Over spring break, I chose to stay in New York and go into my internship in person. My spring break was an exercise in waking up early, commuting into the city and then knowing what subway to take to and fro. I’ve been taking public transport, coming home, watching TV while I cook my dinner, and bringing my leftovers into work the next day for lunch. This unprecedented level of adulthood and maturity that came over me was a welcome change from my laissez-faire college mindset of sleeping in and turning in work when I feel like it.  

The subway system makes no sense to me and is therefore very stressful. I never know what the schedule is, when the subway will arrive, which one I need to take, and when to get off, but since the only real way to learn is by doing, that’s what I set out to do on my spring break. My streak of getting on the right train was short lived when I got on the wrong train on my way home from work. I meant to take the B train uptown. Instead, I took the B train downtown. I got on in Manhattan, meant to go to the Bronx, and ended up in Brooklyn. I prefer to think of it as not getting on the wrong train but getting on a train that was going in the wrong direction. It’s the same thing, I know, but we’re going to pretend that it’s not. 

I cried out of frustration when I first got off the train. When that didn’t solve my problems, I called my dad to set me straight. I couldn’t call my mother to help me out with directions since I get my terrible sense of directions from her. I also, probably, wouldn’t have had very nice things to say to her about this.

(“YOU DID THIS TO ME!”) 

With a little bit of help from my father, I went back on the B train, this time going uptown, and got off at Grand Central. It was at least another hour before I was back home off the Metro North. 

It occurred to me while I was venturing into the city to go to my job everyday that I wasn’t having a typical spring break like all of my friends were when they left school to go to Los Angeles or some other fabulous locale. 

I deserved to be in Cabo or Miami, where everybody is a college student at risk of alcohol poisoning and heat stroke. I wanted to be in the type of place where sleazy men try to find girls with low self esteem to make their “girls gone wild” videos, so that when a guy yells “take your tops off,” I get to yell back “no thanks, I’m a feminist.” I had big dreams for my spring break. 

Anahat and I have had our noses to the grindstone since the start of our semester, so during the one nice weather day, we ventured half an hour away to the beach so that we could eat a picnic, read our books, splash around in the water, and soak up what little sun existed. 

It was a gorgeous day outside: not-even-a-cloud-in-sight type of weather. It was there that we listened to “Solar Power” by Lorde and devised our plan to see her in concert in about a month. We didn’t end up reading our books (sorry Eudora Welty) or getting in the water, but we did decide to come back later with a bunch of our friends.

For our picnic, I made cilantro lime chicken with cilantro lime aioli on a ciabatta roll that I slathered in melted sharp provolone cheese. It was a successful first attempt at making a panini. On the side we had a fruit bowl of bananas, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries, and for dessert, because we hadn’t had enough strawberries, we had chocolate covered strawberries from Topps Bakery. I know that we all have some pretty great movie moments in our lives, but biting into a strawberry right as the song “Strawberry Fields Forever” plays is a whole other level of serendipity. 

We’d clearly gone a little wild laying out on a bedsheet, eating a bunch of fruit and listening to music. We spent hours just like that, taking the kind of fun, relaxing trip that we knew we deserved. Afterwards, we got back to campus with the knowledge that we’d finally done something with our spring break other than work our asses off and that we’d be back at our beloved beach soon. 

I had a wonderful time and I hope that everybody had as pleasant of a spring break as I did. Now I am back to the grind as my semester winds down. 

The Tragic Queen,

Raquel