Loving the beginning of spring

Days like today are why I love Reno.

The sun is beating down on the pine trees in beautiful 61-degree weather, I'm sitting outside of Fritz Bar and Grill drinking Corona and hanging out with my friend Dave, and all the stress, specifically as it relates to the Big Freaking Paper, is gone for the moment.

Oh, and there's a cute girl in a tube top sitting just behind Dave, so I can check out her infant nurturing region and look like I'm making eye contact with Dave.

This euphoria will go away soon enough – at any moment I'll realize that I have about two weeks to learn Flash, a month to finish my thesis and two months to figure out what I'm doing with my life – but right now I can go back to the way I was when I was sophomore and life was only as complicated as deciding between hard alcohol and beer.

I think that when I look back at college when I'm old (in about a year), those are the days I'll remember. My entire life, I've felt a ridiculous amount of pressure to try to be successful – whatever that means – at what I was doing.

Except for my middle years of college when, quite frankly, I stopped giving a shit and started loving everything about life, especially the part where I could make fun of the drunk, slutty sorority girls to their faces and they didn't get it.

I used to spend almost everyday like I'm spending today, plus or minus the alcohol and cleavage (who am I kidding, it was usually plus alcohol and minus cleavage). During my first two years of college, I spent my spring days imbibing with the homies on the back porch of their house before heading inside for a night of beer pong or going out for a night of general and debauchery that would almost certainly end in our expulsion from one of downtown's fine establishments or one of us winning $200 and buying breakfast.

If we weren't shooting the shit or hitting a casino, we were usually doing normal things (like sneaking alcohol into the movies) or watching our buddy Stefan drive a 10-speed off a homemade ramp in the middle of the street (oddly enough, we always did the dumbest stuff when we were sober).

Somewhere over the years, all that ended. No doubt part of it has to do with the fact that most of the people in our crowd have graduated, and then there's that moment of self-awareness when I realized the real word was coming whether I took it seriously or not.

Whatever the reason, I don't think I've ever laughed like I did during those days, so I'm going to enjoy what's going on in the moment while it's all fresh in my head. All the work and decisions and responsibility will weigh down on me soon enough, but right now I'm just going to tip back another beer and accept that I can worry about everything else tomorrow.