The other day I found myself once again surrounded by a hoop of people feeling stale, bored, and boring, looking this way and that desperately for something else to laugh at. Because laughs nicely fill up the minutes – an empty filling feeling. And I felt that creeping realization I had pushed away like a dirty secret – I felt saturated. Fully saturated.

Well, not exactly. I also felt really hungry. Starving, in fact. For something new, something different, millions of delicious things to cram into my mind.

This is what I call the Post-Junior Year Syndrome. So full of “scholarly knowledge,” fingers and neurons tenured in the arts of studying, understanding, and memorizing. Rattling off formulas and cramming cornices of the mind and stretching the expanses for creativity. Now my mind needs to refresh and release its clenched muscles. No more forced memorization of facts and methods I could care less about, but a rejuvenating burst of flavor exploding all sorts of things that I want to know.

Summer. I can taste it. Early in May I remember starting a list of “Things to do:” Then, I scribbled off the colon and added “later.” Then, I scribbled off the colon again, and added “when I have time.”

And now here we are, at the brink of freedom. I’ve never felt more ecstatic about the imminent summer. This end of the year period is nearly always my favorite, probably even higher up on my Sound of Music-esque list of favorite things than the actual summer itself. It’s this period of hope and glee.

Our patience with annoying communication with people we dislike is running dry so much that the idea of a three month respite from the same, tedious group of people energizes us enough to babble emotionally in yearbook entries and bestow generous good-bye hugs.

A new beginning, albeit a far more dramatic one for seniors, awaits us the next year. All of our follies and foolishness are being slowly effaced as everything gets lost in a blurry picture of various hands waving goodbye. And the focus turns from the crowd, the groups, and the others, to the self, the person, and the individual. Pressures off. Seriousness gone.

I remember last year in sophomore year, we read Dandelion Wine, in which a junkman, Mr. Jones, presented the main character, an ailing young boy, with a bottle of fresh mountain air. And when said boy, Douglas, took a sharp whiff of the crisp air sealed in the bottle, he felt it coursing through his veins and flicking on every off-switch inside of him.