My first six weeks at Midd have been a learning experience in every sense of the word. Examples could consume as much time as you could devote to reading them, but here's the countdown to the top:
#6: Parents paid for a lot of things you didn't realize they paid for
laundry, ibuprofen, coffee, lessons, peanut butter, books. Aly is leased out taking care of two little girls who absolutely adore her and so far, hasn't had an issue with her back (if it hurt, they would know- who doesn't remember USPC champs '08 when my horse bucked two entire twenty meter circles of Training 2?). This means one horse worth of expenses, which is great, except when that horse is Neil, whose record for not doing something stupid to injure himself is a whopping twenty-some days and who currently resembles a pirate with yet another face bang-up of unknown cause. He's getting clipped this week, which I'm pretty excited about, because it means I can make him do real work again.
#5 Living with 2400 of your closest friends is really fun,
except when you want to make a phone call. Or wash saddle pads on a Sunday night. Or sleep on a weekend. at all. Or when your curtain breaks and you can no longer pull the shade down. Or if your habit of singing songs in the shower to which you actually don't know all the words is really, really hard to break (of course, well all know that one wouldn't be me...).
#4 Failure is a really productive way of learning
for example, if you're used to being able to keep your GPA over 100% and ride two horses, do jazz, and work 40 hours a week, you might need a little bit of a wakeup call (cough cough, microeconomics midterm). The fact that life at Midd is only, only, ride, study, eat, study, class, study, write up another lab...is refreshing in some ways; a job is a really nice thing not to have to balance with a double lab and an event horse. Not succeeding instantly when you work that hard to begin with pisses you off and makes you work a lot harder. My failure to ever park the truck actually between the lines and not encroaching on someone else's parking spot... the jury's still out on that one.
#3 Ugly sweaters are in
This is possibly the most paradoxically dressed campus in North America. At 53K a year, either you're wearing an ugly sweater from Goodwill because you're paying the difference between (grant money+ scholarships+ loans) and tuition, or you're wearing an ugly sweater you paid an arm and a leg for at J. Crew....and nobody knows the difference. I'm seeing an alarming future ahead of me with a consistent theme of dressing the way I have made fun of my mother for dressing over the last 18 years of my life. Alarming trend #2? Mountain horse field boots actually soliciting compliments from non-equestrians in the dining hall: "they look so real!"
No way.
#2 Time not spent doing work is not a waste of time
Time spent riding is time spent absolutely NOT memorizing where this carbon and that hydroxyl group go in that carbohydrate to tag that transmembrane protein for transport to that organelle or figuring out whether a flood in imaginary country x will shift this or that curve in a supply and demand model. It's almost better to be riding a baby horse which demands this level of compartmentalized focus than to be riding a horse on which I could get away with some level of distraction. Downside to this: Neil no longer sees me as the grocery lady but only as the really demanding lady who has high expectations for his emotional ability to handle walking past a field full of cows (aka, horse-eating zombie monsters).
#1 If I can drive to Burlington with 5 male backseat drivers, I can do anything
If you've ever spent any amount of time in the back seat of a two door Chevy Silverado, you can imagine the amount of extra space left over with one girl, 5 very tall college boys, and an unbelievable level of noise piled in for one 45 minute road trip. Miraculously, the bottom of the truck did not scrape the pavement of Rt. 7 all the way there and back. As an added and perhaps greater miracle, one pumpkin spice latte with espresso was enough caffeine to maintain a more or less calm disposition (depending who you ask, but since it's my story, we'll go with my version) throughout the adventure. Boys of Stewart, I love you, really, I do. But contrary to your ingrained beliefs about women, we really can drive- just not when you're blasting Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and singing along with the truck next to us at every intersection.
Cheers!
Marina
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