We’ve all done a lot of thinking and talking about what we’re grateful for in the past week, maybe even to the point where it seems trite.
Every couple of months, U.Va. allows us to leave our monotonous lives as college students and go back home to the luxuries of our own rooms, the holiday cups at Starbucks, our moms’ — dad’s in my case — home cooking, and our high school friends without whom we thought we could never live.
Here we are again. Despite the countless promises I made to myself before Thanksgiving, I opted for blissful ignorance above proactive preparedness this break.
If there is one thing the holidays have taught me, it is that commercial travel is perhaps one of the most unifying and simultaneously divisive forces of our era, especially during the holiday season.
The holidays are here. In another universe, we may be able to ignore this fact, since it’s not even December.
I’ve resisted the nagging urge to write a column about this particular topic because of a previously perceived lack of substance, but sometimes my internal filter through which I pass all ideas gets polluted by particular aggravating experiences. We all know about famous French cuisine, and believe me when I say it meets expectations.
We are at that point in our young adult lives where self-expression begins to matter. The research papers we write, the special items of clothing that comprise our signature outfits, the concert tickets on which we splurge and the stubs we tuck away for safe memory-keeping.
Now that Starbucks is using its holiday cups, Barracks Road Shopping Center has hung its wreaths, and the back of Target looks like a Christmas tree forest, I think it is appropriate for me to write a column about why the holidays rock when you’re in college — a whole 35 days before Christmas. Around the holidays, it is hard to not be a little sad.
Dear unknown girl who refuses to wash her hands, You confuse me, you intrigue me and you disgust me.
Today my father is getting a pacemaker. At 21 I never thought I would say those words about my 61-year-old father.
Last week, our nation reelected Barack Obama to be the 44th president of the United States of America.
Has anyone in the history of the world ever attended a fraternity house while sober? Am I the only member of this sad minority?
Thanksgiving is so close I can almost smell my mom’s garlic mashed potatoes and gravy steaming on the stove.
Perfect students. We all know them — I mean, it’s U.Va. There’s the student with a 3.7 GPA who is active in six different clubs and president of two of them and still manages to work out two hours a day and eat healthy.
I’ve never really been a birthday person. In the past, the event has been riddled with enough anxiety to make it generally unpleasant.
I’m apt to loathe politics. It all seems to be happening so far away — in some other time, on some other planet.
At this point in my column-writing career, it becomes harder each week to think of a new and interesting topic.
Much like my current favorite fictional heroine Lady Mary Crawley of “Downton Abbey” fame, I am very lucky.
For the first several weeks of my stay in Lyon, Sundays were the dreaded day. In France, everything is closed on Sundays.
My sister’s room is littered with Hemingway quotes, pictures, books. She drinks Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale because it’s named after one of Hemingway’s short stories — and it doesn’t hurt that it also has a pretty high ABV.
