I walked out of my house today, Jan. 27, and was met by a soothing tropical breeze. My phone said it was 29 degrees, but my body felt ready for margaritas and awkward tan lines. After days of temperatures ranging dangerously close to zero, I was ready to strip and go all Michael Phelps in Sunset Lake (no, not 4/20 Michael Phelps, Olympic Gold medalist Michael Phelps).
This is the life we live in Poughkeepsie: one where weather predictions range from “rainy all day” to “beware: Dementors near!” Our grandparents may have grown up walking to school and back uphill both ways, but we grew up with polar vortices and twerking.
This weather is having devastating effects on the student body. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve made my housemates to faint with disgust when they find that, for the third straight day, I haven’t left the house and I’m wearing a stained gray sweatshirt with matching gray sweatpants, huddled over my laptop like some Neanderthal discovering fire for the first time.
While it is true that there is some injustice in the fact that half of us show up to class during these tough times with runny noses and lips so chapped not even Burt’s Bees can help and the other half looks like they just stepped out of a Vassar Contrast article, nowhere is there a greater schism than in the TH duck/geese community. The one-percenters of the aviary world, the geese, spend most of their time on the baseball field, sleeping on a feathery bed of Americana. They mock the fate of the lone (plastic) wolf which Vassar has placed in center field as a mock-scarecrow to help keep the field goose-free. “Who is this commoner? He who can watch, but not share in the consumption of wine, and soft-cheeses-for-sturdy-crackers,” remarks one of the geese to his winged brother. “We should send him to the stream,” he says, nose in the air.
This brings up the 99 percenters, the ducks that spend their days with frozen feet as they float on the stream by the TH path and harass hungover seniors on their way to a Sunday library session. I can’t blame them; I’d be angry too. At best they sleep on a patch of ice and at worst they sleep on the murky water, their behinds easy prey for the three-headed fish and ghosts of Deece Cats Past which haunt the existential abyss that is the TH stream.
Let us hope, for our sake and that of the college’s fauna, that we are blessed with an early spring. Let us hope that we will bear our fluorescent skin in the late days of March rather than May 14 when you’re walking to the academic quad to turn in a 40-page paper. Realistically though, I’d settle for no snow at graduation.
While I’m telling you things that I would settle for (a.k.a my deepest hopes and desires that I have never ever told anyone before), I’d also like to confess some things. I like to imagine that Deece Cat is living it up in kitty-heaven just snorting mountains of catnip while joy-riding around the pearly gates with Paul Walker. Deece Cat has like 18 person al belly-scratchers and all of the milk. In a perfect world, I will receive an email after this gets published saying that Deece Cat is alive…and so is Paul Walker. I am worried the geese/duck population will sue me for slander, or at the very least double their harassment efforts. Finally, the celebrity look-alike I get most is James Blunt. FML.
