“Ew, morning breath.”
I’ve never hidden my disdain for Princess Aurora from the Disney movie, Sleeping Beauty. For one, she slept…a lot. She is nearly at the same level as Snow White, but at least Snow cleaned up her messes and took care of seven men before she took her power nap. Aurora was sheltered by three wise-cracking fairies, played stranger danger with a mystery man in a forest, ignored all red flags when she approached that spindle, and then slept for over a hundred years or something. She ALSO basically caused the entire kingdom to fall asleep, and caused Prince Phillip to be captured and then put through the physical hardship of slaying a dragon/evil sorceress.
Please tell me how one princess can cause so much destruction while sleeping through the entire sequence?! You would think being secluded in a forest would give her some time to reflect on philosophy, pick up some basic skills, or perhaps gather some common sense, but she just blazes through her reckless choices, and at this point I’m not sure if she even thanked her fairies for anything?! Like, “Uh, thanks for keeping me alive and saving my butt at each and every opportunity. Are we cool now?” Nothing. Granted she is only sixteen years old (yup “only sixteen” with that body), but someone should teach her not to reach toward the terrible glowing spindle for future reference.
Unfortunately for this week, I can’t give you a concrete lesson that Aurora (AKA Briar Rose/Patch) has shown us through her movie. You can’t fall in love with the man in the woods because you will die, you can’t sleep through your entire college career because you will fail, and you can’t even rely on your fairies because they don’t exist (except maybe Mrs. Killings? Just maybe?).
What I can tell you to do this week that I didn’t learn from Aurora is the following: learn something!
“You trying to say something?”
Pick up a skill, go to a free lecture, take a class out of your comfort zone, find a new hobby, or learn a lesson from a mistake you’ve made. As a fellow princess, I am not picky in what you do, just so long as you learn something from what you’ve done. It can be in class, in your apartment, or even off-campus, but remember that you are here for four years, so you might as well do something productive with your time besides partying, sleeping, or—gosh forbid—picking blueberries in a random forest (unless you are trying to build a sustainable garden; in that case, kudos to you my princess).
Hopefully this lesson doesn’t seem more like a lecture. Maybe we can assume that Aurora learned kindness, learned how to never prick her finger on a random object again, or learned how to lucid dream. (Who knows at this point?) If so, at least she did something with her short story, and so should you. For a princess, college may seem fleeting and we don’t want to blink our eyes and have our happy ending be over before we even learned the moral of the story (or at least learned how to sing).
Princesses, I have more faith in you than in the princess of today’s lesson. I know you have the capacity to gain knowledge in your classes, to explore new talents, and to definitely learn more than a thing or two while in college.
And FYI, if a guy you meet at some strange party once kisses you awake the next morning, you better slap his face and ask him if he sought your consent first. If not, sick a dragon on that dude and kick him off the bed (and probably your life).
^Think you slick? Think you can creep? Think again!