Bright College Days

There's a Tom Lehrer song titled "Bright College Days." It sums up the general nostalgic feeling that most people seem to have towards their time in college. Yet for someone who feels as much nostalgia as I do, I feel nothing of the sort towards my college years. I dislike rather intensely the person that I was during my time in college. I look back and from freshman year through graduation, I see mostly mistakes and poor choices. There is little to nothing that I'd like to relive. Doing it over is another matter--I'd do it all over and completely differently in a heartbeat, although the question would stand in that case would I be here, as I am now, if I had not done what I did in college? That philosophical discussion aside, there are so many things that I now spend time trying simply to ignore, forget and not think about. I was a dick, a slob and a poor student. I was wrapped up in myself (probably expected, but it still disgusts me the extent to which this was true) and in a lot of ways unhealthy. I don't want to get too much into specifics here since I don't want to have long chats with my parents or my spouse; suffice to say, I dislike periods which bring on this sort of introspection.
When I think about it though, it's impressive the amount of break that there is in my life. I can't really think of a single person to whom I still speak who was a "college friend." When I decided to turn my back on the way that I was at that time, I completely broke off almost everything that I could that was related to that time. Some of it was intentional, some of it was not, but looking at it now, it is quite astounding the degree to which there is pretty much a hole in my life between 2000 and 2004. I'm not saying it is a bad thing, but it's certainly something that contributed to the small number of friends that I have these days.
I made more friends in law school, and in many ways I wish that college had been more like law school. Part of me wants to say that it couldn't have been because the classmates I had weren't as serious then as they were in law school, but I know for the most part that is a lie. They were there, but I wasn't serious or mature enough a student myself to see them, or to be accepted as one of them wholly when I did meet them. Furthermore, there are/were plenty of people who were very close to what I think of as "college kids" in law school as well; I simply better managed to find the people who I could connect with in law school. No, I don't really wish that college had been more like law school; I wish I had been more like I was in law school while I was in college. Again, with the self dislike.

Introspection, and solitude are good at times. But too often they lead to too much dwelling on things past and regretted. This used to happen to me a lot while I was driving my old Volvo, which had no radio (or rather, had a radio that slowly died.) Even in college, I can remember longing for solitude at times, demanding it, getting it, and then hating it once I was finally alone. Probably because I knew even then, that I was not acting the way I knew that I should have been.