Written by Joe Krzyston
The situation was dire. Students and staff across campus were on the brink of losing it. Everybody knew this, but nobody would do much of anything. We were but hostages to the weather for a few days. In what experts are calling a stunning reversal of fate, the entire student body of Roanoke College is now suddenly just fine after three sustained days of unseasonably warm weather.
“It… it’s just wild,” said a junior at the college, who had, until the turn in weather, been entirely emotionally despondent. “One day I was spending my days looking up from the bottom of a deep solipsistic hole, and the next I was parading across the back quad. There were birds chirping and people laughing. I’d forgotten what a human smile looked like, how the warm sun felt on my skin. There’s a meaning to life, and it’s finally thawed out.”
Campus mental health experts are absolutely stunned at the increase in the wellbeing of the campus community. “Yeah,” said one official, “we’ve never seen such a sudden turnaround as this. It really was like somebody flipped a switch and made everybody happy again. This is dramatically cheaper than the Prozac-in-all-the-commons-food idea we’d been tossing around before.” Despite the positivity, there are rumors of cutbacks among the counselling staff amid the sudden upturn in spirits, and employees are murmuring about who might be the first to go.
The only students unenthused by the improvement in the weather were the environmental studies majors. “We enjoy a nice day as much as anybody else,” said a sophomore in the program, “but studying and understanding the processes that might be making it this warm in February makes it a little harder to enjoy it.” In spite of this, though, the program is a generally easygoing one, and talks of a walkout climate change protest (a thinly veiled excuse to go on a hike, perhaps?) are ongoing.
Still, across campus, spirits are high, skin is tanning, and moods are improving. Things are expected to continue improving steadily until the overall quality of life declines when we reach the dog days of summer. Still, there are quite a few months before we start scurrying from air conditioning to air conditioning, and we are advised to enjoy these days while we have them.
