Welcome back to the spin cycle that is the Vanderbilt school calendar. It’s time for Freshman Year: The Sequel. Hopefully it won’t turn into a trilogy. After the absolute madness of finals season, we all got three weeks of nothing but food, sleeping in, and (I really hope) no 8 AMs. With some luck, maybe you didn’t even have to be productive. Sadly, however, that time is no longer. We must bid adieu to the days where we didn’t have to hear the horrible ba-donk notification of Duo Mobile asking if it was really us trying to log onto Brightspace. The era during which you didn’t have to show your ID to a security guard every night just to get into your room has come to an end. Ladies and gentlemen, break is over. Womp womp.
There were a bunch of things I missed over break, chief among them being Taco Mama and that one really cheerful cashier who works at Rand. You know who I’m talking about. Squirrels abiding over their trees by night, Zeppos tower in the distance, and the square breakfast potatoes from Commons became my Roman Empire. There even came a point where I started missing Diermier’s occasional email rants about why we shouldn’t have dropped in those rankings. The constant beeping of construction was lost to my ears, and the maze of Stevenson remained untraveled. Treks to and from Blair were mere memories over the course of those three weeks, with one of my favorite activities becoming a faint evocation, a mere whisper in my mind.
Some of the things I didn’t miss, however, included having to actually use my brain to function, as well as keeping track of how many meal swipes I had left. Life is so much easier when you can just wake up, go downstairs, and shovel cheez its in your mouth until there’s either none left or you get yelled at by your dad. Other things I felt no reminiscences towards were as follows: having to climb down a ladder every morning, patting my pockets every 5 seconds to make sure my room key was still there, and I certainly didn’t miss adhering to a bedtime.
Finally, the amount of things that I had forgotten how to do here are kind of embarrassing. I got borderline lost on the way to the bookstore last Tuesday, and I somehow didn’t remember that Commodore Cash was a thing? Coming back and having to kind of re-learn all my old habits felt really weird. I was almost proud of the fact that I had to think to remember what my Brightspace password was.
Regardless of how much you missed this place that we call school, it’s hard to not admit that we are so back. MCL is so back. My favorite people are so back. Life is so back. Here’s to a good second half.