year has taught me anything it is to expect the unexpected, and know that pretty much everything is fleeting. Your life can change as swiftly as the wind.

How could I have anticipated last December and meeting Sara, for example?

And our breakup?

That, too.

What about Japan?

What about anything?

Did any of it even happen?

Life is, despite what we may all see as monotony, a capricious beast, and I'd have it no other way.