The river has changed, but I've changed more

So I'm sitting around in my college roommate's apartment in San Marcos, after a five-day stint at the College. It was strange and good and culture-shock-filled, and now here I am away from it again. Wavelet is off teaching middle-schoolers, and I'm amusing myself by looking through her books. Right now I'm thumbing through the Mechanics, Waves & Optics manual from Senior Lab. That year we were in sister sections, so we used each other's books a whole lot, making for a compendium of notes inscribed therein. Mine aren't too enlightening...mostly what I wrote down were the lyrics to the various songs playing on the walkman in my head. That and unprintable calumnies about certain tutors, certain other students, and frequently the author of the work in question. So basically I spent most classes being either bored or frustrated as shit. Wavelet's are awesome...mostly they're snatches of mad mad conversations between her and Joe-ey. Clearly the two of them were not being challenged enough in Lab class.

Anyway, there's one particular page with my handwriting on it, and I've been trying to figure out what incident it refers to. It's at the end of the manual, and the page is annotated in this wise:

In pronouncement-style block letters:
Still buzzed the next morning.

In wobbly cursive with my [non-dominant] right hand:
When I shut my eyes the world spins.

In small block letters at the bottom of the page:
Note to self: At some point, find out what the fuck happened last night.

If this were a junior year textbook, there'd be quite a few mornings that it could refer to. But since it's in a senior year textbook, and given its placing within the book, I'm pretty sure these notes were written the morning after we all turned in our theses. Which, yeah. Whoa. I'm still not too sure what happened that night.

So that was kind of cool, finding a concrete reminder of the murky and melodramatic past. Exactly two years past, in fact, since I just watched the current seniors finish up thesis-time on Sunday night. I watched them all celebrating, and left them to their party, and went off and drank beer out in the cold elsewhere.

Which sounds like about what happened the night I turned my own thesis in. It wasn't just the same thing, though. I'm a different person now. In a good way, I'm pretty sure. Things change, but you keep coming back. The same things keep happening, but you've changed, so you bring better endings out of the same old shit going down. Different, anyway. That's a start.