Winter break went by so quickly! Not because I was doing a million and one exciting things and internships and international tours and what have you, but because I had a rough case of the ol’ walking pneumonia for the first three weeks of our time away from classes. The end of finals week hit hard, and then my lungs just shut down. I hate doing nothing, and that’s exactly what I had to do for those weeks. I coughed a lot, and I watched far more episodes of The Simpsons than a person really should.

By the time I felt well enough to do anything, break was almost over. Lucky for me, I’d made a plan to go to Atlantic City with some of the other McBrides! I hadn’t really realized how much I needed to get out of Philadelphia. AC is super close, but by the time we got there, I felt like I was on a totally different planet. (Part of that is how weird I feel about casinos, but that’s for another time.)

We spent two days inside a giant dome, pretending that it wasn’t January and enjoying the sunshine, the warmth of the hot tubs, and a seemingly endless supply of fruity drinks. It was very hard to come home.

I’m never so far away from Bryn Mawr, though. It follows me everywhere. Example: the night my friend MJ asked me about “Moby Dick,” because she’d just started reading it and needed some context. I launched into a lecture, fueled by Strawberry Bellinis, about race and slavery and whaling and disability and the chapters on whale taxonomy that she could maybe skip if she felt herself losing faith in the novel…

Someone took video, and it exists in the internet ether. It was a proud (and silly!) moment. That’s a good combination. I’m working toward more proud, and more silly.

Welcome back Mawrters!

P.S. Oh my gosh, this was my last undergraduate winter break. This is not a thing we can process right now, but come back to me in two weeks, okay?