From the desk of Ren LaForme

Growing up is a lot harder than I thought. I used to worry about what I would eat in the lunch room at my high school and what to wear in the mornings.

Now I’m making decisions that could affect my life-long relationships and my career.

I’m scared for the future. I’d never admit it to anyone face-to-face, but I am. I’m will graduate in seven months. I have no idea I’m doing after that.

I could apply to graduate schools. My grades aren’t the best — but those are for my psychology major. If grad schools focus on my journalism major, it looks like I’m doing pretty good. And I got a respectable score on the GREs.

But I don’t want to leave my girlfriend to further my schooling. I don’t want us to end up in two different cities. People who give up opportunities for a relationship are stupid — I know — but this girl is the one and I’m not going to let her go. Plus I never really wanted to go to grad school. The whole thing is just a whim for me.

I could also decide to not attend graduate school and travel with her to whichever school she gets into. I really want to get out of the Buffalo area and all of the schools are looking at are in larger cities. It would be fun to live on our own somewhere exciting.

This is the option that will most likely happen. I’ll get a job somewhere — hopefully a writing job — and work while she gets her master’s degree. I like this option because it’s the one we’ve been discussing for a while and I don’t really want to continue schooling at this point.

But this option scares me too.

A lot of the schools she is considering offer internships in far-off places like New Delhi and London. Obviously, I wouldn’t be able to go and I don’t know what would happen to me if I was left alone for 12 weeks or more.

My girlfriend went to Los Angeles over the summer for five days and I almost had a breakdown. It was really hard and I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. It’s not that I don’t trust her — I do. I trust her more than I trust my own family.

I honestly don’t trust myself. I’m pretty needy when it comes to relationships. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I lean far too much on my significant other. I spend all of my time with her and all but ignore my friends. But we both enjoy all of the time spent together so it’s a non-issue.

Of course I would encourage her to take the internship. Journalism is her dream and this would be a career-making experience, and I’m not the boyfriend that holds her from her future.

I just get weird when I can’t see her. I can never seem to find anything to keep myself occupied. When she doesn’t call because she’s busy, it upsets me because it makes me feel unimportant. I’m not sure how I would react if she left for 12 weeks. I feel like I would end up doing something unnecessary to get her attention and act passive-aggressively toward her until I got it.

I don’t want to ruin this. I means too much to me. How do I deal with her being gone?

P.S. This post is a low point for me. I promise to not write anything with so much melancholy in the future.

Nobody likes the GREs. Not even this girl.

I’m not sold on the concept of the Graduate Record Examinations.

I mean, if I was smart enough to make it into college the first time, why do I have to take a test to continue? What more do they want from me?

Do they want me to prove to them that I learned something in college? Or they want me to show that the constant partying and all-nighters at The Spectrum didn’t kill all of my brain cells.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of college students stress over these standardized, bastardized tests. They pour thousands of dollars into courses and prep books and spend hundreds of hours fretting over definitions of words that they will probably never see again – all so they can head in for another round of education.

If grad schools really want students – good students – they should be the ones paying for the GREs, because right now, they are just weeding out the poor kids on the lower rung of the socioeconomic ladder.

Good students should be rewarded with scholarships for GRE courses and be allowed to take the tests for free. If they can earn the right to go to school for free, they should be able to take the tests to get into those schools for free, as well.

But in a perfect world the GREs wouldn’t even exist.

Several studies have shown that standardized tests don’t even measure what they are supposed to measure. Graduate schools should focus on undergraduate performance, internship work and other factors in a student’s career. Why add more pressure to something that is already stressful?

Hey Educational Testing Services, kick the GREs to the curb so students can focus on their senior years as undergraduates instead of studying useless analogies.

Asher Roth loves drinking, among other things.

Asher Roth just pushed his way to the front of my worst concert list.

His performance at Alumni Arena Thursday night was atrocious. Perhaps it was because nobody knows any of his songs except for “I Love College.” Perhaps it was because he danced around like a suburban Eminem wannabe.

Whatever the reason, I’m sorry I attended.

Seeing Asher dancing around the stage was, simply put, pathetic. I have never been embarrassed for an artist before today – he dances worse than I do, and that’s saying a lot.

But honestly, it wasn’t all bad. I should probably contact Guinness because I have never seen so many skankily-dressed young women in one place. I took great delight in watching them wriggle around to a white college dropout with a baggy T-shirt.

The pep assembly portion of the evening was also great fun. I haven’t been to one since high school. It really made me reminisce of the days when I had no style and nobody liked me.

Some things always stay the same.

Oh, and seeing Student Association President Hassan Farah onstage with his estranged vice president and treasurer was interesting. It bumped up the squirm factor a little bit, and I’m always in favor of that.

Thanks, SA, for setting up another awesome event.

Asher Roth may love college, but I do not love Asher Roth.