Just when you feel like you’ve got the hang of being an undergraduate, you’re on your way out the door. As a Senior, you’re at the top of your game, and Spring is like a wonderful respite from the uncertainty that awaits post-May. To be sure, there is the premature nostalgic element; we’re scared, we’re hanging on desperately to whatever we can. Elements of Wesleyan that used to make one feel terribly embarrassed now become heartwarming, and activities that are at best banal take on emotional significance: “I cannot believe this is the last time I have to go into Dean Phillips office and explain to him that I am most certainly not failing insert class for excessive absences, or the last time I meet with Dean Rick to argue over the fact that the insert fire safety violation I am facing is a large misunderstanding, in addition to being a cruel and draconian policy on the part of the university. THE LAST TIME.”
Basically, whether or not it is the product of delusional graduation anxiety or the reality of being Awesome Seniors, soon-to-be-graduates are having a ball. We’re relaxed, we know what’s up in our classes (”You wanna talk post-colonial theory? I like, basically invented post-colonial theory my sophomore year. My senior thesis didn’t actually use any post-colonial theory because I just like, wrote in the fashion of post-colonial theorists. Like personally, myself.”) and obviously, EVERYONE wants to sleep with you (and you’re like, totally down right? the idea of sober sex does not make you nervous like it did freshman year when you would break out in hives every time someone mentioned how HOT one night stands are, right?? right???). Simply put, we’re comfortable in a way we haven’t been all of college. Comfortable, but not bored. The comfort and the knowingness and the seniority in itself is new and interesting and fun. Right?
Senior Spring is a return. We get to feel like freshmen again, we rediscover Wesleyan, relax and “chill” because, shortly, we will be embarking upon a whole new part of our lives, and this makes us feel entitled to lots of grandiose self-reflection and sunbathing. However, the aforementioned self-reflection and sunbathing, I have found, can lead to a certain amount of its own anxiety.
I undeniably have still not got the whole, school-work-life-party-learning-bettering-myself-exploring thing like, totally down. Sometimes I oversleep and miss class. Sometimes I don’t oversleep– I actually wake up on time, and then I just don’t go anyway. There are some freshmen in my drawing class that could put me to shame not just in drawing but in life in general. The other day, while I was drawing some 40 year old’s ballsack one of them mentioned her long term plans to work at a pharmaceutical company, her short term plans to knit something and her even more short term plans to JUDGE ME WITH HER EYES. Then she asked me if I was considering grad school. I almost attacked her with an HB pencil.
Sometimes I ask myself if I am the senior I thought I would be. Considering that I am writing this at 1 in the morning after telling myself I wasn’t going to olin tonight, I would be “getting up early tomorrow” to begin the multitude of assignments that seem to have piled up due to my over-zealous addiction to the “hill culture” extra-curricular ethnography/autobiography/experiential learning thing I am um, writing that NONE of my professors understand MUST be my main priority right now…. yes. I guess I am the senior I thought I would be. I’m the same floundering and pathetic creature I was freshman year, except my macbook is like, four years older and covered in cigarette ash. Wesleyan has done its job in that I am far more painfully aware of my condition than ever before, and I have learned to use this self-reflexive quality as a shield of sorts. A weird, disillusioned, ironic shield.
And with that, a Haiku:
Rl Tlk: Senior Spring Wait It’s Been Like This Always Just Like, Whatever
