Happy belated New Year, faithful Cav Daily readership! I know I’m a few weeks late, but let’s pretend you just finished ringing in 2009. To refresh: a ball dropped, glasses clinked, that song that no one knows the words to was played and you laughed at how cold the people on TV looked. Remember? Good.
The new year can mean a lot of things — fresh starts, resolutions, champagne hangovers, best-of-2008 lists. I won’t bore you with my version of the latter, but here’s the short list: go see “Slumdog Millionaire,” download some Frightened Rabbit and Fleet Foxes and be thankful that 2008 was the year of Tina Fey, not whatever Kardashian or Simpson like the tabloids would have you believe.
For returning college students like ourselves, the new year means a new semester and the difficult task of getting back into the academic groove after holiday food comas and post-holiday ennui. It’s another season of ISIS blackouts, last-minute course action forms and depressingly expensive trips to the University Bookstore. It’s replacing football with basketball and autumn with winter — unless you’re in Cabell Hall, in which case it’s always summer.
As a fourth-year student, the dawn of 2009 is somewhat tainted by that oppressive, all-consuming fear of what happens after graduation. It feels a bit like watching an M. Night Shyamalan movie: You think you might be moving toward something scary and exciting (or perhaps exceedingly dull), but right now you’d rather just hit the pause button and grab a snack.
It’s a time when even the most confident of undergrads develop paralyzing self-doubt and murderous hatred for those either young enough to delay such decisions or smug enough to parade their so-called “life plans” around. We can’t be blamed for our actions against them.
To postpone the inevitable, we tend to sink into reminiscence. We develop overblown nostalgia for the recent past, for both our childhoods (hey, remember the Internet?) and our time at U.Va. (hey, remember the Lawn?). We sift through Facebook photos of first year like widows perusing their wedding photos, grieving a time of innocence and carefree days. Sounding more like grandparents than twentysomethings, we gripe about “kids these days,” remembering a time when the raciest thing Britney Spears did was bare her midriff, when you needed film to take a picture, when the height of fashion was scrunchies and stirrup pants.
We are not, of course, old. Don’t go checking the price of Botox just yet. But filing another year away makes us feel this way, especially as we move toward a moment when the bubble of college life will burst. For those of us on the brink of becoming real people (or graduate students), looking back is sometimes the only way we can bear moving forward. We rehash memories from 2008, because looking at 2009 requires putting on a certain set of blinders — ones that don’t see past May 17. This, thankfully, is what I’m about to do right now. Enough of all this end-of-days talk.
There are lots of things I’m looking forward to in 2009, though graduation won’t be among them until I have a job or one of those “life plans” people are always talking about. First up is today’s inauguration — a ceremony about embarking on a four-year journey instead of leaving one behind, a celebration infused with hope instead of anxiety. Then there’s Spring Break and the relative ease of a 12-credit semester, plus turning the nicely symmetric age of 22.
There are pop culture phenomena to be anticipated as well — this year’s “Dark Knight,” “Gossip Girl,” “Iron Man” and “Womanizer.” The penultimate season of “Lost” begins tomorrow, sure to blow our minds just as much as ever. My limited comprehension of the show disappeared with the island, but I still love it like Desmond loves Penny. Surefire blockbusters like the sixth “Harry Potter” and the long-awaited “Watchmen” will finally be released this year, provided further problems or legal battles don’t get in the way. In the realm of music, I’m personally keeping an eye out for new albums from Bon Iver, Neko Case, the Decemberists and Wilco.
The blinders are working so far, right? 2009 looks far brighter and far less taxing when you remove any and all deadlines or life decisions from the picture. Like a 4-year-old playing hide and seek, I’m thoroughly convinced that if I can’t see graduation, it can’t see me. It’s the new year, after all. Anything could happen.
Rebecca’s column runs biweekly Tuesdays. She can be reached at r.marsh@cavalierdaily.com.
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