RODRIGUE: Crappy holidays

A friend of mine from high school, whom I haven’t seen in a year or so, called me out of the blue last week needing a place to stay. I set him up on my futon and we evaluated how we both had changed since we last met. By the end of the evening, we had settled that we had both grown considerably, albeit in different ways: he, intellectually and artistically, and I, in bitterness.

Here I am, wading through the scholastic sludge of my sophomore year, no declared major, no foot in any door, no progress made on anything really ‘-‘- even now, I should be packed and ready to hop on a train to Maine, but instead I’m sitting in Espresso Royale staring at people who look like they’re accomplishing more than I am, while somewhere in Kenmore Square, my travel bag sits unpacked.

These languid days of seasonal transition ‘-‘- when trees are finally completely bare, but it’s not quite cold enough for the snow to come and distract us all from the leftover foliage amassed in congealed chunks between sidewalks and street corners ‘-‘- are my bitterest days of the year. Thanksgiving break lassos you into this suspended animation, in which you’re caught between preparing for finals and wanting to simply sleep and stare at the television with your family and strange cousins. It’s a time of schizophrenic weather patterns and erratic dressing habits ‘-‘- coats over short sleeves, with a sweater thrown into the backpack just in case. Fingerless gloves, sleeveless turtlenecks, large caffeinated coffees and later, Sleepytime tea. It’s a season of hypocrisy ‘-‘- not good for any constitution, especially one as delicate as mine.

My friends and I discussed our collective Thanksgivingtime bitterness over dinner yesterday. We all agreed, us 50-grand-a-year students hovering over our expensive GSU meals, that the obnoxious chores of the college lifestyle completely drain the season of any sort of warmth or spirit whatsoever.

‘What’s the point of going all the way home for only a few days just to overeat and feel guilty about not doing homework? I can do that here ‘-‘- without being hassled by my weird uncles,’ asked Daria, picking sadly at a Panda Bowl, fake-reading her anthropology textbook.

‘There is no joy left in this world right now, except maybe somewhere on YouTube,’ added Andy in a similarly wistful tone.

There was a unanimous sigh of agreement. In the final stretch of the fall semester, we were losing whatever links we had left to the real world, reduced instead to the very essence of what it is to be a college kid: whiney, tired, twitchy.

Although Lobster Night in the dining halls and Marathon Monday are both decent holiday substitutes for the BU student whose Thanksgiving is overlooked and whose Christmas arrives, not with gusto, but rather with post-finals nausea, nothing really makes up for these losses.

And it’s easy to play the devil’s advocate here ‘-‘- oh, us poor college kids, working so hard on our meaningless 10-page thisses and thatses, studying for our exams on Postmodern Hobbesian Meta-irrationality that we can’t even properly ring in the holidays. Poor us with our mini-Christmas trees and contraband holiday d’eacute;cor that gets removed by Residence Life staffers faster than we can say Merry Christmas in our shabby third-semester-level foreign languages.

But we’re still kids, damnit! We deserve to not let those horrifying end-of-syllabi monsters devour whatever holiday cheer is left in this world, regardless of our places as academics. In an effort to herald some of that novel childhood holiday enthusiasm, a few friends and I ventured downtown to the Fanieul Hall tree lighting last weekend, only to end up mourning the malevolent wind chill and abominable toddlers. On our way out, as we fought through the celebrating masses, Elissa thought out loud: ‘Another holiday season for me to spend broke, busted, tired and single.’

I guess our only salvation is to think of finals and term papers as overly commercialized elements of academia, the same way gifts and parties are overly commercialized elements of the holidays. I guess we need to just dig a little deeper ‘-‘- after all, college, even when it gets as dismal and stressful as it gets at the end of the semester, serves a greater good. In the end, it means a lot more than grades and papers. And the holidays aren’t just about all that superficial stuff we miss out on when we’re in school ‘-‘- home is home, and breaks are breaks, and few things are more satisfying than sitting in the train on your way home for Winter Break.

So in the end, it all comes down to us battling our seasonal bitterness with a more humanistic approach and the realization that this, too, shall pass. And before we know it, we’ll be on our way through the gentle peaks and valleys of a whole new semester, once again celebrating second-rate holidays and anticipating the arrival of spring all over again.