When I started looking at colleges a bunch of years ago, I wanted a place where I could wrestle, use my writing skills and set myself up for a job after graduation.

I also one other very important criteria – distance. I wanted to move as far from Baltimore as I could.

That’s not entirely true because I didn’t ever consider moving to the west coast or anything like that, but I definitely wanted to get some distance from my hometown.

I had no problem with my family so that didn’t drive me away. I just wanted a fresh start. I didn’t have much of a social life in high school and wanted to go several hundred miles away to begin tha next chapter of my life.

I ended up in the northwest part of Pennsylvania at Allegheny College. I thought back to the whole process of ending up there the other night on my way to an alumni event the college held in Baltimore.

When I left home that fall, I had no idea what to expect. I had achieved the goal of going where no one knew me, but I didn’t know how I would react.

I had attended private schools my entire life. Someone always told me what to wear each day. In parochial school, I had a uniform. Things changed in high school a little, but I still had to wear a coat and tie each day.

At college, I could roll out of bed a few minutes before my 8 a.m. economics class, which conveniently took place in the building next to my dorm, and go to class pretty much in the clothes I slept in. I loved it.

Besides the conveniences that spoke to my inner slug, I also started to develop a set of friends who would help me grow into the person I am today. So you can blame them.

Allegheny had a unique rythym to its days and nights. I could always count on good gossip in the library, running into friends as we checked our mailboxes for care packages from home and the inimitable Meadville weather.

The nostalgic side of my brain drifts back to these days more and more. I have started to re-connect with some friends through e-mail and things like facebook. We have drifted to different places across the country – and in some cases across the globe – but we still have those shared connections of our freshman dorm, the corner store that had the beat iced tea (and lemonade for non-tea drinkers like me), and far too many weekend nights letting loose at fraternity parties.

While we often talk about the good old days, talk often drifts to who has kids and how we’re trying to avoid the fact that we all will turn 40 soon if we haven’t.

I know that these kinds of things would have happened regardless of where I went to college, but I always wonder if my connection would have been as deep somewhere else. It’s just funny that I wanted to go far away, but ended up feeling right at home.