It’s normally pretty stressful this time of year. After midterms, everyone begins to freak out because they haven’t been doing enough work all semester. Finals and snowstorms are right around the corner. To add to this ‘normal stress,’ now we’re less than a week away from registration for next semester’s classes. It’s always fun to sit hungover by your computer on Sunday morning and cross your fingers while you helplessly hope that no one will take the two available seats in the class you’ve been dying to take since you were a freshman in high school. It would be absurd to suggest that things could get more stressful.
If you’ve learned one thing from reading any of my columns, it’s that I’m absurd. I believe things actually are becoming more stressful for juniors such as me because of one simple fact: I’m not going abroad next semester.
What the hell are juniors like me – who will be confined to that beautiful Boston winter/spring season combo – supposed to do during our last semester before senior year? I contemplated this question the past few weeks and the only answer I could come up with was cry. But, I had an epiphany and now have three ideas on how we can have just as much fun as our friends abroad.’
My first idea is to beg your parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and former babysitters for some money to go visit people in Europe. I haven’t even been out of this country yet – since I don’t count Canada – so why not go over to places such as my homeland, Ireland? Because all of our friends will be there, we’ll have a place to stay and free tour guides. Maybe I can even convince my friends in London to help me find Hogwarts.
Second, all of us stuck in Boston need to get together and take ridiculous pictures that’ll enable us to make amazing Facebook albums. I don’t want to have to wake up every Monday morning to see my friends tagged in pictures in front of castles, smiling in front of the Coliseum or chugging beer from das boot in Germany. Those of us still here need to produce pictures that will make our friends across seas jealous that they’re not here. Let’s get on those theme parties I talked about last week and make our friends regret leaving Boston.
Lastly, if the Facebook album and begging for money ideas fail, I say we resort to third-grade thinking and ask our friends to be more than friends – we ask them to be our pen pals too. Since I haven’t been to Europe, I don’t know if they use Internet or cell phones there. If we write to our friends, we won’t have to worry about it. We can lie through our writing – it’ll be easier than over the phone – and say we’re having just as much fun as they are. If they ask what the splotches on the paper are, we can just say it was the snow/slush thing that the Boston winter/spring is famous for – and not our melancholy teardrops.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
