Reruns, robo and revelry

For both my freshman and sophomore years, spring break was a week when the Princeton infrastructure loosened its belt. Public Safety officers seemed friendlier and less stressed out. Administrators were entirely absent from view. Day blended into night, blended into day, blended back into night. The prime directive became a suitable way to waste time until you got hungry again.

Break days were mostly spent hunting for food. We would wake up at around 3 or 4 p.m., typically hung over, spend a few hours blindly searching for food, then party until the sun came up. Those were the days before any of us had cars and before we knew there were culinary options beyond the residential colleges' dining halls.

I remember one night in particular: We were so lost and confused about sources of sustenance sources that my roommate finally drove up from Trenton at three in the morning to take us to a diner on Route 1. It was pathetic.

Those were also the days before we had work. Oh, we thought we had work, but it wasn't demonic and all-consuming the way junior papers or theses are. So we found other ways to amuse ourselves even though the campus was deserted. We played robo on the big yellow table that used to grace the Forbes lobby. We attempted to fit ourselves inside the laundry machines. We played a lot of pool and made a fort in the Forbes lobby. We wandered around the golf course for hours at a time. I had friends who even ventured into the steam tunnels. They have asked me not to divulge their identities.

For my fellow seniors and me, this spring break will be different.

This year, much of the Class of 2008 will participate in the longstanding Princeton tradition of spending an entire week mired in the carrel-lined bowels of Firestone Library. That's right, it's thesis crunch time. I will spend this spring break in the basement of Peyton Hall, tweaking code and praying I'll have results in time to start writing by the end of March.

Delwin Olivan '08 has never gone home to Vancouver during spring break, and this year will be no different. "This spring break I'll be starting and finishing my thesis," he said.

Sean Mahon '08 has stayed on campus for intersession a few times but never for spring break. During intersession he's always had fun, going to New York and ice skating with friends, all while not having too much work to do. He said he thinks this spring break will be the opposite. "It will not be fun. It will be lame, due to [my] thesis," he said.

Either way, we can't help but have a little fun. I mean, St. Patrick's Day is the Tuesday of spring break, and having a senior-heavy campus should make the crowds at the eating clubs a little more relaxed. We'll stand around complaining about our theses and pinching people who forgot to wear green. I'm looking forward to it.

The idea of spending spring break on campus either doing nothing or working is quite foreign to my friends at other schools, including Steve Avery, a senior at the University of Southern California. He and his friends will rock spring break in Vegas like normal college students, he said. "People stay on campus? I don't get it," he continued. "I'm going to Vegas."

"I might play some golf too," he added. "Work on my short game."

I'm a little jealous. But mostly I just wish I could go back to those days in Forbes when spring break meant absolutely nothing. Even while lying under the sun in Cancun, you still feel the stress of making sure that your passport is safe and that you've applied enough sunscreen. I didn't know how lucky I was in my first two years here, as I watched Indiana Jones with commentary for the 40th time, sat around in the empty taproom of Terrace debating the intricacies of robo or loitered in the Forbes lobby for hours discussing the possibility of ordering Chinese food. I'll probably never have that opportunity again.