‘Oh, I wish I was back in college!!!’ That’s what I said the first year after graduating, and maybe the second year, too. But three years later, there’s no time to reminisce about the past when the future is fast approaching. A full-time job, a full-time girlfriend, and bills all the time may not sound thrilling, but that’s the life that college was meant to prepare us for.

With Homecoming here again, there is no better time to indulge you with some of my fondest memories of Binghamton and the university, as they will inevitably be forgotten, only to rise from the Nature Preserve every five to 10 years in honor of milestone anniversaries.

Let’s start from the beginning, with the Freshman Fifteen. You know what I’m talking about: the first time you had to pound 15 beers or risk being ostracized by fellow students that you’ll lose touch with by senior year. This was the first time I drank more than just a Mike’s Hard Lemonade. After endless hours of beer pong, and a swig of Barton vodka, the movie ‘Memento’ was easier to piece together than my memory of the rest of that night.

You think I would have learned my lesson, but no more than a few weeks later I attended my first house party in downtown Binghamton. I had no clue where I was or how I got there, but after an hour I heard a whistle. It wasn’t the neighborhood watch, but the Binghamton city police breaking up the party as everyone spread like cockroaches. I ended up fleeing to Wendy’s ‘ only to realize years later that I had been on Main Street ‘ to avoid the cops and get my first drunken cab ride back to campus.

But college was not all about drinking: some of it was about sobering up, and when I did that I found Pipe Dream, the twice-weekly student-run newspaper. Instead of regaling you with a cookie-cutter memory that anyone at the paper could recall, I will share with you one special road trip after yet another late production night.

One editor was passionate about ‘ you might say obsessed with ‘ a particular senior member of the Binghamton University administration; she had been the butt of our in-jokes for months. So at 3 a.m., a group of us piled into a car, circus-clown style, and drove up and down every hilly street, lane and road in Vestal, screaming and yelling the whole time ‘ all the while unable to find this administrator’s home.

The journey was better than the destination ‘ though we’ll never know for sure what we would have done if we had found it. The road trip was a spontaneous adventure emblematic of the entire college experience. We didn’t know what we wanted to do, we were with our friends and at the end, we may not have found what we were looking for, but the memory remains.

It’s been three years since I’ve graduated, and I can honestly say that I do not miss college at all. College was a reality show ‘ meaning it was nothing like reality (but don’t tell Ryan, the student who was secretly being recorded via webcam in his dorm room by his roommates ‘ it was a little too real for him). We were all bubble boys and girls thinking we were experiencing life, when really we were on vacation from reality. Sure, now I miss having all my friends close by, and my only worry back then was getting a paper in by deadline, but college comes and goes at the right time. You arrive trying to change your reputation from high school, and leave ready to define who you will be for the rest of your life.

This weekend I will be taking part in more of the Homecoming weekend events than I ever have before. Drinking until 3 a.m. and then sleeping all day is the college life, but that’s not my life anymore. They say you can’t go home again, but I wouldn’t want to anyway.