Going Back To College is EXHAUSTING.

When my friends and I were seniors in college, we affectionately referred to ourselves as "SWUGS," or, "Senior Washed Up Girls."

To put it nicely, it was NOT cute. We wore weird outfits to class and to the bar (workout clothes on a good day, full blown sweatpants on a hungover one), ate fried food nonstop, and only talked to the boys we'd made out with as freshman and had, in the course of four years, had basically become like brothers to us. I don't think I brushed my hair or kissed a boy once the entirety of senior spring (with the exception of Spring Break. Obviously.).

#SWUGlife

When my mom came down to DC for graduation, she and I went dress shopping and I came out of the dressing room in a hot pink bandage dress. 

I thought I looked AMAZING, despite the fact that it was senior week and I had been drinking for 8 days (and four years) straight. Looking back, though, I was 15 pounds heavier than normal (due to the beer and fried food consumption that had become the #SWUG way of life) and definitely looked like a neon-colored sausage. 

“She doesn’t normally look like this!” My mom told the lovely young couple next to us. “She’s a senior girl. She’s normally much thinner.” They nodded in agreement, seemingly understanding of the fact that my lifestyle pretty much required me to consume 10,000 calories a day, and the rampant hangovers inevitably prevented me from exercising. 

Regardless of the fact that I spent the whole semester looking like a chubby, unkempt gorilla, it was the best time of my life (probably because I was eating ice cream 3 times a day and going through 9 bottles of wine a week). I lived in a house with my best friends, and we did pretty much WHATEVER we wanted. To this day I’m still too afraid of the Georgetown housing office to put the true details of our debauchery on the internet, but just know that we came very, very close to not being able to walk at graduation. 

This weekend, I went back down to DC for homecoming to find out what its like to be a SWUG who’s three years OLDER than an actual SWUG.

I sent this to a boy on Saturday because I
thought I looked sooo cute. I don't. 

On Friday night, four of my closest friends and I piled into a car with 6 bags of popcorn and some Big Macs (really getting back to our Senior Spring eating habits) and made the trek from New York down to Georgetown. It took us 5 and a half hours, one pit stop to pee in a parking lot and one pretttttyyyy scary accidental detour in Elizabeth, New Jersey, but we made it. We did almost kill each other a few times (mostly over the fact that SOMEONE wasn’t fulfilling her duties as the front seat passenger) but by the time we got to the hotel at 2am we were, as usual, deliriously obsessed with each other and for some reason all speaking in weird accents. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, breeds more inside jokes than a long, tense car ride. 

It was, admittedly, really weird to get to the hotel and only have to share a bed with one other person (considering when we were in Montauk this Summer we slept 19 to a room and I slept on the floor) and to have my own towel that no one else had dried their body with or thrown up on. We did, however, wake up with a 12 hour old Big Mac on the desk, so we haven’t totally changed since college. 

After addressing the rotting Big Mac situation, we went to brunch at a lovely restaurant on M Street with our group of friends like the civilized 24 and 25 year olds that we are. I only had one Bloody Mary. My suggestion to pickup beers at the deli and find a sophomore party to go to before the tailgate got laughed at — apparently, we were too old for that. 

When we got to the tailgate (at 11:35am — more on time than EVER, because we had literally nothing else to do) we promptly realized that we no longer knew anyone who went to college at Georgetown. I recognized two people who were freshman when I was a senior, and even they looked like ancient grownups compared to the 18-year-olds walking around in jean shorts and crop tops. 

One girl walked by in a GO HOYAS bandeau (read: bra pretending to be a shirt), and I pretty much wanted to kill myself. Did I mention I was wearing a sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers? 

Waking up and finding out this was
my Snap story was... tough. 

I spent a large part of the tailgate trying to find beer that wasn’t flat (when did I start caring about that??) and catching up with people who told me they loved my blog, which was AWESOME (seriously, thanks guys — you made my weekend). I also made it a point to apologize to a boy who I thought thought I robbed him senior year, only to find out that my friends made the whole thing up and he had no idea what he was talking about. At one point, I ran into a boy who I briefly dated, and neither one of us recognized or acknowledged each other.  

We spent the rest of the afternoon at the waterfront drinking Dirty Shirley’s (if you don’t know what they are, look it up) and catching up with people who, thank God, graduated around the same time we did. It was around this time that we figured out that 3 years after graduation is really the last time it’s still appropriate to go to homecoming — we were the oldest people there. 

That night, we went to a bar that I could never get into in college because you had to be on a “list,” and I knew 19-year-old me would still be really proud of old, boring, cares-about-the-carbonation-of-her-beer 24-year-old me. I almost ended the night going home with  a guy I had a crush on in college, but jumped out of the moving cab on the way to his apartment and went back to the hotel to order pizza with my friends, instead.

Unfortunately, we fell asleep before the pizza got there. 

The next day, we squeezed all four of us into the back seat of the sedan we’d driven down in — somehow we’d agreed to let our two guy friends come with us, and generously gave them the front seat (you’re welcome, guys) and embarked on the darkest, longest, coziest 6-hour car ride of our life.

I didn't change my outfit all weekend. SWUG me would have been proud. 

Just a girl and her house. We tried to rent it for the weekend, but
considering we almost got evicted on four separate occasions when
we lived there, the landlord turned us down. Rude.