It’s Sunday night. For the past month, this night has posed many of the same questions. What am I wearing tonight? Who’s buying the booze? What bars are my friends and I going to stumble to once we are sufficiently lit?
Now, Sunday night means only one thing: I have class tomorrow morning.
Yes, in a way this is good. After tomorrow I will be one hour closer to three credits closer to graduating (that being said, I am still going to be a fifth year senior next year whether I like it or not). But in many ways this blows, because I want to steal a street sign, get up on a table and dance, and wake up tomorrow afternoon with absolutely no memory of doing any of these things, like I have every other Sunday for this past month.
Unfortunately, many of you are doomed to the same fate as me—the return from Christmas Break. For some this comes as a chance to start over: new semester, new classes, new professors, and new freshman to prey on. For others, this comes as another chance to screw up again, form another drug problem, foster your alcoholism, and come up with new ways to convince your parents and the government to keep paying for the fun of it all.
The hard part is balancing the going out with the staying in. And by that I mean, since you and I both know that staying in isn’t going to happen, the hard part is balancing going out with not looking like you tried heroin for the first time and got gang-banged by a fraternity when you walk into your 8AM classroom tomorrow morning. It’s a tough job, I’ll give you that, but if I know anything at this point in my academic career, it’s that you have to pull your shit together when you walk into that classroom.
The upperclassman aren’t the only people judging you; your teacher is the harshest judge of them all. I know this for real now because approximately 25% of my friends are student teaching this semester. And what is the first thing they do when they get out of school and come over to my apartment? Talk shit. They talk shit about their students, whether it be “Johnny” in pre-kindergarten who shit his pants or “Brad,” a senior in high school who came into the writing lab
reeking of pot and then couldn’t spell the word "couch." I can only imagine what my college professors have said about me over the years. “This red-headed student of mine came into class today twenty minutes late with a penis drawn on her forehead…I laughed my entire lunch break.”
Along with the transition back into the classroom comes the shift from your parent’s house back into your crappy apartment or dorm room the size of a broom closet—not an easy thing to do. Remember a week ago when you opened the fridge and it was bursting with opportunity? You could make an entire meal without
even realizing that one of the ingredients was a year past its expiration date. New food would appear in the refrigerator on a daily basis without you spending a dime. There was always ice in the freezer (and not the leftover ice from the bottom of a keg bucket), and you could store your leftovers overnight without having to worry about a roommate stealing them upon their return from the bar. Wow, those were the days. It’s unfortunate that now that you are back from break and you can’t even open your fridge at all for fear some monster made out of mold will jump out and attack you. Clearly, you didn’t clean it out before you went home for a month.
There was also a constant supply of toilet paper (the good kind), and your bathroom didn’t constantly have some unknown smell created from the combination of a hair-clogged shower drain and a garbage can that hadn’t been emptied…ever? And finally, the big guy, there was free laundry, and, if you were really lucky, a mom to do it for you.
It almost makes me wonder why anyone even comes back to school after going home for break…and then I remember. First, your parents don’t overlook your alcoholism as easily as your roommates. At college, your drinking looks like nothing compared to your roomies drug addiction. At home, your drinking problem looks like a suicide attempt.
All alcohol aside, what about the sex, and the sleeping in, and the promiscuity and shadiness of it all? Are we college students really willing to give all of that up? Certainly not. So I welcome you all back to school. I will now set my alarm clock for 7:30AM and run (literally) to the liquor store because I have fifteen minutes until it closes. Good luck this semester, and don’t forget to wash that penis off your face before you walk into class tomorrow.
