Since this is the Emerald’s “year in review” issue, this is my “year in review” column. It’s also my last column as a UO student, so I feel obliged to put some sort of punctuation mark at the end of this chapter of my and my peers’ lives — whether that punctuation is a simple declarative period, an enthusiastic exclamation point, or a big question mark. Maybe a string of “?!?!?!” or a bunch of dot-dot-dots that just kinda trail off … into the post-grad future.

It feels somewhat forced to tie a narrative bow around my four years spent here. College seemed more like a collage of unrelated events and tangents and anecdotes. If my college life were a movie, it’d be one of those vignette movies, with a lot of fades and bad banter — more “Rules of Attraction” than “Animal House.”

Cut to a classroom. Cut to a party. Cut to all-nighters in the library. A montage of living arrangements: dorm, house, quad, house. A montage of dorm drinking; late nights at Common Grounds and Carson. Wandering up and down Hilyard as a freshman trying to get into house parties. Complaining about campus Wi-Fi. Long hours in Allen 2.0 working on Gateway projects. Wearing bow-ties and loudly listening to Ke$ha and Waka Flocka. Writing for Flux, Ethos, the Emerald. Football victories and the accompanying revelry. Failing a class in my very first term. Walking 20 minutes every day to and from campus for a year. Drifting away from old friends and toward new ones. Wishing I had done something with my time here, but realizing I had. Fade to black. Credits.

Four years is a strange amount of time: enough to change you in a way, for better or worse, but not really enough for you to learn anything meaningful about yourself or the world. It is easy to mistake the passage of time for progress. After four years at the University of Oregon, I am four years older but not wiser or whatever. I’m still rather uncertain about a lot of things even though I know more than I did four years ago. It can be hard to learn from your life story when you’re an unreliable narrator to yourself. Maybe this recognition is the thing I have learned.

I tend to dislike any kind of nostalgic impulse because nostalgia is dumb and dangerous. Also, it — the word itself — suggests a painful loss, something taken from you by time that you long to have back. Usually this stolen thing is innocence, the opposite of which is experience. The remedy for the ache of nostalgia is to learn from experience, rather than lose from it. Speaking for myself, and maybe for others in the Class of 2013, I don’t quite know what I learned over the past four wonderful, horrible, dizzying, clarifying years here, but I will soon.