Of course I’m going to write about spring. Of course I’m going to mention the added buoyancy in the steps of my fellow Elmhurstians and me. I may be a tired, lonely spinster, but I am not immune to the glistening sun. This weather makes me exuberant, frantic, and full of life. Every spring, my grades suffer (just a little bit, Dad), because all I want to do (and admittedly, all I do) is go to the park, lie on the grass, and swing.
It’s quite shocking how every time winter’s blanket shrinks back across its earthen bed, the student population of the college seems to triple. After yet another stuffy class period spent inside, we rush to the mall and patio, to see we’re not alone. Hordes of school children swarm the mall—boys playing football dangerously close to the patio and the associated inescapable clan of sorority girls screeching things like, “Eric, put yer shirt byack ahn!” (real quote), professors reading textbooks they wrote and smiling into their hummus, and then me: fighting the regular feelings of disdain and trying to just bask and glow in the light of the sun.
This spring may be tarnished by the irritating tug of the global warming monster, but that is easily pushed out of our minds by a light wind ruffling the tree tops and cooling our sun-drenched shoulders. The spring may be tarnished by the lack of anything closely resembling a winter, but that is easily pushed out of our minds when we expertly climb Colin Pascoe’s tree and exist silently in the upper branches.
Just when we thought we couldn’t take it anymore, when the homework pile seemed as insurmountable as the laundry pile, we were granted a spring break. It’s as if the college is giving us a nod that is to say, “Go ahead, enjoy your self.” The college spring break is unlike anything you’ll probably ever experience again. A week long break that is relatively easy to ask off of work (I don’t really know, I guess; do I look like I have a job?) right in the middle of the semester—a time when we have the least amount of responsibilities, so I advise everyone to take full advantage of it. Travel! Read! Eat delicious food! Drink a lot of beer but only if it’s with your favorite people!
This spring break I went to Nashville with my friends to visit a lowly, Elmhurst dropout currently having more fun and being more successful than us in a quintet just finishing up recording their first EP… in their house… and it’s really good. We only left the porch to replenish on water, Tennessee beef, and beer, but I’ve never had a more relaxing time.
Nashville is far greater than our little city of Chicago, I’ve decided. While the mid-twenties-shoulder-length-black-haired-musicians-who-simultaneously-play-the-harmonica-and-guitar-and-the-bass-clarinet are a dime a dozen in Nashville, it doesn’t mean they don’t send me into blushing fits of giggles. And while Chicagoans may relish their beloved “Bean,” as the most important, useless, urban structure, Nashville has the Parthenon, an entirely superficial replication of the building still in existence from Ancient Greece!
Regardless of spring goodness, the daffodils bloomed a month early and now they’re all dead even though they’re supposed to bloom the first week of April, and spring is wasting its beautiful buds on the current cold front (it’s 45 degrees, boo-hoo). Don’t spend time romanticizing this fact and trying to twist it into a neat, little allegory about your life, but study for your goddamn midterms.
