Fall break is in full swing and it is just as relaxing as I’d planned and exciting as I’d hoped. Pretty much everything I’ve done this week has all centered around one beautiful, magical, fantastic place- my dorm, Pomeroy Hall!
I’m not sure if this is something I’ve mentioned at all in my blog, but I happen to be one of three elected Birthday Fairies for the illustrious Pomeroy Hall, which is a duty I do not take lightly. We’re in charge of decorating everyone’s dorm for their birthday with streamers and pictures of celebrity crushes and cute animals, so it’s definitely not any kind of grueling busywork. All three of us Birthday Fairies are first years living on different floors of Pom, so it’s actually been a really nice way to make friends with some people I might not have been able to spend a lot of time with otherwise! I also feel like I’m able to get to know the other residents of my dorm better through door decorating, even the ones I’ve never met. Your favorite movie can say a lot about you!
This week the Birthday Fairies are a little bit swamped. We’re celebrating 28 birthdays and throwing an all hall birthday party, which would be an insane undertaking in a normal academic week. Thankfully on break it’s the only responsibility I have, so it’s very manageable and also a very fun way to ground myself in the midst of all this free time. Our party isn’t really going to be anything big- there aren’t very many ways to throw a fun, safe, and ethical birthday party during a pandemic- but we’ll be showing Hotel Transylvania– a movie about Halloween and a birthday- out on the quad this weekend, which I think will still be really fun.
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve developed a habit of lurking in the Pom Morning Room at all hours of the day. Sometimes I’ll sit and do a word search or some sudoku, maybe I’ll get some homework done, maybe I’ll do some reading, maybe I’ll just sit and talk to people. It doesn’t matter what time of day; if I’m doing something I could be doing in the Morning Room instead of my dorm room, I’ll be in there!
The Pom Lobby, all decorated for Halloween! I helped with the streamers.
Our beautiful Morning Room!
The prettiest windows on campus
The Morning Room is right inside the lobby in Pom, and located in the path of what I think is the only student entrance to the dorm. I get to say hi to everyone as they return to Pom from all across campus everyday, and I feel like being here- because of course I’m sitting in the Morning Room right now writing this blog post!- instead of being in my dorm reminds me that I’m never as isolated as I think I am. I live in a building full of awesome people, which is something to be very grateful for.
My station in the Morning Room has also been the source of most of my fall break fun so far. I’m the kind of person who gets very into doing busywork- if you gave me a room full of paper and told me to cut all of it into little strips, as long as there was another person somewhere near me and maybe some music playing, I probably wouldn’t leave until every sheet of paper had been shredded. On Sunday, I sat for two hours just compiling a google doc full of pictures to print out for the birthdays this week, and when I was done, I printed them and spent another three hours cutting them out and labeling them with names and room numbers. On Monday, Paula- the Pom Community Director, a resident of Iowa for a couple years, and one of the coolest people in the whole wide world- asked me to fill out and decorate a poster template she had for a display about Pom residents’ favorite books. She gave me the poster template around 10 AM, and I left the poster twice- once to get lunch, and once to get dinner- before finally finishing around 7 PM. On Tuesday I sat down in the Morning Room to read and ran into my House President, Caroline, who was making a board game, and I got so invested in helping her make it that I skipped dinner and didn’t end up leaving to eat until around eight that night! There’s just nothing more relaxing to me than that kind of busywork, where you only have to think about it enough that you aren’t really thinking about other things. I like to think of it as a kind of meditation.
The Morning Room also serves as a pretty fun hang out space at night; last night I set my laptop up on the back table and my block and I watched Sky High, the greatest superhero movie of all time. We’ve taken to playing Among Us a couple nights a week, too, and if you’ve managed to glean any sense of my personality from this blog it should come as no surprise to you that I am terrible at that game- I’m usually the first one to die, and I feel so guilty about killing or sabotaging the other players that whenever I get chosen as the imposter I just vent around until someone catches me or one of my blockmates realizes it’s been an abnormally long amount of time with nothing really happening and accuses me of being the imposter. I think the worst thing about it is that I have such a hard time lying to anyone about anything at all that I all but admit to being the imposter, and then I end up voting for myself because it feels dishonest to vote for someone else when I know I’m the one who’s the imposter. Thankfully, being terrible the game doesn’t stop me from enjoying it. The other night we invited Jocelyn, our friend from the second floor who can frequently be spotted sitting at the puzzle table in the Pom lobby, to play with us, and it was kind of funny to see how a new person reacted to the ferocity with which my blockmates play the game. The one to really watch out for is Alexandra; she’s such a good actress that she’ll follow through to the end and you’ll spend the seconds following voting her off feeling so guilty for wrongly accusing her before you find out she really was the imposter all along!
Overall, the greatest thing about Pom is absolutely the people who live here. Whether I’m running into my HP and her block, chatting with one of the maintenance workers as they disinfect the lobby, or checking in with Bobo- the world’s greatest RA- about how my classes are going, I really feel like I know people here, and that they know me and they care about me being here just as much as I care about them being here. We don’t call it the Pommunity for nothing; Pom really does feel like home for me, and I can’t imagine anything better than spending the rest of my semesters at Wellesley here. Fingers crossed- it could happen!
Tomorrow is my big advancement recital on the carillon, so wish me luck! I’ll finally be up playing the big bells for the whole campus. A very daunting task, but I think I’m up for the challenge. I’ve been practicing like crazy, and I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to make it through the concert.
I hope you’re all having a wonderful, incredible, reflective, life-changing fall, and best of luck to all those seniors out there applying for the first round of early decision- only ten days left until you hit your deadline! As a former Wellesley ED 1 applicant, next week I will finally post my Why Wellesley story in your honor. I pinky promise this time! For now, I’ll leave you with some pictures I took on my way to breakfast this morning. Wellesley really is beautiful during the fall.
A very foggy Sev Green
The view from my carillon rehearsal this morning!
Sending you joy,
A