Today is a lovely Tuesday. It is a rare day for the sky to be so clear and for the sun to be out, but it is still chilly enough that I can still wear my favorite sweaters outside. I love this weather – it really makes me feel better despite being in the thick of midterms season. Seeing as Spring Break is next week, it is commonplace for classes to schedule exams, papers, and assignments all around these last few weeks. It has been a lot and will continue to overwhelm me, but I still want to make time for people who are dear to me. I hope I can shift my mind’s attention to all the little good things that have happened to me, like this lemon icing raspberry filling sponge cake that they had at Lulu the other day. This thing is so good – I would eat it for dessert with every meal if I could.
A new dessert from the Claflin Bakery – a sponge cake with raspberry filling and lemon icing
In particular, last Saturday was a good day. In the morning, my roommate Amy and I got brunch at Bates. We then went to the library and sat at a place with sunlight filtering through windows above us to study. Last semester, we took an 8:30 AM neuroscience class together and had Chamber Music rehearsals on weekend mornings, so we naturally spent many weekends together. On Saturdays, we would have fun; on Sundays, we would go study together after rehearsal. That hasn’t been the case this semester as our schedules diverged, so I’m just glad that we got to spend last Saturday together in peace. It is comforting to spend long hours in the presence of a good friend, and even though we did nothing except study together in the library for four hours straight, it was nice.
In the evening, we made instant ramen for dinner. We had bought some rice cakes and kimchi, so we gathered some raw mushrooms and tofu from the Stone Davis dining hall’s ramen bar and fried everything together. I think we did a great job! We ate so much that we couldn’t eat another bite.
After we cleaned up and washed our dishes, we bleached our hair! It is a quintessential college thing – to cut, bleach, dye, buzz, or change your hair. Or maybe it’s a Wellesley thing. Either way, we had been planning on dying our hair together since last Fall, but we never got around to it. That evening at around 7 PM, we went to the bathroom, invited a handful of close friends, and got to work fumbling through hair bleach, tying up each other’s hair in awkward sections, and humming random phrases of songs that were stuck in our heads (“I’ll leave the door open…”). Only about 3-4 of our close friends showed up, and we were glad that it was the perfect amount of people that it wasn’t too socially draining. We are planning to bleach our hair again on this Friday and dye it then too. I’m excited to see our results!
From around 10 PM to 1 AM, we sat in the common room, made milk tea with Amy’s oolong milk tea packets and Pranathi’s boba packets. We painted each other’s nails while chatting about our high school lives and watching videos of each other’s high school orchestras. I’m glad that we didn’t have a strict, organized evening planned at that we were able to just spend time sitting together on the couch, saying whatever comes to mind. It was a long evening, but it was a sweet one too.
I had been avoiding a lot of group socialization events for a while, save for scheduling meals with a handful of people I know well. I was stressed about this hair dying event too because we had both accidentally invited too many people and I was worried about that too. But it ended up being okay – even better than okay, actually. It was nice. I felt so drained by the time everyone left, but was left with a warm feeling inside.