Choose life. Choose a college. Choose classes. Choose the arcana of the studentry — pencils, highlighters, book darts, and the Burton Raffel translation of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Choose your friends. Choose matching Under Armour leggings and never rock Filas. Choose Netflix; ditch chill. Choose a seven-hour marathon of “The Office” punctuated by 15-minute intervals of frantic attempts to assemble a coherent annotated bibliography for Professor of English Justin Jackson. Choose freaking out at the beginning, middle, and end of each semester, becoming a hazard to your roommate’s sanity and an aural slave to Frank Ocean’s Balmain yelps. Choose internship applications, meetings with Professor of History Paul Rahe about your future in public policy, and the constant dread that all of this — All Of This — will culminate in a white collar Phoenix-based waste management job that leaves you in the lurch of the collective longing that is history. Choose your future. Choose life.
But why would you want to do a thing like that? We chose not to let anxiety guide our semesters or our lives. We chose a loving community that makes this place a home, even if only for a short while. Yeah, choose that.