I flew over Stanford the other day. I had visited a friend, my freshman year roommate, who is currently training in Southern California with the U.S. National Women's Water Polo Team for the '08 Beijing Olympics. On my flight back, lo and behold, Stanford's sprawling, green campus lay directly below my tiny oval window.

There was the Dish, pointing directly upwards and nestled like a robotic flower in those rolling, russet foothills where I had gone for an afternoon jog on so many different afternoons. There was Roble, my freshman dorm, where I met my water polo superstar along with so many other kindred spirits with whom I shared the trials and tribulations of higher education. It was where I got my heart broken and my eyes opened, where I actually learned to appreciate my parents.

There was the bright, pearly, new Stadium, where I watched this year's Big Game, and where, in the older, ricketier stadium I had watched two others. Last June, it was where I Wacky Walked, a wonder of wonderful traditions where creativity, costumes and joy beautifully collided for just over an hour during one beautiful, Palo Alto day.

There were glittering rectangles of blue, where I had gotten both sunburned and rained on while watching my roommate play so many of her water polo games. There was the diving well, where I had watched, with utter stupefaction, a bestie of mine throw himself off a high-in-the air bendy metal board with unreal corporeal precision.

The Quad was perhaps the easiest building to spot, with its dominating centrality. It is to where I repeatedly and recklessly biked in order to listen to so many intelligent men and women share things they knew. It was where, under a full moon, I kissed my fair share of senior boys. And then my fair share of freshman ones. There, on the northeast side, was the History Corner, where I took my first Freshman Seminar, where I was tricked by the Chappie into showing up for, I soon learned, a fake Napoleon Dynamite II screening. (They showed turtles having sex until I, and all the other three hundred or so hapless and credulous moon-boot loving students, stormed out angrily.) It is where the doors are always unlocked for a 2 a.m. frisbee initiation or an isolated study. It's where I watched movies at all hours of the night on the big, classroom pull-down screens with roommates, friends from home, and boys I liked.

Scattered around the southern half of campus are the glittering, oh-so-immaculate emerald jewels of the golf course, where, after completing Beginning Golf, a friend and I played the back nine during the Student Twilight tee time. We never got close to par, lost four balls each, had to walk two holes because we were backing up the course, and took so long the sprinklers doused us at Hole 17 (we valiantly played though, nonetheless.)

Presiding over the green grass and red roofs is Hoover Tower, in all of its phallic magnificence. I sometimes still call the tower "Banana Pancake," which, after completing a re-naming, escape-those-linguistic-limitations exercise in Mechanical Engineering 101, our teacher revealed had been her long-time alternate name for the building.

And there was Mirrielees, looking like a flattened tripod, where I live now, as I finish my, yes, fifth and final year of undergrad. It is where I tried to do everything I hadn't in the first four, where every day I get more nostalgic and sad about what I have here and what I am leaving behind. It is where my voice, I think, has become the most strong and clear. And it is where, in two short weeks, I will drive away from half a decade of the great times, long nights, and tremendous people.

But as I landed down in SFO, I'll admit a little misty-eyed, I realized that my time here at this marvel of resort, where I have been pathetically spoiled and allowed every opportunity, has provided me with my own all-too-high, bendy board from which I am ready to dive headlong into all the rest that is to come.