- Make tea. Drink tea. Drink too much tea with too much honey so you get too hyper happy too quickly and crash from the sugar high at six in the evening.
- Hike through Palmer Park on an absurdly warm January morning.
- Think about studying. Study. Think about studying some more. Study. Think. Study. Drink more tea. Make that a coffee.
- Go to CC’s Winter Ball at the Antler Hotel. Dance. See nearly every face from campus you know (but not really). Shun the crowded bus for a chilly ten minute walk home. Smile as the CC buses pass you, one by one, beacons in the brisk night.
- Spend an embarrassing amount of time searching online for a mattress you won’t need until May.
- Consume lethal amounts of chocolate courtesy of the Preserve.
- Attempt to master scansion. Don’t cry when you have yet to master scansion and third week is mere hours away. Scansion. Scansion. Scansion. You’ll get it eventually. Hopefully sometime this week. SCANSION.
- When it snows for the first time in what feels like all winter, walk around campus at twilight and slip and slide and spin in the dimming light. Lose feeling in your thighs and toes and go home.
- Go to ballet and attempt to not fall on your face.
- Don’t sleep. You don’t have time for sleep. That’s a lie. You totally need to sleep. So try to sleep, but don’t be surprised when you wake up from dreams of poetry. Perfectly normal. You should be used to this: your block never fails to enter your subconscious. Embrace it. Dreaming in poetry is fun. Usually. Except when it’s T.S. Eliot theme. Those can get weird.
- Smile at the faces you know as well your own yet have never actually met before.
- Take a CC bus to Red Rocks to see Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. Make it a self-date and weave your way to the front of the ropes and dance surrounded with strangers. Meet a boy from DU who gives you a mean gesture. Hug him. Attempt to make peace. Eventually make him smile, then run because the show begins. He’ll yell something profane as you depart. That’s OK. CC is better anyway. Dance so hard that you take off your coat and feel warm, alive, in a sleeveless dress in the 20 degree Colorado chill. Feel warm, safe, content on the bus ride home, back to campus, home, you are home already though, even the CC bus feels like home.
- Role on a tennis ball on your bedroom floor. Cheapest greatest massage ever. You’re welcome.
- Try not to have a panic attack about all the words you need to write and read and analyze and reread and understand in the next week.
- Find prospective CC students online via Tumblr and Facebook. Convince them CC is magical–it is–convince them it’s worth the risk.
- Call your mom and try not to cry because you’re so overwhelmed and so stressed and so happy and so exhausted at the same time.
- Write a blog in bullet points instead of working on an anxiety-producing paper that you feel should be a cakewalk but is totally not feeling like a cakewalk.
- Wonder what a “cakewalk” is exactly and where the term came from. Make note to Google it.
- Roam campus. Feel blessed. You are.
Published by Heather Ezell
I’m Heather. I claim both northern and southern California as home, though I’m happiest when surrounded by sequoias and a foggy beach. After jumping around several different community colleges in CA and CO, I transferred to CC in Winter 2012 and majoring in English on the Creative Writing Fiction Track with plans to graduate with the class of 2014. During my time at CC, I've acted as the student curator, the copy editor of The Leviathan, a peer tutor in the Writing Center, and an Admission Fellow. However, I most adore to pretend I'm a ballerina in the afternoons.
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