Spring Break: eight days, 130-something hours of utter freedom. No classes to worry about sleeping through. No homework to rush to do five minutes before class because last night “Dawson’s Creek” just seemed a hell of a lot more appealing than Immanuel Kant’s “Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals.” No annoying neighbors to blast Shaggy’s “It wasn’t me” at un-Godly hours over and over again until the only thing you feel like banging is your head against a cement wall. No roommate to wake you up simply to tell you that in a drunken stupor, she mistook a leafy fern for that hot crew guy (your next door neighbor) and proceeded to molest it until our Resident Assistant wrote her up for intoxicated lap dancing with a pteridophyte in public.
There I was last week, yearning for Spring Break more than a School of Management student yearns for that Italian imported cigarette to smoke on a sidewalk-blocking pack outside the palace with other people wearing tight, leather Gucci pants. More than the average School for the Arts student yearns for the professor to turn her back so he can get sniff himself into a Crayola marker and Elmer’s Glue euphoric high. I didn’t go to class and write the multitude of papers that my sadistic, inhumane professors assigned to be due the day before Spring Break (a day that should be devoted to margaritas, sit-ups, and buying last-minute Spring Break essentials, like sunscreen, flip flops and a thong bikini). Instead, I packed.
I packed fiendishly. I stuffed all of my summer clothes into my roommate’s suitcase that I had commandeered for this very purpose. I packed seven days worth of bikinis, belly-baring halter tops, really tiny short denim shorts, and one of those baggy, bright, orange biohazard suits that I fanatically place over those flesh-baring clothes in order to avoid mass hysteria and casualties caused from the sight of my pasty, white thighs.
I emptied my ATM account and invested wisely in American Express Travelers Cheques (which I promptly lost). I locked my pet rats that I share with my roommate in their cages under my rack raisers. I unplugged all of my illegal electrical devices — the George Foreman Grill, the halogen lamps, the coffeepot, the space heater. Spring Break is just a week away, and I was ALL ready.
Then I remembered something: I had made no plans whatsoever.
In my Spring Break giddiness, I had overlooked one crucial step: making travel arrangements. I had remembered to buy the string bikini, but I forgot the tickets to Cancun.
I panicked. Then I sprinted to every travel agency within sprinting distance. I groveled and begged, cried and pleaded with a fat, balding, discontented, middle-aged travel agent named Stu. In between sinister cackles, he told me that the only trips still available this late in the proverbial Spring Break game were either a four-day trip to Iceland to watch snow melt or a six-day, seven-night tour of the Bible Belt states with visits to every Elvis landmark in the South.
So those were my options: I could spend Spring Break visiting exciting landmarks like the home of the woman who makes life-sized replicas of the King out of Land O’ Lakes butter, or I could head 20 minutes down I-93 to Woburn, Mass. and spend eight days reliving the nightmare that was my life before college. My first 18 years of life may not seem that nightmarish — I wasn’t orphaned at the age of six, raised by a travelling band of gypsies, who sold me to a circus where I worked as a contortionist until I was laid off and then spent the rest of my short live living in a cardboard box by the side of the road. However, I did spend 18 years living in very close proximity to three of the most evil beings ever: my siblings.
There was no way that I was going to spend Spring Break at ground-zero the Spellman family war zone where Satan, Beelzebub, and Judas (as I affectionately refer to them) are engaged in teenage, hormonally charged battles over important
societal issues like whether
“South Park” is better than “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
Fortunately I will not have to choose between staying in the sewers of Mission Hill and spending a week with the rodents that are my younger siblings. At the last minute I was able to find a Spring Break destination that I am keen on.
The weather will be warm. Everyone will be on drugs. There will be a plethora of baked goods. I am going to spend Spring Break with my grandparents in their retirement community in Florida. It isn’t Cancun, and I doubt there will be many tall good-looking men with washboard abs who I can painstakingly cover in tanning oil. But I will be the only one who doesn’t wear a skirt over my bathing suit or has to go to bed at 8 p.m. after the excitement that is Jeopardy. Plus my dream to pick up a rich husband Anna Nicole Smith-style might finally come true.
[Denise Spellman, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press.]
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