and i cringe

When I try to recall what undergraduate life was like, it is almost as if another person lived it, and not the current me.

On a large rug on the second-floor of my family's apartment, one of our many transient dwellings, photocopies of readings in six different subjects lay around me. I'm pillowed on my hands clasped behind my head, seeing nothing but white ceiling, ignoring the muffled voices of my family in the other room. At almost nine in the morning, Mom is dressing up my two younger brothers to take them to Grandma's house, where they can play till Mom fetches them after five.

Yes, Mom, I'm leaving for school after I finish typing my term paper.

I lock the door behind them, fix myself a cup of coffee, and go back upstairs, to my room, to continue staring at the ceiling. I brush aside some papers with my foot, to make a larger space to lie down on, and fight the drowse-inducing cadence of very faraway sounds.

I'm a philosophy major asking the ceiling why I am academically required to try and find the central algorhythm of all knowledge. I don't even have a girlfriend.

How did I manage to wake up and sleep feeling all important, all throughout junior and senior years, as if my thoughts, which were restated echoes of dead white male Anglo-Saxon thinkers, rippled forth and changed the core of things? Back then, I couldn't even fry an egg without piercing the yolk.