Sometimes you can’t escape, and that’s when you envy the hermits of the world.

Like the pepperoncini in the Papa John’s box, you desire to hide behind the giant pizzas of the world. Yet, the wait always comes to a staggering halt after the pizza is gone and someone yells, “Hey, anyone want the hot pepper?”

It’s one of the reasons to come to a large university, really, to blend in and never find a familiar face from the past … but somehow, some way, they always find you.

Even in a crowded restaurant, you can find several familiar faces with other non-familiar faces, kind of like you, only suddenly you feel like your private night is no longer the enigma it was supposed to be and you swear someone just yelled something about a hot pepper.

It fills one with the desire to land in a faraway place, like Athens, Greece, where one can sit in a crowded town square filled with families, gentle winds, shadows, street lights and the scent of unfamiliar food coming from a nearby restaurant. Or on a pier watching boats floating in the setting sun and people laughing in an unknown tongue.

It’s the knowledge that all of the sudden, you’re in reality and the reality is that the world is getting smaller. While most of the time a comforting thought, that surroundings are familiar and known, the restlessness signals a coming change — in this case, graduation, employment, moving, leaving and adjusting, again, to a new life.

It starts with the tension of all there is to do — the cleaning, packing and stuffing of suitcases. It ends with the laughter, tears and frustration at not being able to pack it all in — the ending knowledge that something will have to stay behind.

Then the present comes rushing in with a deafening whack of text books hitting the floor.

How we fit it all in, one will never know. The worry of past and future combined with all the stuff we have to do now — doing homework, going to work, cleaning, eating, sleeping, (and how can it be college if we can’t party with friends on the weekend?) going out, seeing family and (sigh) trying not to absolutely break under the strain of it all.

College students sometimes are looked at as a shabby lot. After all, we don’t have a “real” job, we don’t know what the “real” world is and God forbid we should understand “real” pressure.

This life we lead, with our wanting to be the pizza-center of it all and the hidden hot pepper at the same time, it’s unlike any other. There are we thankful. That we are not in the real world yet — there are we thankful.

But to not understand — then what is this whirlwind we go through everyday? If we don’t understand the stress of work, school and keeping it all together, chances are we’re struggling. But isn’t that learning itself? Before we can have understanding, we have to struggle through the math and Spanish classes of our lives. Isn’t that the “real” world?

The night winds down and bed never looked so good. Yet the textbook stares us in the face, whispering, “You’ll have a quiz on me tomorrow … bet on it …” Choices, choices. Isn’t that real life?

The reality is that the world is getting smaller and choices are getting harder. Strange, aren’t you supposed to get smarter as you get into the real world?

Sometimes the desire to escape from the world comes at the most inopportune, hot-pepper moments. And sometimes that familiar face is the only one you want to see. The hills and valleys of emotion — isn’t that real life?

The change is coming, but dealing with it is part of life, with eating, sleeping, homework and all. And now the time to eat pizza is here, to shine like we know who we are and what we’re doing — even if we haven’t a clue.

“Hey, anyone want a hot pepper?”