Cheese and Truth

     As I search for the proper direction in which to take my personal essay, I can't help but begin to feel a bit philosophical, nostalgic, and sentimental. Of course, the written product of such sentiments can be a bit cliche or cheesy - but if my senior year of high school taught me anything, it was that cliches are essentially laws of the human experience. The law of gravitation is scientific law because it has been proven through experiment. Likewise, if certain expressions and sentiments continue to arise in certain situations, could we not call these laws as well? Of course, I am talking about the various cliches that we all know and love, and are afraid to write about for fear of being simple, unimaginative, or cheesy.

     Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a propensity for incorporating much more than the percent daily value of cheese into my social relations. Some people avoid them at all costs, but I love the ironic predictability that cliches bring into our interactions with others and the world around us. Like it or not, cliches become cliches because they hold true across time and cultures. Essentially laws of our social existence, they aren't going away any time soon, so why not embrace them instead of avoiding them?

     The last thing that I wanted my personal essay to become was a story of my quest for self in college. We all know the story: college is a time for self discovery. At first, I aimed to blast this old adage to smithereens with my essay. Why should I need to "find myself"? I am me, I am here, I know my thoughts and why I do what I do, what is there to find? But the more late-night conversations I hold with friends who I didn't know two or three weeks ago, the more new people I meet, and the closer I get to my fourth week away from home, the more I realize that college really is a voyage of self discovery! Maybe not "finding yourself" per se, but finding out what you know, what you want to learn, and what you believe. I've begun to write about just what I wanted to avoid writing about - but if it's really me, really what I've been thinking about - why not write about it?