Home Alone
“No,” my friend Evan said after I made a casual comment about going home for Thanksgiving and Christmas. We were working as kitchen staff over the summer when the topic of college breaks arose. “You don’t want to go home for Thanksgiving.”
I looked up from the stack of dirty pots before me and raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”
“Because you’ll waste a lot of money.”
I put down a newly-rinsed skillet and leaned on the edge of the sink. Evan had already had a year of college, so I was interested in any piece of advice he could offer. “What do you mean?”
“Last year I spent like two hundred dollars on a flight home and back, and then I had to pay another two hundred to go home two weeks later for Christmas.” Evan picked up the skillet and started scrubbing it with a soapy sponge. “The way I see it, you should either go home for Thanksgiving, or go home for Christmas, and since you can’t stay at school for Christmas…”
“I should probably stay at school for Thanksgiving,” I told my mom over the phone a few weeks ago, months after Evan had given me the budget-saving advice.
She wasn’t very happy to hear that. Though she tried to find holes in my reasoning, I eventually wore her down, convincing even myself that staying on campus was the best option.
As the holiday crept closer and my friends planned their trips home, I began to plan how I was going to divide the work I had to complete over the three days I wouldn’t have to go to class. I looked over my schedule with anticipation – ready to complete as many assignments as humanly possible.
On the first morning I the break, I crawled out of bed after a beautiful eleven-hour sleep and wrote three reports for Earth Science and two papers for Cycling. Then I slacked off. Instead of spending the remainder of the day doing work, I spent it watching multiple hours of television. I tried to get back on track, but I just couldn’t. My brain had shut down and it had no intention of turning back on.
Thanksgiving Day was… interestingly depressing. My mother called me repeatedly to tell me what she was cooking, who was coming, and to make sure that I was still alive. My sister and I spent the entire day texting each other innocuous insults (she disowned me – that was actually the highlight of my day). And when someone called around dinner time, I could hear the whole family talking around the table. I felt like I was the kid from Home Alone. He thought that spending the holidays alone would be great, but found out that he’d rather spend it with his family instead.
Unfortunately, my story didn’t come with a pair of dim-witted thieves and an arsenal of imaginative booby traps.
Though it isn’t going to be one of the most memorable Thanksgivings, the one I spent on campus allowed me to see all that I had to be thankful for. Its cliché, but you really don’t know what you have until it’s gone.
I find it interesting that that epiphany rose from a state of complete boredom.
Maybe I should be bored more often.