Hello. Merry finals season. Happy Thanksgiving. Merry Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa. Happy New Year. Good winterim. The next time you hear from us, all of this will be over, grades will be in, turkeys eaten in celebration of things that should not be celebrated, presents unwrapped, resolutions made and resolutions shattered.
As hard as it is to believe that this term is coming to a close, it’s also pretty easy to believe. By now we’ve noticed it happens every 10 weeks. We once thought that these weekly reflections might help us process things better, so that we wouldn’t be standing here now wondering what we did with all this time. But suffice it to say that senior fall is not the time to process, but the time to deny like one’s life depends on it.
We’ve gotten still older. We won’t deny that. We feel it in our knees and backs and the fact that the entirety of the senior class seems to have had a meltdown over the past few days. Wiser, no. We don’t feel that anywhere. But this week, we stumbled upon some rare opportunities to redeem ourselves, albeit in very minor ways.
Seanie: Monday night, I had resigned myself to the near all-nighter. I sat in the library with Amanda and one of our best friends, feeling the exhilaration that the early hours of an all-nighter inexplicably give me. They were so common to me freshman year that I once, during the course of one, wrote a manual for best practices in pulling all-nighters. I don’t know.
Then the news came, and it bowled me over: Amanda figured out what I was working on and, incredulous, told me that the assignment for the class we share was not in fact due the next day, but six days later.
An error in syllabus reading — or academic karma in general — had never before come out in my favor, and I felt saved. I recognized this as a special opportunity to do some good. I got ahead on the assignment anyway. I did leisure reading. I contacted old friends. I got eight hours of sleep. I ate a sit-down breakfast the next morning.
These are lies. I stayed in Novack. Until 4 a.m. And by the time I realized what I had done, it was too late. Amanda was wearing a fur coat and laughing like a baby and I was Google searching “weirdest performance art.” Don’t search this. It is too much to handle. Our friend was on her third pack of gummies and, wearing a hairnet on her face, referring to herself as the Grinch who stole Christmas. The most common advice I heard freshman year was the whole “a great late-night conversation with a friend is more important than homework, be a yes person” spiel. ’17s, this is good, but do not use it to enable yourself to stay up so late for no reason that you make yourself nauseated and have to sprint to class the next morning like an anxious high schooler.
Amanda: I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that I do not yet have a job and therefore am indefinitely, disastrously broke. As a result of this, I have had to prioritize certain necessities, like food, gas and a bus ticket to the airport over things that are more extraneous in nature, like a haircut.
So I found myself in a bit of a pickle when I realized that I was in dire need of said haircut, but had neither money nor an abundance of time. Lucky for me, this realization was quickly followed by another: I have scissors, I have friends and I have extra DBA to offer. This is the story of how the kitchen in my house doubled as a hair salon.
An hour later, after various friends chanted “This is a bad idea. This is a bad idea. This is a REALLY bad idea,” my volunteer hairdresser and I were able to prove them wrong. There was only one rogue chunk that fell victim to my friend getting a bit feisty with the scissors. For a free haircut, that was a sacrifice I was willing to make.
Disappointingly, though my appearance had been altered and I felt like a new person, my habits did not undergo any sort of transformation that would warrant me calling myself one. A few days later, after the aforementioned unnecessary all-nighter, I woke up so late that I sprinted to class only to watch Seanie sprint in a minute behind me. But people have liked the haircut, so in a way it still felt like a new leaf, and I’d like to think that counts for something.
So for now, we bid you adieu. As for the wisdom for which we still wish and wait, there’s always next year. And for the first time in the past 21 years, we alarmingly have literally no idea what 2014 will bring. As a basketball legend once said: “This is the start of something new.”
This is not high school nor do we play basketball nor is this a musical nor are we happy that Troy Bolton is the person we’ve decided to quote. But whatever. If the boy’s right, the boy’s right. And he is.
Yours in good tidings,
Lucy & Ethel