Up to this point, there have been two constant sources of reprieve in my life: chocolate milk and ice cream. As far back as elementary school, I remember racing to the milk cooler to make sure I got a chocolate milk carton before they ran out. White milk just never provided that same soothing, stomach-coating feeling that chocolate milk did. Some may consider a chocolate milk fetish childish. I revel in mine. On most days, I will walk into Walgreens and buy a quart and drink it casually over the early afternoon. And nothing caps a good, hard bike ride or run like a chocolate milk, banana, yogurt and frozen blue and black berry smoothie.
Ice cream wasn't about to be outdone though. Throughout my childhood, regardless of the season, I would end most nights with a big bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup. It was borderline ritualistic: three-to-four scoops, heavy on the syrup, wait about five minutes for it to soften, then mash the ice cream and syrup all together into a perfect puree. Only then was it ready to eat. The start of summer also meant Sunday night family trips downtown to get mint chocolate chip waffle cones at the local ice cream parlor. Freshly made cones loaded with local, home-made, high-fat ice cream made for beautifully decadent summer stomach satiation.
This isn't a ""I am graduating, I don't have a clue what the world wants me to do"" column or ""I am a senior, let me give you the do's and don'ts of college"" advice column. I already graduated once and did the real world freak-out, and I am still going to be here one more year. Also, I've never much believed in the power of advice. Tolkien probably said it best in ""The Lord of the Rings"": ""For advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.""
No, this isn't one of those columns because, funny enough, it does all seems to work out in the end. Yet I would be remiss not to reflect back a little, seeing as this will almost assuredly be my last column and my last foray into journalism. As I have grown older, my life has taken me on many tracks and byways, each one helping me make some type of headway on this pursuit of progression that we call the game of life. I think back on my time here in Madison, which seems like a life unto its own. I arrived a baby-faced, stubborn know-it-all from a small town in northern Wisconsin who was afraid to challenge his ill-informed assumptions. I hadn't traveled much outside of the state, hadn't thought much about the antecedents to my perspectives, hadn't inspected many of the bigger questions of what it means to progress into the world.
And I look at myself now and see a completely different person. Starkly, radically different. Some of it is due to age, books and professors, some of it is due to travel, friends and mistakes. More than anything though, I think I re-learned how to experience life again as I once did, as that kid who rushed to make sure he got his chocolate milk and who routinely ate his nightly ice cream in a perfect puree. It is hard to keep everything in perspective when there are so many things that are supposed to be within our purview. It is a daily exercise of mind and will. It is so easy to get wrapped up in ourselves and these life pursuits, the pursuits we have been told we ought be advancing towards, ""the orgasmic future that year by year recedes before us,"" only to be disappointed when the future becomes the present and it does not provide the satisfaction we were hoping for.
So why do I like chocolate milk and ice cream? Because they continually provide me little bursts of satisfaction in the chaos of our prolonged Odyssean adventure. They are a reminder of childhood indulgences and adult yearnings. Plus they are dairy, and as any good Wisconsin kid knows, cow products equal goodness.
As Euripides once said, ""Our lives ... are but a little while, so let them run as sweetly as you can, and give no thought to grief from day to day. For time is not concerned to keep our hopes, but hurries on it business, and is gone.""
