These days are my favorite.

Today I woke up at 8 a.m. - sans alarm. This kind of thing makes me proud. Laugh all you want.

From my window, the sky was cloaked in clouds shaded with deep ocean blue and gray. A storm was eluding the earth. A flirtatious interaction was clearly playing out between what lie above and what lie below. 

I wanted to believe they would soon relent and give in to each other - like an audience member watching a play, I held out hope that something momentous would soon transpire.

It's been dry here for far too long.

Tired and a tad envious of their tete-a-tete, I closed my eyes, shifted my arms back under my pillow and embraced my head in the cushion.

Sleep like this - unencumbered, un-rushed by time, things, people or places - is luxurious. To lie in bed awake and aware of the fact that you have nowhere you are needed is strangely satisfying. In solitude, you are only needed by yourself. In that moment, you are off the ground. Gravity - and the world attached to it - has yet to touch you. 

You. Can't. Touch. Me. You tell the world. You are, in feeling, free. You are in comforter-comfort land. 

I love cloudy days. Rainy days even more. 

Perhaps it's because I live in Texas and days when the sky decides to fill up with puffy wisps and dollops of white are as rare as nights in the city when you can see the stars. 

But from the perspective of the thinker, writer, analyzer and theorist that I am 98.7 percent of the time, I'd say I love cloudy days because they mean change. 

Clouds are moving, moody things. Unforeseeable. And when seen, they are still unpredictable.

Sometimes they scatter away from one another and create a picture-perfect day where the sky is one half cerulean blue and one half wedding-dress white. 

Sometimes they come together, as though huddling like a group of school girls, to tell a secret. 

A hush and silence like none other comes over the earth at that moment. A rumble - a murmur - is heard in the distance. Or from which cloud did you hear it? It's hard to tell. 

The earth waits in anticipation of being let in on this secret - what is this excitement happening above?! What's with all the whispering?!
It begs the sky in desperate patience. 

These days are my favorite.

Maybe it's because clouds have a life of their own. And while they don't ask people to try and figure them out, people still try. Guessing at their chances, predicting their paths.

Often, people are wrong. 

Maybe it's because while clouds all have a unique shape and form of their own, one cloud is not more beautiful than the other. And in that way, they're a lot like how God sees us. 

Or maybe they're my favorite because they make me think. About how big the sky is, how wide and diverse and experience-rich the earth is. How fulfilling and simultaneously fleeting life is. 

Then again, these days might just be my favorite because they make me feel like it's okay if I close my eyes for ten more minutes. The clouds will still be there for me.

Shifting spots in the sky as I sleep. 

You know you're a college student when...

1. It's 12:38 a.m and your bedside drink of choice is Diet Coke. Caffeinated. Duh.
2. You just misspelled "caffeinated" three times before authorizing autocorrect to do its thang.
3. You just said "thang."
4. Your iPhone looks like this...I use it too much, I tell you! (No, not really. Freak accident.)

About that upgrade...?

1. You feel like coloring. Except you have no crayons at your disposal. Homework = 1; Procrastination = 0.
2. There are 2 (not 1, but 2) Justin Timberlake songs on your iPod. Don't judge! He's popular again. Either that, or the world is ending. Lol. 
3. You notice yourself adding cute, short, text-message lingo to the endings of all your sentences. 
Whether they need it or not. Which they don't. You also know that in the career-world this lingo is discouraged and you should probably stop. ASAP. (Or not.)

1. Even though you're currently taking an online editing class, you still don't completely grasp HTML and are befuddled by how to get that 1 over there at the start of this sentence to go back to a 4. 
2. You try and participate in school-related group activities, but find yourself bulking at the last minute before you've entered the no-return world of full-on commitment and commencement.  
3. Yes, I did just clutter that sentence with a bunch of compound verbs and alliterations. Thanks for noticing!
4. You go grocery shopping at 10:16 p.m. Because you can. 
5. One of your teachers has a severe axe to grind with students not coming to class (8 a.m. that it is), and starts accusing people of "playing at home." Whatever that means. Unless playing means sleeping. Then, yeah...accusation upheld.  (Did I mention it's a media law class?)
6. Another one of your teachers answers a student's question with a shrug and an "I don't know." You shrug and sigh and roll your eyes and start wondering what's wrong with our education system?? Where a professor at a nationally-recognized geology school cannot answer a simple question on the Coriolis effect?! Then you see that the girl in front of you is perusing her Pinterest account. Q & A session fail? Say whaattt?? 
7. You're all caught up on your 3 favorite TV shows, but still have homework for 3 of your classes. Funny how that figures. 
8. You miss your family. And your house. And the washer and dryer that complete the domestic trinity. 

You would give anything to be here...

But then you see this... every. single. day. 

And you remember why you're here in the first place...

Because this is your start. This is you tiptoeing to the edge of the diving board and looking into the deep end of the pool. You're anxious about making the jump. Your equal parts nervous and excited.  

To quote Taylor Swift, this is the moment where you get to be "happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time." 

"It's miserable and magical," she sympathizes in the proceeding lyric. And I couldn't agree more. Although, being the optimist that I am, I try to maintain focus on the latter. The magical-ness. 

Lastly, you know you're a college student when you're listening to a Taylor Swift song titled "22" and you just turned 22. 

I feel in some unofficially-official way like I've made it in this life. Like, totally.