listening to: Michelle Branch, Everywhere
And now we add Karen’s Marshall Chronicles to the diary list. Yikes, Diaryland is contagious! Actually, it makes me happy to finally be able to read someone else’s thoughts and stuff, after years of being the only one of my friends with an online journal.
So the new fall co-ops started work yesterday, all 35 of them. Thirty five!!! That is a huge number of new guys; when I started co-oping back in the olden days, I started with 15-18 others. Hmm. I know it was less than 20. And geez, these new guys are all so young! When I said I’d started co-oping in 1997, and started college in 1996, one of them laughed and said “I was a freshman in high school in 1996!” Argh. They are really young.
Sadly, I don’t feel as much connection with the co-ops as I used to. Most of my co-op friends have graduated and come back full-time, or gone somewhere else entirely. Most of the co-ops now have unfamiliar faces, and it’s harder to get to know them. They look at me as the elder grad student; I look at them as the naive underclassmen. It helps to remember that I was once a bright-eyed new co-op…but it’s still weird. You wouldn’t think four years would make that much of a difference.
Last night Phil and I ended up “in charge” of the first night activities, and as we drove home, we kind of looked at each other and Phil said he felt like a camp counselor. EXACTLY! We had gone to dinner, then putt-putt, then ice cream, and it felt like we had to coax the new kids into going each time. “Ok, who wants to go play putt-putt? Ok, now who wants to go get ice cream? Yay! Let’s go!” The need for the hand-holding will disappear as they learn their way around, and see what there is to do in the area, but it was still weird. I think Phil and I have already fallen into the roles of father and mother co-op.
