pERFECT Sunday  by Yee-Fan Sun, Editor | 1 2

There’s a lot that I miss about being in college, even now, four and a half years – yikes! –after a diploma and a handshake marked my official booting from that idyllic microcosm out into the big, scary Real World. I miss Belgian waffles at weekend dining hall brunches. I miss living in funky Harvard Square -- browsing for books at Wordsworth, lingering over coffee at Café Algiers, CD shopping at Newbury Comics, salivating over cool shoes at Berk’s, squeezing into a packed Pinocchio’s for a sublimely good sub. I miss those days of thinking about Confucian humanism one hour, classics of world cinema the next, all while stressing about a final project for a printmaking class called The Artists’ Book – and having that mean I was an admirably well-rounded individual rather than a hopeless dilettante. And I definitely miss Mom and Dad footing the bill that let me enjoy all that college-life goodness. But as wonderful as all those things were, what I miss most, stupid as this may seem, is the simple pleasure of wasting time in good company.

Parties, bars, clubs and the like – these are all fine and agreeable ways of passing the time, but loafing with friends, that unofficial extracurricular upon which college life seemed to center, is just pure bliss. Lounging around with a cozy group of your best buds, doing nothing at all while you ignored the fact that you should really be finishing a problem set or writing a paper instead, indulging in a lazy afternoon that stretched languidly into evening … happy happy, joy joy. Sigh. Pardon me while I overdose on nostalgia for a moment.

Last Sunday was one of those perfect Sundays that made me forget, for a day at least, that I’d spent the previous two weeks depressed about the fact that I am now, as of my recent birthday, nearly 30 (okay, only if you’re rounding to the nearest 10^th, but still …). See, Sunday was spent sprawled on a futon on the floor of a living room, slacking en masse with friends. It was the sort of day that used to be the norm back when I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, and that, sadly, has become an increasingly rare occurrence in these post-college years.

The whole weekend had been fairly fabulous. Saturday, of course, was the big Halloween party at our friend Eileen’s, a fete she’s been throwing for so long – and so well – that its renown as a 100% guaranteed source of creative costuming, dancing and general debauchery has now reached near-mythic proportions. (How many parties do you know of where poor grad students will – and I exaggerate not – actually fly in from the other side of the country for a weekend just to attend?) I ate, I drank, I did far too many tequila shots and jello shots, I danced (in my unwieldy black widow spider costume – which, don’t ask me how I’m supposed to take this, I was told quite suited me), until sometime after four, having amused myself for awhile by gradually adding other people’s misplaced costume remnants (a red feather boa, an over-sized Mad Hatter’s hat) to my happily inebriated, now-napping boyfriend, I felt sufficiently sober to drive the two of us home. Upon exit, we said our good-byes to the hostess and promised we’d be by the next day to help clean up.

but wait, there's more!

---------------------------> lounge . nourish . host . laze . home .