Living & Arts

Woes of post-Spring Break ... in list form

In print | March 27, 2008

Here’s the thing: Post-Spring Break involves the simultaneous lifting of Seasonal Affective Disorder and arrival of Swarthmorial Affective disorder so the sun comes out just as everyone starts complaining. In the spirit of this glorious season, here is a potpourri of newly sprung Swarthmore.

1. How do you handle it when someone you completely don’t recognize walks up to you and says “How have we not met yet?! We have so many friends in common; I feel like I’ve known you for years!”? The obvious answer is to bluster through like Piglet in Owl’s sideways house, but there is always a chance that you’ll have to play the dreaded “guess my name” game, which always leads to calamity. I think the correct answer is to learn how to say “long-lost twin” in Dutch and pray that some wonderful ne’er-do-well pulls the fire alarm, but if everyone starts doing it, that will probably stop working too.

2. Men wearing pants at Sager must be thinking strategically.

3. Don’t you think that if they don’t hold Pub Nite in some alternative venue for the last month of the year they’ll have to cancel graduation because 93 percent of the senior class will have died from suffocation? At this point, every time I blink, I’m afraid my eyes will open to find that my body has fused with a hipster’s and I’ll suddenly have an urge to move to the Barn, get square eyeglasses and wear Alpaca.

4. Scrooge McCabe sitting on top of the hill in his giant fortress swimming through hours and hours of student time and constantly competing with Flintheart GlomCornell.

5. What the hell happened to the knee of justice?

6. Three tips for making a playlist: Never put two slower sing alongs in a row. Space out your energy songs (songs that make everyone do whatever they’re doing harder, so the nodding head becomes a body sway, the holding hands dancers grind, the grinders Parke, etc). Realize that everyone arrives on the half-hours and put the can’t-misses there.

7. If you told me five years ago that my favorite song of 2008 would be a retro-disco track fronted by a vaguely transsexual pale British man who had previously released an entire album about transforming into a bird and Bjork thinks is a black woman, I would probably realize that I didn’t manage to get into Yale.

8. The drink caucus didn’t make any sense right? Am I the only person who thinks this? I felt like I was in Swedish parliament at night or something.

9. I think if I were a visitor to the campus and was told there was a really cool Mariachi band, I would get super excited and dash off with visions of frilled suits dancing in my head, and then I would walk in and see Ben Bradlow front and center and feel like a strange joke was being played on me.

10. Sager works for the most part, but there’s always that moment around 1:15 a.m. when you stare around the WRC and see your RA wearing drag and being danced on by your freshman crush in lingerie and then looking elsewhere to see someone realize that their outfit isn’t objectionable enough and stripping and then averting your eyes into sex while meanwhile you’re quietly pulling shapes in the corner and wondering how you’ll fondly reminisce about college to the grandkids.

12. Dominic Lowell ’09’s count-down emails are going to singlehandedly bring back the Apoplexy epidemic of 1876.

13. The column about Vampire Weekend last week was not misguided, but it was wrong.

14. I have no qualms with co-ed bathrooms—or so I’ll claim; in fact, I find them more terrifying than their mono counterparts—but why did it have to be the men’s room on the second floor of McCabe, my own little fortress of solitude? I feel like Solid Snake every time I peek around the corner before going in there now.

15. What would have happened if the men’s basketball team had randomly been placed in March Madness? I think the new Phoenix would immediately explode, only to rise anew as a cooler mascot.

16. I don’t know about you, but whenever no news comes from the frats for a couple of months, I begin to get a feeling that something really bad is about to happen.

17. The number of seniors who felt massively betrayed when Da Vinci’s turned out to be for sale probably numbered in the dozens. If it wasn’t already apparent that the guy who owned the place was financially misguided for selling $8 lukewarm paninis, there can now be no doubt that his failure to engage desperate-for-work and terrified seniors in a bidding war was a colossal error. That would have been the best speakeasy ever.

18. God bless the “one list per semester” rule at The Phoenix.

Adam is a senior. You can reach him at adalva1@swarthmore.edu.