ithacation

I was wearing shorts last week, if I recall correctly. Ithaca was still basking in the seemingly endless sunshine that, in a normal year, would have ceased to exist after orientation week (or so it always seems…).

Then came this week. The mercury plummeted and the skies turned grey; we won’t be making it out of the 40s today, and the wind chill is in the mid 30s. Maybe not so coincidentally, this week marked the unofficial start of prelim season. Every professor on campus feels the need to get at least one major test or assignment in during the couple of weeks leading up to our long Columbus Day weekend. Seats will become harder to come by in the library, partially because nobody wants to play frisbee on the arts quad when it’s 37 and drizzling. Soon enough, though, we’ll have a long weekend to recharge. Judging from what I’ve heard from my fellow Daily Sun editors, I wouldn’t be surprised to run into friends on the streets of Montréal in a couple of weekends.

The Monday after spring break is one of the more obnoxious days of the academic year. Nearly everyone on campus has just spent a slightly less stressful week spread out across the globe. The stream of cars on Route 79 entering Ithaca on Sunday evening carries better-rested students whose sunburn still kind of hurts and who are just starting to get back to work on the bus ride in from New York City. The transition from break to school is never an easy one, but this year it was a bit tougher because, when I arrived in Ithaca for what is supposedly spring, it was snowing. Thank you, mother nature, for reminding us that, no, Ithaca doesn’t observe spring like the rest of the world does. Kind of like Arizona not doing the whole Daylight Savings Time thing, but colder.

Group projects pick up where they left off, even though everyone’s brain is still somewhere else for those first few days. Paper topics loom ominously on your computer’s desktop, waiting to be contemplated, researched, and outlined. Prelims sneak up from behind. Perhaps most terrifying: there’s only a little over a month of classes left in the semester. Back to work we go.