Last week, we got not just one, but two days off from classes, and so what did we do with our last-minute four-day weekend? If you’re like most Hopkids (Hopkins + kids = Hopkids), you spent your class-free day studying for the classes you didn’t go to.
We could have gone sledding down the Beach — well, maybe not, it’s barely even a hill. We could have had snowball fights all over campus, or we could have built a snowman. Insert your Frozen sing-along here.
No, we’re Hopkins students. We live in our books and our problem sets. Our lives revolve around papers, labs and midterms, which are always. Yes, we were all incredibly excited when we read those text messages, but not because we had big plans to stay in bed with the bae: Netflix, obviously.
That feeling of exhilaration, of unquantifiable happiness, of childlike enthusiasm came because we would get to sleep in an extra hour and then spend the whole day with the best bros on campus, Milton and Brody.
We all did our work on Wednesday night because how could we know for sure that we’d get a snow day on Thursday? And then when Thursday rolled around, we spent all day getting ready for Friday because there was no way in hell we were getting another day off, right?
Everything we predicted was wrong. The snow day calculator claimed a three percent chance at a day off from classes, and all of Hopkins history leaned toward campus holding classes on Friday. But then that text message came.
“JHU: Ice: No daytime or evening classes.”
Oh, how we loved reading those words! Now, instead of wasting three hours not paying attention during lecture, we could hunker down in the Brody Reading Room and catch up on all the stuff we didn’t learn the first time around.
None of us really understood exactly why classes were canceled in the first place. “Ice,” they said, but there wasn’t really much of it. Walkways were mostly cleared, or else they were just covered in snow, and it even looked like the streets were pretty drivable. Was Friday’s cancellation really necessary? Probably not, but who are we to complain? An ice day is the perfect excuse to curl up in a big armchair in Brody with a Shakespeare play or a calculus problem set or an overpriced, exorbitantly chocolatey coffee from the BLC café.
Did we waste our surprise long weekend? A double snow day at Hopkins is more elusive than a double rainbow, and it probably hasn’t happened since that meme was funny.
Should we have spent our days of winter wonderland sledding, drinking hot chocolate and watching movies, or finishing off last weekend’s Fireball? (Obviously we don’t have any Fireball from last weekend. That would be illegal for most of us and irresponsible for all of us.)
We could have been making snow angels but instead we balanced chemical equations and wrote about Russian literature. We could have been throwing snowballs but instead we read about the history of Brazil and documented our really weird social experiments.
We could have spent Thursday and Friday slacking off and having fun, but instead we spent it working hard and you know, expanding our minds or whatever.
Yeah, no fun for us Hopkids.
But we were having fun, weren’t we? Don’t we love researching women’s roles in the Middle Ages or solving matrices or doing something with chemistry? (I’m a Writing Sems major, okay.) Isn’t that why we’re at Hopkins? Because we love to learn? Play your favorite inspirational song and reread this paragraph.
Right, we totally signed up for at least four additional years of non-compulsory education because of our innate love of learning. That totally wasn’t beaten out of us during high school. That’s why we chose to sit in the library and gaze longingly at the falling snow outside.
Yeah, okay, we’re not kidding anybody. But at least spending Thursday and Friday in the library meant that Saturday and Sunday were pretty chill, right? No, we were back in the library Sunday night like we do every weekend. We’re selling our souls to homework for the sake of an elite education. Maybe if we had gone to a state school...
Even then, we probably would have spent the snow days in the library. That’s just in our personality, the collective personality of the hardworking Hopkins student. That’s all of us. We are compelled to sit in front of a computer or a book or a math problem until it’s late enough to observe daylight savings time.
But hey, at least we got two days off from class.
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