At 11 a.m. on Sunday, the first round of returning Bowdoin students skipped into Thorne for their first brunch of the spring semester. Tanned and tired from trips to Mexico, Peru, Mars, and Florida, clad in their holiday loot, the Polar Bears appeared ready to take on the new semester, fresh from five weeks of fun, restful traveling, and couch-potatoing. Still unscathed by heavy reading, 187-page papers, 18-hour labs, and midterms that seem to last until the week before finals, our campus seems ready for anything.
Some, however, are ready for anything but the sight of people. A few faces in this crowd of new arrivals are already tired and jaded by two or more weeks of pretend-school. These athletes and outing club members, overwhelmed by the sense of renewed life that took over campus this past weekend, have just awoken from Bowdoin's equivalent of a science fiction novel, or some kind of intellectual thriller: preseason.
"What in the Sam Heck just happened?" I asked myself the Sunday after preseason, wondering what kind of alternate dimension the last two weeks of my life had taken place in. All I could really remember was trudging to the field house what felt like about five or six times a day and getting my peanut butter from where the salad usually goes in Moulton.
Quite a trippy experience, you can imagine.
Preseason certainly does have the appeal of nearly complete freedom, and perhaps it fulfills this dream for many. Essentially, preseason is a couple weeks of intensive sports practices, games, and lots and lots and lots of team bonding. Lots of that last one. If you manage your time properly, you could conceivably watch about 65 movies and play about 53 hours of video games over preseason, although few and proud are the people that can pull this rigorous schedule off.
All this makes pre-season what many consider the greatest time of year. 'Tis the season for Will Ferrell movies, ordering out Indian food, "Grey's Anatomy" on DVD, "Halo," Prancer, and Vixen! The "college without homework" utopia has been achieved.
But from what might possibly be considered a more Type A perspective, the whole thing seemed completely surreal. Campus looked like the set of "28 Days Later": the landscape is dark, icy, and eerily silent. A few scattered, zombie-like figures stalk about the route from Farley to Moulton, hair awry with sweat, donned in torn, baggy, pungent clothing, moving stiffly and slowly from the 17 hours of exercise they've done that day. Not only is there a ghastly appearance to campus, but there is a sense of loss, of unfinished business. Where is there to wander when there's no class? What is there to do when there's no homework? What is there to complain about when it doesn't matter anyway if Blackboard is working or not?
I worried that brain cells would sputter and die every few minutes or so. But, more often than that I'd be sitting on my bed with my laptop, comatosely watching episode 786 of "House," and notice that it was time to go to one of probably three mandatory activities, minus practice, that was asked of me the whole of preseason. Muttering angrily to myself, I would wonder why I couldn't seem to find a moment of spare time to do what I wanted to do, darn it! No rest for the weary. Somehow, anything I was told to do during preseason became so overwhelming that even the 12 completely unattached hours a day were simply dismissed and ignored as required TV time. I had all the time in the world, and none to myself. This paradox can produce a moderate amount of guilt and a lot of exasperation by the end of the whole charade. A difficult existence, this preseason.
Of course, preseason doesn't get everyone this worked up. It's possible that those few weeks are some of the most enjoyable of break, or even all year. Does it get any better than friends, sports, and maybe just a few quick four-hour rounds of "Madden 2007?" It's debatable. But, for those of us who were itching for some structure, for some sense of academic obligation during those few weeks of "freedom," Monday was the rejuvenating of the walking dead. Or just the walking really, really tired.
But comatose or really relaxed, zombie-like or really zen, the preseason Polar Bears seem happy, though perhaps momentarily shocked, to have the rest of campus back again.
You guys feel like playing some "Madden?"
Annie Monjar '09 is a member of the Bowdoin Women's Indoor Track Team.