I absolutely, positively, hate Mondays. If you see me, and it's a Monday, odds are I'm about as happy as Paris Hilton's father the day after the sex tape went public. Whether it be starting a week of classes during the school year or a week of work in the summer, Mondays have a way of sucker-punching me in the kidney.
This semester, however, I took a proactive stand and decided to have a class schedule with zero commitments on Monday, and I gotta tell ya, it has been phenomenal. Lately, I've been practicing to pursue my lifelong dream to be a professional sleep technician for Jordan's Furniture, so it's been a great help to add Monday to the list of "days where it's socially acceptable to wake up in the p.m."
I like to keep myself honest, though, and remember my early-bird roots. So occasionally, I'll try to trick myself into thinking I actually have something relevant to do by setting my alarm for 8:00 in the morning. The best thing about this is that I never get tricked, and I get to hear my sick new phone alarm (the opening guitar solo of "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns n' Roses).
When I pulled this move this past Monday morning, I was pleasantly surprised with what I saw out the window: the year's first snowfall. Snow on its own is unbelievable, with such classic activities as dodging graves while sledding down Dead Man's Hill in the cemetery across the street from my house or performing covert snowball ops on local police. But the real reason for all the excitement is knowing that following the first snowfall is my favorite time of year: the Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa break.
In public school in Medford, the winter break is far shorter, but it's okay, because each year, a Tufts tradition brings Christmas a little early for the citizens of Medford and Somerville. For years now, the Naked Quad Run has been an event where Tufts students can forget about all exams and papers, get extremely naked and run in the subzero temperature. I'm all for this event (a little nudity never hurt anyone), but I do have some issues with the fact that a few thousand townies show up for the free show, one hand videotaping and the other doing God knows what.
I say that, this year, if you see some random guy who nobody knows holding any type of camera, call him out and tell him he has to run naked if he wants to film, making sure to remind him that pocket pool is only allowed at The Glass Slipper in Chinatown (the K-Mart of strip clubs), and that the cold weather causes extreme shrinkage, the likes of which can only be seen after a swim at Revere Beach. This will most likely cause him to head home - or to Chinatown - in his beat-up Chevy Cutlass.
For this townie, it doesn't get any better than the Christmas holiday. I'm not much of a churchgoer, and I respect those who do go to Mass for Christmas, but I'd rather spend the eve of Christ's b-day with friends and family, imbibing enough wine to drink all three wise men under the table. The last time I checked, Midnight Mass isn't a pub event.
Christmas morning is an unrivalled time of happiness for me, because as I've said in an earlier article, I'm the "baby Jesus" of my family, and up until a few years ago, I almost had to get my own tree for all the sweet gifts I received. Now the presents are fewer, and that's fine, because nobody likes a spoiled 22-year-old townie who'd be more excited to get a video game than a designer watch.
This winter break is shaping up to be a regular one, with one major exception: I need to look for a job for when I graduate. Just writing that sentence almost brought me to tears and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Leaving the comforts and luxuries of college life for a real-world job and subletting your old room in your parents' house is not the most attractive scenario, and that's assuming I can swindle someone into hiring me, which as you can probably tell from my writing, should be no easy task.
So assuming I don't win that elusive million dollars playing Keno at Tavern, the job search is going to begin over winter break, starting this townie's walking of the plank into the real world, where Christmas break is only a week long and going to the Naked Quad Run isn't a student activity but a perverted townie move.
But hey, at least I'll still be in Medford.
Pete McKeown is a senior majoring in English. He can be reached at peter.mckeown@tufts.edu.
