Lake Lag was a real lake in the winter of 2005. It was not very deep. You could walk straight through it, if you didn’t mind taking a disinfectant shower or suffering mutant syphilis. The water was dirty, but from the porch of Lambda Nu (before it was Jerry), all you could see was a wide expanse of sky blue. It didn’t look very shallow from up there. You could grab a lawn chair and set it out on the tiny half-dirt beach and open a good novel and imagine you were anywhere but Stanford. And in the evenings the lights outside of Roble and Suites would reflect dark-orange off the surface of the lake, and the world felt still.

Everybody always misses freshman year. Part summer camp, part booze cruise,part dormcest that feels so right until it turns out so wrong, freshman year looks innocent in hindsight: carefree, devoid of responsibility, bursting with possibility. Staring forward toward the best years of our lives. In the all-frosh dorms there was a vivid sense of living a great adventure, a new discovery around every corner, another Row house throwing a party (back when they threw parties), another classroom, another fountain hop. Sophomore year feels like waking up from a beautiful dream to find that it’s Sunday afternoon, you’re still drunk with an arriving hangover, you lost your keys and your left shoe and your girlfriend’s leaving you for your grandfather. It feels backwards, directionless, even empty. It feels desperately close to real life.

But I loved my sophomore slump. It was a weird and static year, full of long lazy Futon days watching “King of the Hill,” playing “Perfect Dark” on my old N64, filling and emptying my Netflix queue (Now, I barely ever watch movies that aren’t required). In the fall, I went jogging every day, and in the evenings my roommate and I went to the gym. I was going to the gym six days a week. Then I got mono and spent winter quarter beating San Andreas. Sometimes I think I still have mono. That would explain a lot.

I think what I miss most about that year is the indecisiveness. I took the Film Society’s Beginning Film Workshop, had a plan for a long film that went nowhere. My friend and I wanted to start a TV show. We held auditions, no one came, school happened. I finished off a year of Italian with a pass-fail whimper, missing at least half the last quarter, and then decided to go to Berlin. I tried and failed to read “Mason & Dixon.” I flirted with a girl and could’ve sworn we were together until we weren’t. I’m positive it’s my fault, but I don’t remember why. I didn’t do anything really substantive that whole year. Except for “Visions of the 1960s.”

“Visions” was an introductory seminar, the only time I ever dipped a toe into the American studies kiddie pool. I took a lot of IntroSems back in the day. They were more interesting lectures, they satisfied a bunch of GERs and they were full of cute girls. On the first day of class, we had to explain why we were interested in the ‘60s. I said I wished I could have been alive in the ‘60s. I didn’t know shit about the ‘60s. I can remember Professor Gillam smiling a little and nodding his head, probably thinking, “Oh, this one is going to turn very cynical very fast.”

That class did turn me cynical, a little. When you study the ‘60s, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that pretty much everyone was full of bullshit: the LSD prophets, the naive idealists turning into idiot rebels, the tottering liberals, the gluttonous conservatives, the soldiers with ear necklaces and the generals who gave them medals. Before that class, I thought “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was a fun book. Now, I realize it’s just an after-the-fact tragedy, notes from the hell the ‘60s created: the ‘70s.

I remember when someone told me that Hunter S. Thompson died in February of sophomore year. That was the end of youth, especially so soon after the election. For a few months all we ever talked about at EBF was how we couldn’t believe it and how awful Bush was and how much we all missed the ‘90s. After awhile it got depressing and I stopped talking about politics.

In the winter, the rain poured and the Lake swelled. The winter nights were the best. We bought a couple of inflatable rafts, the cheap gray ones on the shelf at Wal-Mart. We named them Duke and Gonzo. It was best at night. You could go out on the lake with a couple paddles and a picnic basket full of cookies, chips, beer, pot. Out there it was international waters. “What are the cops going to do,” we would say, “swim out and get us?” And we floated along in the middle of a five-foot lake, sipping a Miller Lite, three of us crammed into Duke, watching the light fog run over the surface of the water.

Darren Franich no longer dreams; he just watches “The Wire.” Distract him at dfranich@stanford.edu.