Ready to Learn
By: Connor Lenahan
I’m about to say something that the elementary school, middle school, and high school versions of myself would disown me for: Can we just start the school year already?
While I have been enjoying my summer in Boston an extreme amount, I have found that having an absurd amount of free time can actually get quite boring. I mean, today I finished work at 1 PM. By 2 I was eating sushi in my bed while listening to an audiobook. I haven’t left my building since. There hasn’t been a need for me to. I won’t walk out the front door of Kilachand Hall again until I leave for Rhett’s Night Out later this evening.
I’m not against having free time, but given that I don’t have an astonishing amount of things to do with my day – certainly nothing all that time consuming – I am perpetually in search of ways to spend my time. I need to find ways to be both productive and entertained. After weeks on end of binge watching TV I just can’t do it. Ditto to audiobooks, as I started and finished three on my twelve day vacation last week. I just need variety.
My week really picks up whenever we have an orientation session on campus. Then there are hundreds of unfamiliar faces to meet and interact with. If I’m lucky, I will know a couple of people coming to the session and have someone to hang out with. This week I get to goof around with my friends Sally Kim, Claire Coffey, and Luis Castro. Once they are gone I will be asking the same question, “why can’t they just stay and have the school year start now?”
I miss my friends that have either briefly visited over the summer or are not due to return to Beantown until August. I like hanging out with these people. It’s sad to make the transition from Warren Towers, in which I was steps away from some of my closest friends at BU, to the summer, in which that distance is now hundreds of miles.
Of course, I love my friends that are here for the summer. That’s been able to keep me more than happy. It’s just hard to spend almost an entire year on a campus filled with 16,000+ people and then suddenly have that number drop below 3,000 at any given moment. It is a tad bit eerie, and it’s certainly odd. I shouldn’t be able to walk on the sidewalk as easily as I have recently.
Call me crazy, but I even miss classes. More accurately, I miss going to class and pretending to pay attention. Somehow, this made all those games of 2048 all the sweeter months ago.
I like to be busy. I like to have things to do. When the school year is not going on I am not constantly rushing around from place to place stressing about what needs to get done. Sure, this is fine for a month or so, but I actually thrive under these conditions. I think. I miss them. I am actively excited to get this year started. I think that we are in store for a great school year.
It’s a bit odd that this sudden wish for school to return came in the same afternoon that my high school, Abington Heights, announced that they will be striking, thus postponing the school year, indefinitely, starting September 11th. I believe the last time the teachers of Abington Heights had a strike I was attending Waverly Elementary School, which is quite literally in my backyard. My younger brother Cary is the last remaining member of my immediate family that attends high school, therefore he will most likely begin his sophomore year over a month after I start my own.
In a perfect world the strike at Abington never comes to fruition, the opposing sides of the conflict causing the strike finally agree, and my brother gets to get back to school. Also in that perfect world, I’ll wake up tomorrow, move into my room for the school year on the opposite end of campus, and soon be reunited with my fellow members of the BU class of 2017 while welcoming all of my friends in the class of 2018.
Sounds pretty good right?
Connor Lenahan (@ConnorLenahan) is a sophomore at Boston University, majoring in journalism.