By Bailey Morgan

Play this scene in your head for me. You’re watching Dazed and Con fused (and if you haven’t seen it just bear with me for a bit). You are at the scene where school gets out, and people are just throwing their papers on the floor, screaming for joy, (and pain if they are freshmen), almost everybody wanting to get out as fast as possible. Most of us can relate to this urge to celebrate their new found freedom.

I love Dazed and Confused but I’m now confounded by this scene, in the joy kids seem to find in leaving school for summer, not just because I am a Geek with a capital G. I love to learn and sometimes I start to view school as my home, as an escape to freedom like runaway slaves viewed the northern states. In my home I must watch what I say out of duty, respect, the need for peace of mind, and love for my family. But at school, I feel somewhat freer with the people I can view as my peers due to their ability accept without comment or criticism my madcap eccentricities. And this isn’t even the beginning; there are so many reasons why from now until I graduate, at the end of the school year I walk out of here like prisoner bound for the chair.

I shudder at some of the attitudes of my fellow students: “I can’t wait to graduate! God it’s gonna be great! I’ll get to move out of my parent’s house, party all the time, blah, blah, blah…” If my summer was a preview of how our lives are going to be when we move out and graduate, we’re all in for a rude awakening. First, I got a job this summer, and I’ll begrudgingly admit l like having something to do and some cash in my bank account. Until the bills came rolling in and I realized that it is no longer by choice, but by necessity that I now had my job, so I began to despise my occupation (which is the nature of affairs such as these).

I felt as though I ran through the gateway to freedom only to find that I had been transferred out my own free will to yet another cage. And slowly but surely I have come to realize that the things I had acquired so easily in what I thought was my restrictive childhood were actually part of a world where my biggest responsibility was to do my homework. And that world is forever gone. I now have to worry about a car, a job, new family and religious responsibilities and expectations, and bills. Now, to sum all of these horrors thrust upon me this summer, this loss of freedom up: I have entered into the world of adulthood, and I don’t like it one little bit.