Well, this is a bit weird. Never did I expect to be putting out the last print column of the year in the middle of March, but here we are. The way I see it, we were all dealt a pretty bad hand these past couple months, but we have two options: we can either throw in the towel and fold or fake it ‘til we make it and bluff our way through the summer. I think I’m still adjusting to the whole online class thing, but I’ve got my hand and I fully intend on seeing this game through to the end.
Taking all this into consideration, I thought it would be a good idea to look back on my year, and pick out the positive moments, of which there were many.
For starters, this year has allowed me to make many new and wonderful friends. I branched out much more this year than I did in my freshman or sophomore years and it has really paid off.
Although I have been doing the newspaper for the good majority of college, I can honestly say that I have never been so close to such a large amount of the staff any of my past years.
Secondly, I was able to travel much more this past year than ever before. Before all this coronavirus craziness hit, there was a time when I was heading down to James Madison University in Virginia about once every one or two months.
Over the course of a couple 12-hour round trips, I got a lot closer to one of my closest friends from high school and made a ton of great new friends down in the place where the sun actually shines more than two days a year. I also figured out how much I appreciate silence on the road trip back.
As much as I complained about everyone in the car falling asleep on the way back home, I have secretly come to really enjoy my alone time.
In the midst of the coronavirus panic, but before everyone was buying up all the toilet paper in the land, I was able to travel to New York City with one of my roommates from freshman year, something I previously wrote about so I won’t go into all the details, but that was especially memorable for a multitude of reasons.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge some of the new stuff that I have accumulated over the course of this year. I’ve already covered my cassette deck, Walkman, and some of the other retro music equipment that I purchased second hand, but there have been plenty of additions to my life that I haven’t covered.
Most importantly, I received a new set of floor standing speakers for my home theater from my parents for Christmas, which have not only elevated my movie watching experience by a factor of 10, but they have also reduced my ability to hear soft noises by about the same rate. But you have to take the good with the bad.
Another fun addition to my life has been my reintroduction to my childhood iPod Classic.
I don’t know exactly what it is, but the amount of joy that I get from listening to modern music on these dead formats cannot be expressed in any kind of quantitative fashion. I’m sure that there are some other knickknacks that I am forgetting, but those are the main ones.
I guess if I had to find some way to end this, I’d have to encourage the student body to remain positive in this time of uncertainty. While I am not at all excited to continue the semester with online classes, at the very least, this is going to be a pretty kick-ass story to tell our kids one day.
What more can you ask for than that?
BENJAMIN HAYLETT
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