Here I sit, my pen vying for equal time in my hand as some Connecticut School of Broadcasting flunkie blabbers on and on and my glass of Diet Coke wordlessly whispers of its passage from fizzy to flat. “What am I, Sam?” I beseech of my cat, who is disdainfully picking over the remains of his Tuna Entree and eyeing the purposeful plummeting of the sky’s best snowflakes with the vigorous venom of a cat grown old enough to truly despise winter.

“Ahh,” he hisses, lidded eyes coming to bear on my vaguely despondent figure. “You are, oh Grasshopper, what you accomplish. A man (or, in your case, a boy) can only be measured by his achievements.”

“Sam, I’d buy it if you were a Siamese, but let’s face it. You’re a Domestic Shorthair rescued by me from a West Side alley in New York. Now come on. I need this for my Beloit essay.”

“Okay, Charles. You want to know what you are? You are an insignificant eighteen-year-old kid pretending to be an adult, trying to write about some aspect of your rather short life and make it seem not only interesting, but significant, too. No offense, but the best thing you ever did in your life was to adopt me.”

“That’s not quite true, Sam, but you do have a point.” Sam disdainfully shook his left front paw and resumed glowering at the snowflakes’ gently offensive descent.

Snowflakes notwithstanding (for I in my youth still enjoy them greatly), my snide little fur-face is right. As my pen hand evicts my head and my pen begins to romp across the paper, I look back on my life and find a notable paucity of great achievements and memorable experiences. I see, complete with warm feelings of triumph and heightened self-esteem, the earning of my driver’s license, my first date, my first (and only) sack in a football game, and other memorabilia of my not-so-distant youth. Not to say that I’ve had an uneventful life, but there isn’t too much to brag about.

This is where what Sam just said comes into play. One simple word which explains my aforementioned paucity of experience. That word, if you have not already guessed it, is eighteen. After all, I’ve been on this earth for but one-quarter of my expected life span, and it’s only in the past few years that I have gained leave to explore the world’s virginal vistas, so it’s no surprise to me that my past is far from chock-full of wondrous life experiences.

Picture if you will the world reduced to the comparative microcosm of a chicken coop, perhaps with Sam playing a role as the Grim Reaper, or the threat of Communism, or the Fuller Brush salesman, or some other such menacing apparition. Following through with the analogy, I have been spending my time in the eggshell of high school. I am soon due to be released into the training ground of the coop’s floor, which serves as a college designed to prepare me for the dangers, inconsistencies, and complexities of the adult world outside the barnyard.

While the snowflakes remorselessly mount their attack against my poor, aged cat, I ponder the infinite mysteries of college. Why college? Sam is remarkably uncommunicative, his ears flattened with rage at the sky’s vile behavior, and refuses to answer my query.

Sitting here in the kitchen, all the wrong reasons for college are readily apparent, and I chant aloud of money, power, prestige, and the endless others that send people scurrying to the shelter of higher education in the hope that one will show some sign of earning my feline mentor’s stamp of approval. Nothing. He sits on the window like a stone meatloaf. Glumly, I stare into the oven, my wave of inspiration having crested and broken on the beach of writer’s block.

Now, though, I feel as if I’m being watched. Slowly, I turn to the window and gaze into two deep, burning liquid eyes. Sam has abandoned his snowflakes for my problem.

“You never could see the forest for the trees, could you? What is it that you were complaining about earlier? A lack of experience, wasn’t it? Now then, tell me what college is for.”

As the words sinuously roll of his tongue, I realize how totally correct he is. I need college to learn, not how to read or add, but how to live.

College is the beginning of real life, of life outside the chicken coop. And it is where I will begin my life.