School starts for me on Thursday. This is my senior year, a year like no other, I'm told, before or since. Some days I get excited about that. Other days I really don't care.

The thing is, this is the end of my last summer, the final days of a hallowed tradition of laziness. As the hours tick by, I am more concerned about the passing of my youth than the fact that I have a stack of scholarships to apply for.

Of course, there is work. There will always be work. But you can only call so many customers assholes behind their backs and assure so many customers that their pizza will be right there and clean the same things over and over again so many times before you start to wonder what else is out there.

That's when I get excited about senior year, knowing that, in a year, I'll be well on my way to the future, a step further than I am now. I just have to get through one more year of the unique brand of fun and excitement you can only find in a public high school, and then I'll have my freedom. Mmm, freedom.

So I'm sitting here on the last Monday afternoon of the last summer of K-12 career, listening to Filter on the internet and wishing I was running around at Six Flags.

I have a friend whose brother died last week. It was an accident. It was drug-related. I would be lying if I said it wasn't an overdose, but it wasn't a suicide, either. Anyway, I only met this guy once, and yet I feel an incredible sense of loss.

It's not that I am particularly sad, because I didn't know him that well. I'm sad, yes, and I extend my sympathies to the family. This isn't about being heartless. I think it's that I feel...mortal.

He was only nineteen, just two years older than me. It was a freak accident, a bizzare situation. It could have happened to a lot of people. But it happened to someone who was home from college in between his freshman and sophomore years, someone who had his whole life ahead of him. Why?

It's not a fun question to answer, nor is it an easy one. I was reading an interview with my hero Anderson Cooper last week in which he talked about his brother Carter's 1988 suicide.

In it, he says, "I looked for a why -- why some people starve and some thrive, why some survive and some die. Now I'm trying to figure out how to live in a world where there isn't always a why."

Profound. A life lesson learned at 17. Although, I learned something else this week, too: there are some lessons we have to learn for ourselves, that no matter how many other people tell us, we won't understand, except on our own time.

Anyway, school starts on Thursday, and Target has spiral notebooks on sale, ten for $1, so I'll see you guys next week.