I say “hopefully” because, from where I sit at my desk looking out my dorm room window, chances don’t look too fantastic.
This week was supposed to be finals week at my university. I planned on being home in Pittsburgh by Thursday afternoon, but now that is certainly not happening. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll be home on December 22, but even that plan seems a little bit misguided at this point.
It started snowing here on December 1. Which was kind of awesome, I have to admit. How often does it happen that winter begins right on the first of the month? (I count the beginning of winter as the first snowfall that sticks; sorry, Winter Solstice) Unfortunately, since the first of the month, it has hardly stopped snowing and now we have two feet or so and campus is closed indefinitely, along with the surrounding roads into and out of our little piece of Ohio.
Can I just say that this is one of the many reasons why I hate snow? First, it’s cold and wet. Tell me how that combination can warm anyone’s heart. Second, it’s easy to ruin. That first snowfall looks heavenly until it has been stomped under an acne of footprints, turned gray and sludgy by passing cars, peppered blue by salt machines, and turned yellow by … you know. Then I realize just how gross it is for everything under the troposphere to be suppressed beneath a never-ending slush field. Not cool. (except very cool; bitingly, frigidly, “what is happening to my life?” cold)
The weather should be bad enough on its own, but then you get all the infrastructural effects of the weather which cause the really big problems. Like the one I have now where my final exams have been pushed back a week so that the students living off campus don’t have to drive here in the snow, leaving me stranded in my dorm with nothing to do but wait it out (and study, too, if I were so inclined, but having never studied for anything in my educational career other than physics and trig/pre-calc my junior year of high school, and never seeing any adverse affects to my grades as a result, I usually don’t bother).
I’m really not concerned that I won’t be home for Christmas. Luckily, this year Christmas is on a Saturday and I don’t have any Saturday exams. But if exams are cancelled the rest of the week (God, I hope not), then I won’t be coming home until the Thursday before Christmas, which rather stinks.
The bright side to all of this, if you haven’t seen it yet, is that I now have an unspecified amount of free time to do things like read, check Facebook, catch up on my favorite shows on Hulu, and hang out with friends in my building. (another downside is that none of the dining areas on campus are open, so if I hadn’t gone grocery shopping on Sunday in preparation for the Snowmageddon the weather men were calling for, I would have been close to starving to death right now.) Also positive: I get to update this blog, which has sat neglected for the past month and a half.
I do feel badly about this. I began this blog with the impossible goal of updating at least once a week. I knew at the time that it wouldn’t happen, but I figured I should set that number anyhow to give myself some motivation, or at least to ensure that I would feel guilty and deceptive when I went a month or two without posting anything. I swear though that I have been coming up with ideas as to what I want to write about over my now drastically shortened winter break, and I intend to follow through with at least one or two of those ideas.
Before I get to the fun stuff, however, I feel like I should reflect for a moment on my first (almost) completed semester as a college freshman.
The important thing is that I made it through alive and with straight A’s (and B’s) in all of my classes. I would have made it the entire semester without missing any classes if it wasn’t for the fact that I had a fever two weekends ago that forced me to miss my politics class and that music class I despise. Worse than that, I was even too sick to go see the university screening of Inception on the big screen in the ballroom. That was truly a terrible blow. Like the rest of the planet’s movie-going population, I was absolutely blown away by the film the first time I saw it, and had been looking forward to seeing it again all semester.
On a more personal and impressive line of conversation, I made the next big step toward taking over journalism. After having fifteen feature articles published in the campus newspaper, I was offered the chance to apply for a paid position on staff this spring semester. Of course I took it, and am now one of two paid feature writers for the publication. Watch out, world. Baby steps.
It’s exciting to have come his far in three short months. From high school graduate living at home, to full-time college student, on my own, landing my “dream job" on campus. It’s been a far more gratifying journey than I would have imagined.
