Column: Like you own the place

I spent a few minutes last week looking up plane tickets for a possible trip to watch a University of Wyoming football game this fall. I haven’t been able to go the past couple years and I really want to make it to a game. Until 2015 I had been to at least one game a season since I can remember, but I’m a bit too far away to make a regular trip these days.

I was looking a hotels and restaurants in Laramie, WY and I suddenly became flooded with memories of my first year of college. It was a wonderful experience to get nostalgic and think about some of the beautiful memories, and at the same time think about how stupid I was at 18.

When I first stepped foot on campus I thought I knew it all. I was standing on the deck of the Titanic screaming to the small college town that I was the king of world. My roommate and cousin Zac and I didn’t walk into the dorms the first day like we owned it; we walked in like we didn’t care who owned it.

I would quickly learn that I was not the king of anything, and I knew very little. After a few weeks of doing whatever I wanted and perhaps neglecting my studies a little bit, I realized that I better stop missing class. I also figured out that when you are out on your own, there are no parents to pay for your food. I had a meal plan that was paid for, but cafeteria food isn’t the greatest thing.

I craved pizza, burgers, tacos and steak, but that was not going to happen. Zac and I would spend hours talking about prime rib like we were on death row and it would be our last meal.

I was a class clown in high school and figured I could once again have people in stitches in Laramie. That rarely happened. The first class I walked into was in a large lecture room with probably over 200 other students. I was a small fish in a big pond now. There would not be much time for classroom shenanigans. They would still happen, but not on the same scale as my earlier years.

One of the first classes I had was Agroecology. I was really bad at Chemistry and wasn’t a fan of Biology, so when I was picking classes this sounded like an interesting idea. I walked into the first day of the class with my hair dyed red, a Pearl Jam Shirt, a pair of plaid shorts and Doc Marten boots. I took a seat and glanced around. I really felt out of place.

The first thing the professor did was ask everyone in the packed lecture all to stand up if they were a Agriculture major. Everybody but me stood up. He than had me stand up in front of the class, and I was the only one not wearing cowboy boots. That was an embarrassing moment because he singled me out, but I stuck with the class, met some really great people, and actually learned a quite a bit about seeds.

There were so many learning experiences that first year, and I’m probably lucky I didn’t end up thrown of the University with some of the stupid things we did.

Living on the 11th Floor in the biggest building in Wyoming and having a golf bag full of balls was a horrible combination. Those things would bounce so high and looked like they would make it to Nebraska.

I’m going to enjoy taking a trip to Laramie, but I’m going to enjoy doing it knowing I still probably don’t know much, but I can probably pay for pizza, burgers, tacos and steak. Well, maybe not the steak. Zac is a lawyer now, maybe he can get us a few huge cuts of prime rib.