This last week was my junior year Spring Break. Planning what you want to do for break is hard. Everyone seems to be doing something interesting or life-changing. My Spring Break was neither of those things.
I went to Nags Head beach on the shore of North Carolina for a week with my closest friends. Before leaving, we envisioned sitting on the warm beach and enjoying the sun, with some mid-2000s indie pop band playing in the background.
In reality, the weather was cold, like around freezing temperatures cold. While some of my friends were in foreign countries, or Florida, I was living in a snow globe with ocean winds actively trying to fight me every time I left the house. As I write this, I still have a cold leftover from the trip.
The thing is, the trip was actually fun. We played more board games and video games than I had at any other point in my life. Every restaurant, grocery store and tourist attraction was completely empty. It was just me and some of the people I care most about in the world.
By all accounts, this should have been the most boring beach trip of all time, but I would say it was one of the best. Sure, it wasn’t Cabo, but who cares?
If I were to make a montage of the trip, I would pull from a mid-2000s indie pop song that I am generally not the biggest fan of called “Let’s Dance to Joy Division” by the Wombats. The chorus says “celebrate the irony, everything is going wrong but we’re so happy.”
To achieve the ironic state the song talks about isn’t hard. All it takes to accomplish this is a level of detachment from reality. Some of my favorite moments in college happened during the most stressful and busy times of the semester. There is something about having fun when you know you shouldn’t that leads to the best memories.
Sometimes, if we are having a stressful week, my friends and I gather in our kitchen (we mostly live together) to play music and complain. I cherish these moments even if they impede on my study time.
I am probably what most people would call a workaholic, so as I am telling you to take breaks, I know it is something I am going to struggle with doing. My natural tendency is to keep working until my eye twitch comes back and my hands shake from all the caffeine. I have found the assignments I did the worst on are the ones during which I allowed the stress to become consuming. I knew the information, but I was just too stressed to convey it properly. Had I taken more time for myself, I might have been more calm during the test.
