The days of class field trips? Drift back to that big yellow bus stationed in the school parking lot. You anxiously climbed onboard with your classmates, clutching your brown-bag lunch and signed permission slip.
No matter how far down the road you were headed, the most important thing was choosing a seatmate wisely.
A good seatmate meant status. A bad seatmate meant
well, we won't even go there.
After all those years of therapy, I wouldn't want to open that can of worms.
When you accepted your offer of admission to the University, you may have thought the days of field trips were long gone.
But apparently the Commerce School feels differently -- my days of field trips are just beginning.
Two weeks ago, I boarded a bus with 40 other students in my ICE block for a field trip.
But this was no yellow school bus (please, this is the Comm school), and no one was scrambling to sit with anyone else.
In fact, on that early morning, the name of the game was finding your own seat in your own row.
It was only 8 a.m., and we still had some sleeping to do on the way to Dominion Power's office in Richmond.
I'll admit it was a struggle to be up before the sun on that Friday morning. It was especially traumatic for a hundred students that aren't used to being at school on Fridays.
We had no smiling mothers and fathers waving to us from the sidewalk, no warm Poptarts to start the day off right. We also didn't have a brown bag lunch. Dominion was nice enough to cater lunch. Again, this is the Comm school.
But what we lacked in well-wishers and bag lunches we made up for with Discmans (Discmen?) and pillows.
Yes, that's right, one student had walked all the way from home with his pillow tucked under his arm. He said we would all be jealous when he put on his headphones and drifted off comfortably to sleep.
Of course, that didn't stop us from teasing and taunting him the first five minutes of the ride. Maybe things haven't changed much from elementary school after all.
As I struggled to fall asleep in a position that wouldn't leave a permanent kink in my neck, I must admit I looked over at my classmate's pillow with some envy.
It was indeed a rough crowd that morning. Getting up early to ride several hours on a bus is never particularly pleasant, even in elementary school.
But in elementary school, there was no such thing as Thursday night. Well there were Thursday nights, but not like a Thursday night in college.
It's safe to say that at least a third of the bus was still hungover that morning. We even had a few champs who were still a little intoxicated.
As we traveled down McCormick Road to Ivy, the scent of Starbucks coffee was no match for the thick smell of stale beer and last night's 80-proof Vodka that hung in the air. In fact, I'm fairly sure if someone had lit a match during those first 10 minutes, there would have been an explosion at the back of the bus.
By the time we reached Dominion, however, everyone was looking somewhat bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
After all, this was no elementary school field trip. We weren't invited to Dominion to wander around aimlessly with our backpacks, trying to trade a classmate our Oreos for his E.L.Fudge.
Like the good Comm Schoolers that we are, we had out our notepads and pens, poised to take good notes for our semester-long projects.
As on any good field trip, the highlight of the day was lunch. After that, we became more tired and cranky than your average bunch of kindergarteners.
Around 3:30, we re-boarded the bus more tired than we'd been at 8 o'clock that morning. Almost immediately, the quiet hum of spinning CDs filled the bus while its passengers fell back to sleep.
If we remembered anything from our elementary school days it was that naptime is essential. One lucky passenger still had his pillow under his head, and again I was jealous.
The aroma of Starbucks and Smirnoff was gone from the air, thanks to someone opening the emergency hatch on the ceiling of the bus.
A few overachievers read their marketing books, and some even had the strength to sit up and have a conversation. The rest of us crouched in our seats like zombies, doing irreparable damage to our spinal cords in the name of sleep.
As we pulled back into the Comm School, everyone straggled off the bus in search of dinner.
My friend with the pillow, once the envy of the entire bus, caught puzzled looks from passers-by as he walked past the Chapel at dusk with a pillow under his arm.
As our field trip came to an end, it would have been nice to have our moms in their station wagons lining McCormick Road, ready to take us home for a hot meal and T.G.I.F.
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