First Snow

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Three years later, I still find myself feeling a little ridiculous.  My mind blamed my gut, the same gut that as a first-year responded do the loud yelling coming from the halls of Battell that had kept me from getting into bed. 

 

The source of the noise was a member of my first-year seminar, but no more than an acquaintance.  She was sporting a bright pink bikini, a ski helmet, goggles and the furriest boots I had seen since arriving at Midd as a first-year not more than two months before.  It had already been a non-descript week night, the kind where Chinese homework, 5:00 dinner and astronomy lab all mesh together to form one long block of time capable of sufficiently making me exhausted to the point where it was not hard to want to pass out for a good week.  So yes, it was my gut and not my common sense that responded to the voice instead of tuning it out.

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Election Season

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I imagine that being a college student during any election is interesting, but the election this year was particularly exciting. The campus buzz during midterm elections two years ago was definitely not as loud as it was this year. Most of us voted in our first presidential election. It seemed like many students thought the stakes were higher this year than they were two years ago or in other recent presidential elections. Well before the election, many students had settled on a major candidate, and most Midd kids seemed to be supporting Obama and Biden.

 

Even after the election is over, the trend towards one political consensus, at least among my friends, does not mean that we have any shortage of conversation or debate over the issues. Somewhere in the middle of schoolwork, loads of clubs and teams, students here find time to read about the different policy proposals and to keep up with post-election developments. During the election, many canvassed for the ticket that they supported. It was not uncommon to hear about students who drove to the battleground state of New Hampshire on the weekends to knock on doors and encourage people to vote for their candidate of choice. A lot of Middlebury students were active in calling undecided voters to talk about why their candidate deserved and needed that voter’s support. The College Dems weekly phone-athons in Hillcrest, and on Election Day, they made 6143 calls from Coltrane Lounge during their “All Day Phone Bank for Barack” event.  

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Quidditch 2009

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I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t provide yet another account (although albeit more fair and balanced than many you may see) about the Quidditch phenomenon here at Midd.  I’d like to at least pretend that my perspective is different from most!

 

In the fall of 2006, my first year at Middlebury, a group of us got together on Sunday mornings to combat the ill-effects of a Saturday night by putting on rather haughty clothing and our best British accents as we competed in a rousing round of croquet.  Soon we began to brainstorm about other ways to ensure that we could drag ourselves out of bed before 11:00 and before long, under the leadership of Xander Manshel, we found ourselves with capes on our backs, brooms between our legs and running around Battell Beach chasing our hallmate cross country runner/wrestler Rainey Johnson dressed in yellow. 

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Back at Middlebury

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The semester is off and running! As I anticipated, I am thinking about Middlebury in different terms than I did in previous semesters. Many of my friends have returned from living abroad and we are all spread out on campus due to the changes in the Commons system. While I was a fan of the original Commons, I am thrilled to live in a new place with friends from other dorms—an option that was not as accessible before.

 

The Middlebury community feels both bigger and smaller with these changes. I have met new people, even in the space of a few days on campus. These new acquaintances traveled the globe with my friends or are simply the neighbors of my old Ross hall-mates in dorms with which we “Ross Rhinos” were previously unaffiliated. When you consider how many people there are to meet each year, it is astounding, even at a relatively small school. People who were abroad all year seem to feel particularly unfamiliar with the campus community because they know, at best, only half the school. (No small feat!)

 

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Tibet

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Somewhere in the mountains of Tibet I forgot how fast life can be.  It was either the macaque monkeys making valiant attempts at capturing my lunch or the ethereal mist that hung over the monasteries dotting the cliffs, but perhaps both were instrumental in helping me lose my complete sense of time. I remember thinking then that despite what appeared to be my total departure from life at home, in a few short months I would be back in Middlebury surrounded by those who also had made the seemingly impossible journey from the ends of the earth back to the figurative center of it all. I remember that while excited for whatever lay ahead I also dreaded again facing the very things that had originally driven me away to a land of monkeys and mountains. And yet it felt like merely a short breath had gone by when I found myself back at Middlebury. Having lost my sense of time long before my return, it was pretty easy to feel lost.

 

For one, I returned to find a Middlebury College that physically in many ways did not resemble the home I had stored in my brain as a reminder of my roots. A new building had come to life, a construction site that magically had become a center of liberal-arts life. In that building, a room where time appeared to be playing a joke on itself as first-year fiddled with their new iPods and Blackberries under the watchful eyes of Julian Abernethy (a reference I hope you alumni get).

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