An Hour Behind

I've crossed a great deal of the country this year for the sake of school spirit, numerous times having trudged up the hill to the loading dock of the Petersen Events Center in the middle of the night, sometimes to be crammed into that bus for 10 hours or more, other times to enjoy a 30 minute ride to the airport where a chartered plane, free food, and in-flight movies await. The buses, noisome and designed to deprive one of any hope of sleep, and the planes, big and intimidating, having the power to make you feel that way too--these things are indescribable to outsiders.
I've learned a lot about myself on the trips that I've taken this year, and although that sounds far too common to mean anything, I encourage you to think about how many thoughts are thought when one has prospect for nothing but 10 hours of road or 5 hours of sky. Spans of time like that allow you to think in the way that makes you forget what song just played through your headphones or that you were even listening to music in the first place.
Of course, not all the travel is silent. Stories are told, jokes are made, and tension builds more than occasionally, as so many explosive personalities are bound to conflict with one another when contained.
And when half the miles have finished accumulating, we become middlemen in our own lives, looking back on the ridiculous past, trying to decide if the events gone by should make us laugh or make us cry. Or maybe we look to the travels ahead, trying to decide how best to avoid the tears of the past, even though we know that they're coming anyway. We know we have to get back on that bus or that plane, no matter what happens today or what happened yesterday. And the best way to make these subsequent hours of transit worth enduring is to fill the present to the brim with memorable experiences, whose tales can be told and retold without loss of splendor or spontaneity.
So I'm sitting on this couch on the second floor of the Sheraton Hotel in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, thinking over my adventures of the past few nights, and I call them adventures, even though I may not have ventured very far. Indeed, most nights involved the dice game, rows of people lined up, facing each other across an ironing board placed between the beds, and a flat screen TV set to ESPN and angled just right so that all could witness the glory that is March Madness. And I'm pretty sure that my initial assumption was correct: Oklahoma sucks. But if I had to be in this wretched pit of desolation that God has somehow forgotten, this is exactly the set of circumstances I'd choose. No matter what happens tonight, I'll get on that plane knowing that in some small way, I'll never be the same. I'll look down on the ever-shrinking ground of this God-forsaken hellhole knowing that I've collected a few more stories that'll get me by when I feel like I've got no more stories left to gain, and I'll look down and smile at this suckfest of a city knowing that I experienced all of this with and for the University of Pittsburgh. Hail to Pitt, for You have given me more than that for which I asked and more than I could have imagined, and these gifts shall endure far longer than I.