One thing I feel like I never fully grasped about college before starting at Conn is how long winter break lasts. Coming from a high school that typically only gave us eight or nine days off, I suddenly found myself with over a month-long break and, sometimes, no idea what to do with myself. This is the saga of how I spent the break, divided into five distinct eras:
1. The Birthday Era
Fun fact: I was due to be born in mid-December, but I shrewdly withheld my extrauterine debut for an additional week so my birthday would fall during break and not finals. When I got home from school, I reunited with various hometown friends and spent some much-needed time doing absolutely nothing at home with my pets. For my birthday, I took the commuter rail to Boston with a friend, went to the New England Aquarium and the Museum of Fine Arts, and then came home and went to Olive Garden with a few more people. If you know me, you know Olive Garden is a place I hold sacred for breadstick-based reasons. I can house seven or eight of those in one sitting if I’m not stopped. Tragically, our waiter forgot to bring us breadsticks until we reminded him, and in the intervening moments, all of my friends were slightly afraid of the monster I was becoming. Catastrophe was very narrowly avoided as I was ultimately able to request and obtain my ambrosia.
2. The Colorado Era
A tale as old as time: I go to Colorado for Christmas to visit family, I tell people I went to Colorado, and they ask me about skiing. No! I can’t ski! I have been violently humbled by New England bunny hills and I’m not scaling up to the Rockies anytime soon! However, I enjoyed the company of relatives, went sledding next to my mother’s childhood playground, read some excellent new books, and played around with a camera I got for Christmas. We all partook in some fascinating rounds of Ransom Notes, a game that I cannot recommend enough. It produces eloquent poetry such as “my thunder / seduce your body / slurp palpitate delight / saggy riot” and “Mister Blow / run.” Nothing can truly prepare you for seeing your relatives construct such arrangements of word magnets. Plus, I got to hang out with my grandparents’ dog! He is anxious about everything, and for this reason I feel deeply connected to him.
3. The Rot
Arriving back home on New Year’s Eve morning after a red-eye, I sank into an era of glorious laziness that I’m unsure I’ve ever known outside of summer. While my parents and brothers returned to work and school, I was utterly without obligations. Or motivations. Ultimately, we were all put on this earth to rot, and there’s no harm in occasionally practicing for a week or two. The most thrilling events were probably when we opened our garage door and a mouse ran out (I refer to the incident as “Mickey Mouse entering the public domain”), and when we went to Top Golf for my brother’s birthday and ended up on an hours-long side quest because of a flat tire. Also, my mom, brother and I managed to binge all of the show Yellowjackets in about a week, which I very much recommend. There’s nothing like watching a high school girls’ soccer team stranded in the wilderness make some, shall we say, increasingly fraught culinary decisions.
4. Europe!!
My dad’s airline recently added flights to Amsterdam, and I had never been anywhere in Europe before, so we took a little jaunt across the pond. (Get it? The pond is the Atlantic Ocean, which is actually bigger than a pond, and is expanding slowly over time due to shifting tectonic plates. At the rate fingernails grow, North America and Europe are drifting apart. Book your flights now before they take even longer!) We flew in and soon discovered that “coffee shops” in Amsterdam are actually weed stores. That was … interesting. We went to the Anne Frank House and the Rijksmuseum and took a boat tour of the canals. We mainly just wandered around a lot. I was amazed by how few cars there were. Everyone was out riding bikes in the freezing rain, no helmets, unsecured infants in baskets — life the way it should be. Dutch is a fundamentally unserious language from an English-speaker’s perspective, and I lost my mind seeing words like “paspoort” and “eetlust” (that means “appetite”). Then we took a train to Paris and spent a couple of days wandering there, visiting the Louvre (that’s right, they made the place from the Lorde song real!) and the Eiffel Tower. Everything was insanely beautiful and reeked of cigarettes. Unexplainably, I saw shrubs and weeds that were bright green and even had flowers blooming, even though it was below freezing — that’s the magic of Paris, I guess. Honestly, I thought I didn’t like cities, but maybe I just meant American cities. Both of the European cities I visited were absolutely amazing, and I am very glad I visited in the winter, because if I had gone in summer to these places that don’t have air-conditioning, I would probably have a very different opinion.
5. Farewells
When we returned, I spent the last few days of break hanging out with friends and preparing for the return to college. Nothing particularly of note. It’s always hard to say goodbye to my bed at home that I don’t have to get a running start and jump onto, but I am glad to be back!