My approach to finals was long and slow. Days of the week became irrelevant. Every day from 12/15 to 12/22, I woke up, worked out, studied or worked on my essays or podcast, and did something fun. I made sure to appreciate all the time I had with friends, since I won’t see them until next fall.
My scheduled fun with friends included a lake walk with Emily, talking about the overlap between her art history class and our WGST class; numerous long, cold lunches with Alison on the Lulu patio, including a chocolate taste test; Shabbat services, which I attended for the first time of the semester—it was so nice to hear familiar melodies and even better to leave with vegan challah; breakfast and a lake walk with Adeline; bake night with Alison and Gaya; and a Zoom movie night with Caroline, who was finishing up her quarantine in London.
Alison and I planned a bake night because Gaya mentioned a few weeks ago that she’d like to watch us make a pie. We walked to Roche Bros in the freezing cold for cake mix and pudding mix, which we turned into spectacularly pillowy cookies. And, of course, Alison made an incredible apple pie. I wore my most orange outfit, just for the heck of it.
Sure enough, Gaya watched the pie come together. She had a lot of work to do—you could tell just by how she was sitting—but when she got her hands on a freshly-baked cookie, her face lit up. She left much more relaxed than she’d come in.
Alison and I made the rounds later that night, way past my bedtime, and delivered cookies to three more friends. It’s amazing what a cookie can do during finals week.
Finals are done. I wrote 17 pages on the history of slavery and abolitionism in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, wrote a shorter paper on housing discrimination, took my last bio test, and made a podcast about the line between necessary journalistic coverage of prisons and true crime. All in all, I had a good last week of the semester.
I left campus on Wednesday. Since then, I’ve gotten my booster, caught up on Money Heist, written cover letters for summer internships, and slept. It’s nice to have finals over with, and it’s good to be away from people at this point in the pandemic, but I miss my friends. I can’t believe that next time I see them, I’ll be a senior.