I’m a twenty-something in the prime of my life.

I get to live 500 miles from home, swim a lot, eat a lot, sleep a lot and sometimes go to class. I’ve passed that phase of youthful angst, and I’ve come to realize that this is “our world.”

However, I’m convinced that I’m old, and I have a running list of reasons why I feel that way.

Right now, the background on my desktop is a picture of The Collegian from Nov. 3, 1933, one of the issues that were recovered from the Founders’ Hall fire in the 1950s. When Collegian adviser Matt Tullis told me that he had issues from that far back, I was amazed and intrigued. When I found out that issues even older might be available on microfilm, I was ecstatic.

I use words like “intrigued.” I have worked with microfilm in the past, and can’t wait to work with it again. I would be willing to bet that a good percentage of people reading this article don’t even know what microfilm is.

The other day, in the swim team locker room, I was talking with some of my teammates about something that I don’t remember at the moment, but that isn’t important. Without even realizing it, a few of us simultaneously said that we remembered how something was “back in our day.”

This is our day.

Or at least, it should be.

I have an infatuation with the past, one that I believe is healthy. I like to learn from the past; that’s how I justify it.

My roommate just purchased an electric typewriter. When I came up with the idea for this column, I thought about actually writing the draft on that typewriter.

I actually suggested half-jokingly to Tullis in our advanced reporting and editing class that we should submit a story written on a typewriter. I hope that we actually go through with it.

Then there was the time last Tuesday in the Collegian office when I used our new camera to take pictures of the 1933 Collegian issues. I pressed the shutter button three times in a row, and three times in a row I tried to pull the film advance lever that didn’t exist. You see, I procured a Canon AE-1 Program film camera this summer, and it’s been the only camera that I’ve taken pictures with in a few months. Being a film camera, I was so accustomed to the SLR’s “film” caveats that it took a few shots before I could readjust to the DSLR.

All of this worries me for a reason more complex than you might at first recognize. I think that the heart of this all is that I’m actually afraid of growing up. Somehow, I’m a junior in college right now; somehow I have less than two years left before I have to know what I want to do with my life.

In high school, my lowest grades were in English classes. On standardized tests, the same was true. People have asked me why I decided to major in journalism. I’ve always told them that it’s because I want to satisfy my curiosity, and it’s a field that would allow me to do that. I think that’s true, and definitely a valid reason, but I also think that it has to do with my inherent fear of picking something to do for the rest of my life.

If and when I graduate in a little over a year and a half, I don’t know where I’ll go. I want to get a job driving a tractor-trailer and write about what I see, but that’s just another way for me to escape the world, to put off the inevitable.

I vaguely feel like my time is somehow running out, which is a terrible way of looking at it. You see, I’ve accepted the idea that I’m old. I just don’t like it, not one bit.