The Ghost of Resolutions Past

We're almost out of the woods; classes are thinning down, reading period has begun, and final exams are but days away. As the end of the spring semester looms close on the horizon, you feel grateful for every friend that babysat you in the line for Spring Weekend and every TA who stayed past their hours to help you understand the material. It was these people, who were there for the good and bad, that made your semester what it was. Unfortunately, this semester can’t be defined only by those who stayed with us. We must also recognize those who didn’t make it. Specifically, those goals you cherished at the beginning of the semester that went up in smoke. After all, who can honestly say that they stuck to every resolution from Winter Break?Hitting the NellyIt may be a little cliché, but most people hope to go into a new year, whether it be calendar or academic, with the goal of bettering themselves physically. After all, this is the semester of #springbreak, #springweekend and #summer2k18. Thus, it is especially painful to take a break from scrolling through Facebook memes only to feast your eyes upon the sneakers shoved into a corner. You look at the gym bag you packed during the first week of the semester but haven’t opened since. Not that it’s your fault. You had a really hard course load after you dropped that fourth class that was simply restricting your development as an individual.DietingAs a healthier person in 2018, you also wanted to carefully consider what you chose as fuel for your body. Maybe your goal was health, or maybe you planned to reduce your carbon footprint or protest companies whose practices you found disagreeable. Perhaps you set a goal, in folly of human limitations, to resist the magnetic pull of chicken finger Fridays. Maybe you even believed that you could avoid Blue Room muffins or pasta from Andrews for a whole semester. Whatever the case, you were hopelessly optimistic and blind to reality. SocializingOne goal common amongst returning students is to put themselves out there and make new friends. While there are many ways to do this, it can seem frightening to engage in some of the most basic methods. For example, you don’t really want to sit down at that Ratty table with people you only somewhat know. I mean, you’d have to ask to sit down and that’s just awkward. What if you came in at a bad time and disrupted their intellectual dialogue about whether the burden of seizing the means of production and redistributing wealth should fall onto the aware middle class or benevolent billionaires?ClubbingIn order to really feel like you're really getting the most out of your Brown experience, you might have come back to campus eager to sign up for new clubs and social organizations. Whether it was for the purpose of expanding your interests, developing new hobbies, or just to have some fun, students flooded the activities fair and put down their email address in droves. Now, most of you wake up to old Listserv emails that do nothing but remind you of the little time left in your days to do much besides studying and writing Brown Bears Admirers posts.Alternately, clubbin'Biggest regret of 2018? Not going to the Colosseum.Just kidding. Your biggest regret of 2018 definitely should have been stepping foot in there.Image via