The borderline-miserable experience of Hilary Term ended yesterday morning at 9:30 a.m., with an overly complicated eight-step process for turning in our only graded assignment of the term.  Technically, I had until noon, but having spent eight weeks on a single essay, I was ready to be free of it.  Instead – in true Princeton Band spirit, I’d like to think – I brought in a bottle of champagne and toasted my compatriots as they staggered in from printing clusters around campus.  Only in Oxford would people drinking the department common room not arouse suspicion, but instead inspire professors to come down and get a glass.

Around noon, we retired to the Turf Tavern, infamous as the place where Bill Clinton tried marijuana but did not inhale while he was in Oxford failing to get a degree.  There’s something amusing about a group of people going crazy (at one point,

we had three people beat boxing and improv rapping about development) on a day that has absolutely no significance to anyone else.  Yesterday was such a massive milestone, and yet there’s absolutely no way to explain why to anyone who wasn’t in the program because, after all, it’s just a couple of papers, right?  It feels ridiculous to be celebrating simply making it through the term.  I feel like by this age, I’m supposed to be reserving celebration for getting published or saving the world, not just managing to turn in a handful of assignments and non-failing a pass-fail test.

All that aside, I’m off to Barcelona today.  England has decided to take away the gorgeous weather it has been granting us in the last week, so I couldn’t be fleeing at a better time.  Here’s to you, Hilary; it’s been real, it’s been fun, it’s been real fun.

– – – – –

Jukebox: Pink Floyd – Another Brick in the Wall