I was really looking forward to making fun of Valentine’s Day. After seeing those Vermont Bear commercials all week, the whole holiday is ripe for plunder, but I cannot.

Instead I’ve suddenly become introspective. We all have these weeks. Men always have them after things like a funeral, a painful breakup or the end of football season. Women similarly do every 25-30 days, and sometimes in between when they feel like being (chickens).

Change is constant. When you’re in college, it’s mandatory. It’s what growing up is all about. Have you ever looked at your freshman ID? It will scare the (poop) out of you. It’s not you. That little face surrounded by orange, looking helplessly at you from its one-inch window doesn’t know what the hell it’s getting into.

It has no clue that you’ll run out of bonus bucks in the first month. It doesn’t know that using Napster (now Facebook) for more than four hours causes blindness.

There are a thousand things no professor, administrator or crack-using Orientation Leader can tell you. My problems started on day one. My grandfather pestered me for weeks inquiring what items were necessary for “Joe Student.”

ME: Seriously, Grandpa … I don’t know. Buy me some toilet paper or something.

GRAMPS: All right, I’m just trying to help. You know in my day we didn’t get much.

ME: Wait … wait. Don’t give me the “I walked 17 miles to school, in the snow, uphill both ways, holding only a heated potatoes to warm my hands” story.

GRAMPS: Fine, be that way. Spoil it for me. It wasn’t like that and you know it.

ME: I’m sorry.

GRAMPS: You should be. It was 47 miles.

I can imagine how embarrassing it would have been for my grandfather, walking down the road shoeless with a pair of spuds in hand.

Surely something similar to the shame I felt when I met my R.A. while carrying in a Sam’s 80 pack of toilet paper into Reese Hall my freshman year.

ME: Excuse me … I need to sign in.

R.A.: Sure, just fill this out. Hey, that’s a lot of T.P. man.

ME: Yeah, gotta be prepared you know.

R.A.: Looks like it. Dude, you know we give you that stuff for free.

I rolled about 12 houses that weekend. I, much like most of us I imagine, learned a lot that first week. But life lessons, like hangovers it seems, are common in your college career.

I was reminded of that this week. My childhood best friend and freshman roommate Allen called me needing his black suit back. I borrowed it for a formal last semester, and I looked pretty damn good if I don’t say so myself. Being lazy I forgot to call him back. It took four days, but I reached him on Sunday. His grandmother had died that morning. Her name was Mildred, and she was the master of the peanut butter and banana sandwich. I had eaten several in my day. It was fitting that I found out on Sunday. The Lord’s Day was like clockwork for me as a child: get out of church, ditch parents for baseball with friends, pig out on homemade ice cream and sandwiches with Al. His grandparents were the caretakers of this solemn order. One would make the sandwiches and the other would start the ice cream machine. You know the ones that sound like they’re going to explode. They make the same sound I envision some of my ex-girlfriends making — not a voice, just a long mechanical nag.

This whole process is really one of the admirable qualities of Southern families. In general, we don’t have a lot of money, proper education or good teeth. But we’ve got food, and if you’re a visitor you’ll get one of everything.

If the ice cream didn’t get me, the foosball certainly did. We’d spend hours playing on the table that had suffered multiple beatings at the hands of reunions and such. I think one of the goalies had been replaced with a spatula, and more than one of the strikers was missing a head.

Somewhere in this onslaught of nostalgia is a point. College is already a time of transition. You have to prepare yourself for a career in something other than what’s on your degree. At least that seems to be the case for most of my friends. But in getting ready for that new life, you lose pieces of who and what you used to be. Sometimes you have to let things go. Sometimes you don’t.

In the end, you are ultimately a different person. (Cue the theme song from “The Wonder Years.”) You’ll have new friends, goals and views on the way things should be. One day you’ll be stealing your friend’s family’s food (I love alliteration) and the next you’ll be some prima donna columnist reminding sororities how they were actually just an idea composed by fraternities to have a constant supply of (tail) on campus. You know kind of like freelance brothels or hook-up grocery stores.

I guess that makes Massey Hall sort of like Bi-Lo, and Greve Hall Wal-Mart since it’s mixed. Oh, and let’s not forget about Humes. We’ll just call that the Fresh Market.

But don’t listen to me. I’m just a sap who had nothing else to talk about his week.

— Glenn LaFollette is a super-senior in journalism and electronic media. He can be reached at [email protected].