As I settled into Baker Library, strung out on Red Bull and EBA's, furiously procrastinating the inhumane amount of finals work assigned to me by my masochistic professors, I yearned for winter break like Richard Simmons yearns for a new pair of spandex. Ah, nothing to do and all day to do it.
I would return home, granite in my veins, a leader who had guided great corporations and worked to wipe out poverty and disease. Women everywhere, donning checkered blue-and white bonnets and wielding rolling pins, would stand on their porches to watch me as silent tears gently meandered the topography of their worn faces. My mother, she would sweep me into her arms and in return I'd casually toss her a scroll of parchment. "Proof to the Riemann Hypothesis, Ma. Real doozy kept me busy the whole train ride." I fancied myself a Castiglione courtier except with better hair.
Too bad we're happiest when dreaming about future happiness. Winter break finally arrived and my fantasy imploded. My mother's first words to me: "You look like a bum. Don't you bathe?"
In my room that night, I'd expected to be overcome with a flood of childhood memories and romanticized pathos. Instead I felt nothing, empty. Something was askew. Had my bookshelf been reorganized? Part of me had hoped everything would look completely different maybe even a faux fireplace for the correct milieu a physical transformation of my old stomping grounds that would reaffirm my inner metamorphosis.
I was as disappointed as I'd been after watching Godfather Part III. My house was no longer my home, and after only ten weeks, Dartmouth had not yet filled the gap.
I felt betwixt and between independence and dependence, living in pseudo-adulthood, simultaneously a cumbersome obligation to my parents and a liberated individual. Indeed free to transpose my chores and worries onto my parents I spent days playing Xbox, speaking in horribly annoying accents and wearing my tattered baby blanket across my shoulder like a toga.
Meanwhile, perhaps unfairly, I deemed myself unduly repressed by my parents' incessant yammering: "Fix your hair, use a napkin, put a cover on that, WEAR A JACKET! No, you can't take the car out tonight." I felt bipolar. My self-image alternated arbitrarily between contemporary Henry David Thoreau and post-season three George Costanza.
The situation with my friends was similar. Although I'd half expected one of them to become the archetypal activist who'd wear TOMS Shoes and lecture incessantly about fair trade chocolate, everyone was the same.
Still, without the regimented lattice of the high school social scene, dodgeball Wednesdays and parties on the weekend, we were self-conscious of how to spend time together. We drank Starbucks Caramel Macchiatos, wore scarves and discussed how pedestrian everything is network television, hah! What a depraved and egregious transgression of taste and decency until, bored by the charade, we watched The Office.
Ultimately, in many ways my vacation home from college was like my first kiss, anticipated with pleasure, experienced with unease, and remembered with nostalgia. Despite all the awkward psychoanalysis, contradiction of identity and grandiose expectation, I had a wonderful winter break. After the adjustment and stress concordant with freshman fall, the opportunity to play board games with family, catch up with home friends and atrophy my mind on a steady diet of B-list movies was worth all the (well deserved) disillusionment.
And besides, I think it's smart to save the ticker tape parade for summer vacation when I'm tan.
