Somebody bring back the Cronin cookies, please! Lanky Tom Cronin made a good cookie fairy. On undisclosed nights he would walk up and down the library aisles with a big basket of sugar cookies over his arm, Safeway-style gourmet. His cookies spiked stressful weeks with sugar highs: frosted pumpkins for October midterms, pastel spring cookies for the end-of-the-year crunch. Oh please, somebody bring me a Cronin cookie. It’s survival time on campus.
My housemate once showed me a Web site with graphs of baby name popularity. Jessica, Brittany and Heather rose; Mary ebbed and flowed; Ethel dwindled. Substitute average sleep hours for a name, and we’re doing about as well as Mildred. Coffee intake? Just like “Emma” after Jennifer Aniston named her daughter on “Friends”: shooting off the scales.
You don’t have to look hard for crazed students. Anybody stop by the Olin lab Thursday afternoon? It was the day for seniors to turn in final drafts of their theses. Cubicles looked like Charly Bloomquist’s office. As new people walked in, seniors snapped around with fire in their eyes and forbade them to print to the thesis printer. They print on special, cotton-based paper so it stays nice in the library collection. Olin became a battlefield.
Our minds are full these days, and our fridges are empty. What do you make with week-old kale, Tillamook butter and almonds? To handle springtime at college, you’ve gotta be equipped with survival skills. You grill up a mean kale almond stir-fry. You beg your housemates for bread and broccoli. You beg nice freshmen to swipe you into brunch.
You curse the ominous Bon Appetit policy of getting rid of double-swipes. Bon Appetit! Don’t you see that you’re cutting the last survival ropes?
A few years ago, I started writing a comprehensive guide to college survival. Number one on the list was “don’t put pears in backpacks (your books will turn to brown mush).” Number two: “take advantage of the Whitman sauna. Take study breaks in the great unknown, like the tennis courts or the TKE couch.”
My mom has advice too: drink warm milk. Do yoga stretches. Sleep.
I always promise her I will. But let’s say my eight-hour sleep window is a block of delicious cheese. My chemistry homework is a little rat that likes to nibble away at the tip. Little by little it eats its way toward my 9:00 class the next morning.
Maybe all you savvy, smart people feel more put together than I do. But if not, take comfort in the starry-eyed alums we saw on campus all weekend. They remember those hellish library nights fondly: ah, that was the night I fell asleep on the second-story leather couch. (I’m making this up. Their couch was probably macrame). It’s true: I already sigh with nostalgia over that time freshman year when I wrote my Shakespeare final over pumpkin pancakes at Clarette’s, and the morning after an art studio all-nighter when hot air balloons came gloriously floating over a deserted Ankeny. Yeah, I know you’re sleep deprived. Breathe in. Whooosh. Think of Cronin cookies. Wheee. Collect some good survival stories.