What's fun?

Me and Vincent.

I was not well-liked in college. I was not actively disliked either. If anything, I was invisible. I had few friends, kept my head down, all my energies went into my schoolwork. The truth is that I had trouble identifying with the people I went to school with. I thought college was going to be about meeting like-minded intellectuals, people who I would sit with in cafes for hours drinking coffee and talking about art and politics. Instead, the people I met had no interest talking about such things. They all had bored-sounding voices and said things like, "Maaaannnnn, I got so wasted last night."

Such a bored voice came from one of my roommates last night. "You're going to bed already?" The tone was filled with disapproval, and it made me shrivel back ten years to my 19-year-old insecure college self. This girl, a college student from Connecticut, was probably no older than 21.

"Yeah," I said. "I am tired and I did a lot today." It was almost eleven.

"What did you do today?" she asked.

"Well, I went on a walking tour and then I went to the Anne Frank museum, and I don't know, just walked around a lot." My words were met with dumbfounded silence.

"My friends are arriving tonight. Probably after midnight," she said, inspecting her nails. "They're going to want to go crazy tonight."

"Oh, that’s cool," I answered, lamely.

"Do you like traveling all by yourself?" she asked, "I would never be able to do that."

"Yeah," I answered and explained the reasons why. She nodded absently making me feel like I was speaking utter nonsense.

I think there is a reason why I have made no friends in Amsterdam. At breakfast, all these kids want to talk about how messed up they got the night before, and I am sucked back into time to my lonely college days where I always felt like I had to act like that was so cool, and then defend why I wasn't playing a part. No one understood me. It was tiring. I think that is why I studied so much, just so I could get away from these people and have something that made me feel good about myself.

When I think about myself in college, so serious with a nose in a book, I sometimes wonder what I would do if I could do it all over again.

But talking to this girl and mingling with these co-eds made me realize: I would do it all over again exactly the same. Because I didn't mix well with 19-year-olds when I was one, and now, 10 years later, I don't mix well with them either. I am the same person.

While this girl triggered the same insecurities I used to have when I was younger, it's different now. Before, I used to beat myself up about it. Now, I can look at her and think, "you're really not that interesting to me."

It's kind of like this conversation I had with my friend Megan, one of the fun-pigs. She likes to get her drink on and would often invite me out for drinks with her on Wednesdays, but I liked to go to yoga on Wednesdays. I always said no thanks and she would give me a hard time about it but then one day she said, "Everyone has their own definition of fun. Mine is going out for a drink, and yours is yoga." I wish someone would have said that to me in college. It would have saved me a lot of grief.

So I was the first into bed last night, the first to rise this morning. And I did things today I think are fun. Going to the Van Gogh museum. Reading magazines in a book store. Window shopping down the narrow alleyways of Amsterdam. Found and ate a cake that I liked. I planned to go bike-riding but the rain discouraged me. When I saw the girl again today, she having her entire day in coffee shops with her crazy friends, it was easy to shrug my shoulders and think, "you have your fun, I have mine," feeling like the 29-year-old woman I am.

My kind of fun: Window shopping. Who doesn't want a snow doll?