Three long months have passed and finally school is starting up again. If you are like me — in denial that summer has truly ended — you waited until the last minute to face reality and come back to school. If you are more prepared, you came back early to settle in. For you, this past week hasn’t been a living nightmare full of nonstop errands and efforts to fill your room with more than empty snack wrappers.
Luckily syllabus week coincides with your denial-that-summer-ended phase, but eventually, reality sets in. You realize you have been putting off setting up your room and instead have been sleeping on a mattress pad surrounded by all your clothes, pictures you can’t decide how to arrange on your walls and the nails you would use to hang said pictures — which end up giving you surprise acupuncture in the middle of the night.
You decide to run some errands to get back in the swing of things, but it’s too much all at once. You go into Staples looking for an HDMI cord so you can watch Netflix shows on a real TV (priorities) and end up getting trampled by pencil-case-obsessed tweens and stumbling into the display of locker chandeliers. You finally make it to the checkout line with some cord that looks like what you need, and you see a fancy planner while waiting in line. You just know that planner will be useful, so you shell out the $30, only to discover it hidden in the depths of your desk drawer two months later, good as new. Do you know how many frozen burritos you could have bought with that money?
Speaking of burritos, you can no longer get extra guac at Chipotle, as you said goodbye to any semblance of a respectable bank account on your biannual trip to the bookstore. Nothing hurts more than spending all your hard-earned summer money on textbooks you will read somewhere between zero and one time.
You finally make it to your first day of classes and realize you already need a vacation. Your tan is fading, you’re not finding sand in random articles of clothing, sunsets seemingly no longer exist and it just feels weird having a fruity drink alone on your apartment balcony. Syllabus week homework: planning your next break.
The start of college also marks the start of the phrase, “Whatever, I’m getting cheese fries” as part of your daily vocabulary. Calories don’t count in college — that’s a fact. The overwhelming, stress-induced need to eat carbs covered in cheese trumps any desire to remain healthy. You suddenly find yourself arms-deep in a bag of tortilla chips, figuring out how to get a pint of Ben & Jerry’s delivered to you.
Amid the constant snacking, you take a second to think, “Maybe I should start doing real things with my life.” Job fairs, study abroad applications, summer internships (already?!) — the list goes on and on. Personally, I prefer to put all serious matters out of my mind until they disappear.
Yet another burden upon going back to school and being a pseudo-adult is cooking for yourself. Fill the freezer with microwave meals and the fridge with random items you can’t manage to make a meal with. Would lime, ketchup, and sliced cheese make a good sandwich or…?
When all is said and done, it is truly exciting to come back to the University, despite our Rotunda being even worse off than when we left it.
Avery’s column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at a.moyler@cavalierdaily.com.
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