A Weekend to End All Weekends (Part II)
Welcome to Part Dos of “A weekend to end all weekends”. For those just tuning in, here’s the first part in all of its glory.
It is now Saturday. I wake up naturally at the absolutely wondrous time of noon to light gently pouring through my fourth-story windows, filtered by some positively green trees. Life is good. Lazily getting dressed, my roommate and I head over to McTyeire to celebrate yet another successful heliocentric rotation of my best friend Max. I was greeted with some delicious, handcrafted Bok Choy made with love, courtesy of my other best friend Marc. What an amazing start to the day!
I unfortunately couldn’t stay for long, as I had to dash on over to a coding contest sponsored by IBM. My hearty crew and I endeavored for three hours to solve some awesome problems. This was our first contest and we were surrounded by a lot of talent with many more semesters of coursework under their belts. We went in to have fun. Mission accomplished! I love discovering new ways to solve complex problems using self-produced code. It feels so liberating!
In general, Vandy is an amazing place for a budding software engineer. With a cornucopia of tech talks, industry leader visitations and recruitment events, and extracurricular outlets (shoutout to Vandy Apps!), students such as myself use and see applications of what is learned in class on a weekly basis. In fact, on Sunday a senior who had interned at Facebook regaled us with his experiences (particularly those concerning his specific work and the antics of “Zuck”, as employees call him). System.out.println(“Vandy is awesome :)”);
Starting to come down from my coding high, I wandered over to the Student Life Center to join in on some fun Garba action! The lovely Aditi already covered this event, so you should check out her awesome post here. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel and repeat what she has already eloquently said, so I’m just going to leave a picture of my henna here.
I will say one additional thing though. Vandy is the perfect size such that you’re always making new friends but then always seeing them around everywhere you go. At Garba, I ran into so many awesome friends, which made all the stick-dancing, scrumptious food-devouring, and Henna artistry even more fun! It’s great feeling assured to find companionship anywhere and everywhere I go.
In high school, I fell in love with a game called fish bowl. The rules are simple:
- write any five things each on a piece of a paper (from Led Zeppelin lyrics to Anchorman references)
- put these papers in a proverbial fishbowl
- pass the bowl around until it is spent (colloquially referred to as a “roach”)
- do this for three rounds; the first is “Catchphrase”, the second is charades, and in the third, the owner of the bowl only has one word to describe the phrase
- the possessor of the bowl, which alternates between two teams, has thirty seconds to get his/her team to guess as many of the words/phrases as possible; each correct guess = 1 point
It is so much fun!!! Imagine my excitement then when, after following my McTyeire friends back from Garba, we decided to play. We struggled at describing ridiculously complicated phrases, embarrassed ourselves due to many occurrences of “twerk” during the charades phase, and thought inquisitively during the one-word final part until the wee hours of the morning.
I know that some may think that this paragraph is proof that I am just a puppet on a string controlled by Vandy admissions to promote the idea that Vanderbilt students don’t drink and instead stay in on Saturday nights for some good clean fun. In response to such conspiracy theorists, I want it to be known that there legitimately is an impressive array of fun outlets available to Vandy students. Every weekend offers me opportunities to party, have a good-old fashioned sober board game night, and do anything in between. Also, I retort that if I was such a puppet, I wouldn’t be breaking the fourth wall as I am doing right now o_O …
Realizing that I’m writing WAY too much, I’m going to conclude with a chronological stream-of-consciousness summary of my Sunday. Thanks for reading and I can’t wait to see you next time!
Cock-a-doodle-doo, snooze button, Cock-a-doodle-doo, snooze button, Cock-a-d-, alarm clock defenestration, noon, urination, brunch, Heather Jackson and company, stroll to lovely nearby Centennial Park, arts and crafts fair, smorgasbord of cute dogs, hipsters, artists, dreamers, poets, beatniks, hippies, ironic facial hair, adorable dogs, AMAZING fudge, “Namaste y’all”, PUPPIES!!!, goodbye, exuberant return, Facebook tech talk, homework, YouTube dog videos, homework, evil temptress that is Facebook, homework, reddit debate, homework, Malaysian night, scrumptious home-cooked food, fashion show, reluctant return to homework :(, study pow-wow with Marc, midnight, jam fest, Red Hot Chili Peppers, 1 am, 0/1 assignments done, Muse, 2 am, 0/1 assignments done, Green Day, 3 am, 0/1 assignments done, close enough, goodbye, bed, “Dog Days are Over”, sweet dreams