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My best friends and I met at a birthday party in sophomore year for a girl named Tina. Did we know Tina? Absolutely not. But there we were, huddled in a stranger’s basement, eating cheap cupcakes.
Four years ago, when I was gearing up for my freshman year of college, I thought I had everything under control. When I laid everything I needed for college out on my bed, I was not afraid. When my mom helped me pack two massive duffels with clothes, chargers, books, cosmetics, brushes, hairbands, hats, shoes and enough K-Cup Pods to pollute a small island, I was not afraid. When my dad carried everything out to the car — when he placed the duffels alongside pillows, plastic storage bins, my guitar — I was not afraid. I was not afraid when we got in the car, when we left Massachusetts, when we passed through Connecticut, then New York, then New Jersey, then Delaware. When we saw “Maryland Welcomes You,” I was not afraid, nor was I afraid when I saw, stamped in concrete across the front of the Beach, “Johns Hopkins University.”
I had my fair share of misconceptions about college. As a first-generation college student, I thought college was going to be like high school. I didn’t have anyone in my family who went to college to tell me otherwise. I got A’s easily in high school; I barely needed to study, rarely reviewed my notes and coasted through Honors and Advanced Placement classes that claimed to “prepare” us for college rigor.
What makes a clichéd farewell letter?
Heat, thunderstorms and sudden rises and drops in temperature were what September brought to Maryland. I had never appreciated Baltimore’s weather as a Maryland native, but the transition from summer to fall seemed particularly bad this year. In a few weeks, I ran out of patience trying to find the right transitional outfits and relied on a pullover sweater to keep myself warm on those chilly days.
Autumn is the season of in-betweens.
Why is it that we associate the season of fall with endings?
I first heard of the idea of romance in platonic relationships at a Barbie movie after-party. We were playing some game — the name of which I can’t remember — that asked questions to help everyone at the party get to know one another better. The game was going well, funny stories and embarrassing moments were being shared when suddenly a question stunned the group.
Coming from South Florida, I grew up experiencing an endless summer, punctuated by the winter ‘cold fronts’ every few years that would bring temperatures down into the 60s. Every day, the weather was warm, the air was humid and the sun was bright. Fall was no different, distinguished from the rest of the year only as being the second half of hurricane season and the tail end of the wet season.
“You are like a ball of constant stress.”
Content warning: The following article includes topics some readers may find triggering, including sexual assault.
Dear freshman Leela,
Music is powerful. It is the language of the soul, a collection of stories — stories of love, joy, heartbreak, failure, success — that anyone can tap into and relate to. Sometimes, if we let it, music has the greater ability of allowing us to feel things we never imagined, to feel emotions beyond our own scope of understanding. Through music we are able to time travel and transcend the borders of reality.
In big things and small. In our day-to-day routines and more special moments. In old memories and new experiences. In songs and books. In the things we do for ourselves, the things we do for others and the things others do for us. These are just a few of the ways in which we can find joy in our lives.
I’m going to be honest, when I heard the fall magazine was going to center on the theme of joy, I didn’t think I’d have an article to write. Being a Hopkins student is stressful enough at the best of times, let alone during the chaos that has been 2020. I’ve been all kinds of overwhelmed, and I’m not alone; according to a survey conducted by the University of Chicago, American happiness is the lowest it has been in 50 years.
I’ve always loved nonsense. Nonsense words. Nonsense phrases and rhymes. Nonsensical conversations. So fittingly, my favorite poem as a child was Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. I always loved how the words meant nothing but I still knew what they were saying. In Jabberwocky, sound plays the starring role. We can’t imagine the “slithy toves” without it. I’ve always pictured the setting as a slimy, murky bog with a monster hidden in the mist, waiting to pounce on a passing traveler.
My instinctual idea of joy mimics the physicality of the word itself: a short burst, a dynamic syllable emerging from the mundane sentence around it, full of energy and brief color like a small dancer lifting her head and jumping in the air for pure love of movement. It’s akin to ecstasy, to giddy happiness. I find this version of joy in moments that overtake me, when it feels like everything is falling into place, like I’ve finally found my nook in the tableau of my life.
“We decorated our Club Penguin house for Halloween. Y’all should see it.”
I took a class this semester on Emily Dickinson for a very simple reason: I, like many people my age, was really into John Green in high school. Green, who is really into Dickinson, introduced me to what has been my favorite poem since 2014 — “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.” And since that was my favorite poem, I thought a class entirely about Dickinson might be kind of neat. So here I am.
Science and love are thought of as two concepts that exist virtually separate from one another. While science uses facts and data to conduct experiments for the purpose of explaining the paradigms of the world, love is a feeling that is unpredictable and unique to each person experiencing it. Never mind the scientists who try to attribute love solely to a series of biochemical reactions in our brains — we know that that isn’t all there is to love. The 36 questions, however, are an idea that brings both science and love together.