About Us
On Sunday, my friends and I woke up early. We moved the kitchen table from the boys’ mod into ours, cooked for a few hours, showered, got dressed up, and put on our very own “Friendsgiving.” While we were preparing, one of my friends remarked that it was a lot like our “Last Supper.” That felt incredibly true.
Senior year is weird and hard. It’s weird and hard to think about post-grad life, where we’re all going to be in six months, and be present at BC. And it’s really hard not to focus on the “lasts”: the last first day of school, the last parents’ weekend, the last Halloween, the last tailgate, the last course registration…the last supper.
It’s easy to get caught up in the hype, to feel like you need to take advantage of everything. The pressure is on to do it all, to go out for every senior night, attend every Pub Series, buy tickets for every ball or dance or cruise. Because it’s always one of the last times you’ll ever be able to do that.
And I get it, I feel that pressure all the time. When I miss out on something, whether it’s because I’m swamped with work or I have other obligations, I’m wildly bummed about it. For example, I’ve never gone to Homecoming—never even considered going, to be honest. But this year, I went back home to New Jersey to visit my family over Columbus Day Weekend, so I couldn’t go to Homecoming even if I wanted to. And I was a little bit crushed, because part of me really did want to go. But I have to wonder, why exactly am I so hung up on missing things that I haven’t genuinely cared about before?
Or, take Halloween: I hate Halloween, and have for pretty much my entire life. But this year was my last Halloween as a college student, so I went for it. I was all in—I planned and prepared and (at least in my opinion) pulled it off. And I did it so that at the end of the day, I could say that I did it.
And I think that’s what’s going on here. There comes a point where we’re doing things just to say that we did them. It’s just like what we do with social media when we post pictures and statuses that don’t reflect the reality of our lives. In both ways, we’re trying to prove something. I think we’re trying to prove just how good of a time we’re having.
That’s not an inherently bad thing. We should look back fondly on these days, and we should take advantage of everything we’re offered. But the problem is that, in a way, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. Sure, there’s value in all of this, but there’s also value in not doing it.
When I try to think about how I’ll remember my college years, I think about the nights my friends and I stayed in and watched Saturday Night Live and drank wine until we got tired. I think about the Sundays where we lazed around, and the nights we were up doing homework together. Sometimes I think about the tailgates, and the performances and the formals—these are all critical parts of our college experience.
But what I’m going to remember most, and most fondly, aren’t all the “lasts.” I’m not going to remember this Friendsgiving as our Last Supper. I’m going to remember it as a Sunday where I blew everything off to spend the day with my friends, cooking and eating and sleeping. I’m going to remember my senior year not as the last year of college, not as a year when I did everything I hadn’t done already, but as a collection of moments—some firsts, some lasts, some neither—spent with my best friends.
