Back On Campus and Back In Business!

Well folks, it has been a wild three weeks back on campus following the beautiful two months I spent napping and watching Criminal Minds on my couch, and I’m just getting back into the swing of all things Wellesley College!

 

I’m a little bit ashamed to admit this, but in these weeks on campus I somehow haven’t managed to finish unpacking my dorm room. On the first night, I set up my bed- a pillow fort I’ve officially named “The Snuggle Cave”- and really haven’t done much more to set things up past that. This weekend, it will happen! I will finish unpacking, even if it’s the last thing I do!

 

 

While unpacking, I’ll be listening to an audiobook version of War and Peace for my Russian Literature class; I have a print version I’m reading from, but I think with a book of this magnitude it can never hurt to listen along as well! I would restart the unpacking and settling process today, but I have my first big assignment due for my other class at ten tomorrow morning, and I’m spending this afternoon and evening writing a thousand word essay on the curriculum of history classes immediately following World War II for my other class, a German history course.

 

Since arriving back at Wellesley, I’ve really struggled to find the motivation to stay on top of everything in the way I was able to in the first semester. I’ve found myself pushing my work back until the early morning and scrambling to get my readings done before class. I’m chalking it up to seasonal depression, and I hope I get over it soon and become more confident in my abilities to get things done. I was very seriously considering taking three courses in Term 4 instead of the usual two, but I’ve realized that I don’t think I’m ready for that kind of workload on the term system yet. 

 

If you’ve been sitting on the edge of your seat waiting to hear what happened with the spring blockmate situation, I regret to inform you that it ended in the most anticlimactic way possible; no new blockmates were found or assigned, and Anastasija and I are taking on second semester as a fearsome duo. I was initially a little bit worried about it, but so far we’ve been doing really well with just the two of us; our classes line up so that we can eat all of our meals together, and we’ve been spending many an evening and late night eating ice cream and debating about animated tv shows in Lulu. I haven’t returned to my Morning Room lurking ways as of yet, but I’m hoping I’ll start to adjust again soon and will feel better about spending more time out and about instead of in my room.

 

 

A big update for second semester is my new job on campus! I’ve been hired by the Office of Student Involvement as an Event Ambassador, meaning that I’ll get to act as a sort of go-between for the office and student organizations when it comes to in-person events this semester. I’m actually completing my training later today, and I’ll hopefully get an event assigned to me sometime after March first, when in-person events start again. I’ll write more about it once I start working; hopefully I’ll gain lots of stories to tell from all of the different events I’ll be involved in!

 

Another bit of excitement from this semester was my first brush with a non-negative COVID test- I spent Tuesday and Wednesday this week in quarantine because a lack of testable DNA on my testing swab from Monday made my results “Inconclusive”, and as a precaution I was supposed to stay in my room as best as I could and couldn’t attend my in-person class on Tuesday morning. Thankfully, everything turned out alright and I was released back into the world in time for dinner last night, but the whole experience was a little bit jarring. Health Services assured me multiple times that it didn’t mean an increased chance of testing positive, but it was the first time in the forty or fifty something times I’ve been tested that didn’t immediately come back negative, so I definitely worried about the end result. I’m happy to say that I’m totally COVID negative and still being as safe as possible. The only person I could count as a close contact is Anastasija, and I’m her only close contact as well. We’re going into the Vil tomorrow afternoon- I need to replenish my dorito stash- but I’m confident in our ability to social distance and keep ourselves safe while we’re off campus. The inconclusive test has only made me more determined to keep COVID far, far away from me.

 

As we approach the year marker of the pandemic in the United States, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ve done in the past year and how many things about my life have changed. Granted, not all of those changes are because of the pandemic, but I think with something as widespread as a worldwide health disaster, almost everything that happens is a little bit affected by it. The classes I’ve taken, the clubs I’ve joined, the friends I’ve made- sure, maybe in a regular year I would have connected with all of them anyways, but the pandemic allowed me to get close with certain people and take certain classes in-person and join certain organizations but not others. Living through the pandemic has affected my life in ways that I probably won’t ever be able to understand; if the multiverse exists, there might be another version of me that’s a totally different person because in their universe, there was no COVID pandemic. That might be a better version of me, or maybe a worse one, but either way, I have been shaped by it, and things probably won’t just go back to the way they were before when this is all over, because I’m not the only thing that’s changed. Maybe we won’t even know what the end is because everything is so different; I can’t see the future, but I hope that I get to continue to grow to meet it.

 

Finally, the most important piece of news for this blog article- every season of the Muppet Show is on Disney+!

I know, I know; way to bury the lede! As soon as my paper is written and my room is unpacked, I will be settling into The Snuggle Cave to watch as many episodes as humanly possible before my responsibilities catch up with me again. 

 

I hope you all have a great weekend, and remember to keep moving right along! It’ll be March on Monday- we’re that much closer to spring!

 

 

Sending you joy,

 

A

 

P.S. Peep the header; I took that after a late carillon session last week!