Manic Impressive/Anthem for a Doomed Twinkie

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all? -
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

--"Anthem for Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen

Knowing that the end is nigh, that my senior+ year of college has begun and that my days of sitting around and having Doctor Who marathons with the tacit approval of society are numbered, I feel that I should reflect. I came to this town an 18 year old, half excited to go off on this next adventure and half devastated that I didn't end up in England or Wales for school, and I'll be leaving a 23 year old finally on her way to school in England (hopefully) and who's had adventures that 18 year old me couldn't have possibly imagined--not that my life adventures were the stuff of legends or whatever, it's just that 18 year old me, given the opportunity, would have chosen to flee to England, and the possibility of going to Israel wouldn't have even dawned on her. And people who meet me and people who know me keep asking me if I regret my choices, whether coming to this school in the first place or whether dropping out to go to Israel. And that's a complicated question.

Okay, be fair, the nearing the end in itself didn't bring this on; rather, looking around my apartment brought this on. A lot of the stuff decorating my walls, residing in my music collection and sitting on my bookshelf are things that I brought with me to this town as an 18 year old. I still have my Liverpool FC sheets and soccer scarves, my Monty Python crap, and a few comforting books like "The Once and Future King," "Pride and Prejudice" and some Little House books. Not everything's the same though: now I have more versions of the Bible than I know what to do with, books in Hebrew, an Israeli flag hanging, and (more recently) enough Doctor Who DVDs to induce a "David Tennant is unbearably hot" coma. Also, most meaningfully, I now have an Israeli passport, ID and draft papers tucked away in a drawer.

What's striking to me is that, as I prepare to finally get my wish of going to school in England and not return to Israel, I've basically come full circle and returned to 18 year old me. The me that was such a passionate Anglophile that she could recite entire episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, that she made her own Beatles posters, that she forced herself to drink large quantities of tea until she could finally stand the taste, that she would go to pubs in the middle of the night or early in the morning simply to cheer on the English soccer team, that she was obsessed with the Round Table and that she spent an entire year claiming to be Anglican simply because it was English. That version of me wouldn't have recognized the girl who spent so much time at Hillel and (formerly) Chabad, who abandoned everything to live in Jerusalem, and who spent some time running around the Israeli wilderness in an IDF uniform with her face completely covered in mud. "No!" teenage me would have screamed, "If anything your face is supposed to be painted blue, like the Celts!"

Having said that, I am not exactly the same as I was at 18. For a start, I'm fatter. I like hummus now. I can speak Hebrew. I'm no longer an Anglophile, someone who likes things simply because they're English, and instead I simply like a lot of things, many of which just happen to be English or British. But more importantly, I'm less terrified of the world. Okay, that's not true. I'm still absolutely terrified of the world, but I'm better now at just sucking it up. Before I tell you how I coped during my freshman year of college, let me just tell you that it wouldn't have worked during the many times in Israel when I was surrounded by strangers and needed to make a support system for myself immediately.

While in Israel I learned to simply thrust myself into the company of strangers, but in freshman year of college terrified little Sammy carried around a copy of "The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen," a young English soldier in the Great War who died in combat. Absolutely terrified of my new neighbors that I was expected to befriend and dine with, I instead spent mealtimes in the company of good ol' Wilfred. Part of me thought it was amusing to ironically compare my own struggles with strangers to Owen's struggles with gas attacks and deadly assaults, but a larger and more alarming part of me likened our struggles with a complete lack of irony. You can tell that one poem in particular, "Anthem for a Doomed Youth," really captivated me because this page lays flat more easily than all the others. If I remember correctly, I was particularly attached to the word "cattle" because that's exactly how I felt. I felt bitter that I had no choice, that I was being forced to go to school, in a country I didn't want to be in no less, when all I wanted to do (if I remember correctly) was to open a vegan bowling alley in Wales and roam the countryside of England like a gypsy (minus the whole house squatting thing). I was miserable and lonely and frustrated and bitter and I was blaming it on society and my parents for requiring an American college degree, and at 18 I was convinced that Wilfred Owen alone, that doomed youth sent by Mother England to die in a foreign land, he alone could understand what that felt like.

Now of course, as a wizened woman of 22, who was denied jobs in Israel for lack of a degree, who spent time away from the educational universe, now I understand what an idiotic little shit I was. And though I may have felt like I had no choice and that I was surrounded by terrifying soldiers, but I wasn't exactly facing enemy artillery fire. Even now I can barely stand to look at "The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen," because on the front cover I now imagine Wilfred Owen holding back tears caused by my teenage insensitivity, and his picture on the back cover appears to be holding back a smirk caused by my teenage idiocy.

So to go back to the question of whether or not I regret any of my choices that brought me to this school or to Israel or back here..... No. Because without it, I don't know that I would have come full circle back to my true (but more mature) self. Yeah, I'm still a work in progress, but I no longer compare my struggles to those of World War I poets. I'm more prepared than ever to go forth and be awesome. And that's what I plan on doing.