The Home Stretch

For reasons known only to the sadistic black-suits atop the ivory towers of Northwestern, our university enjoys the sweet satisfaction of torturing its students into mental oblivion. It's not exactly the Jack Bauer kind of torture, like lowering your naked body onto an electrically-charged puddle (I promise, it's a 24-reference. I don't just think of torture methods in my free time). No no, this torture is worse. It's the kind of torture that consumes your mind and sends you spiraling slowly into the depths of insanity. The kind of torture that forces you to torture yourself, to bite your own nails, to pull your own hair, if only to prove that after three tortuous summer months before college, you're still alive and Northwestern is still waiting.

BUT WHYYYYY? WHYYY ISN'T SCHOOL HERE YET?! CAN'T SUMMER BE OVER?

They dangle the date luringly before our eyes. SEPTEMBER 14. "Move-In" Day. The beginning of Wildcat Welcome. They send out seemingly innocent e-mails with friendly to-do lists and news. But we know they just want us to crave Northwestern that much more.

So yes, we wait. There are two weeks until Northwestern's "doors" officially open. It's painful, no doubt. At this point, our friends are sitting satisfyingly in a dorm room in some better place, and we're stuck pondering what awaits us in college this year. Two months from now, we'll probably be asking ourselves why in hell we wanted to be in school so badly, why we wanted these homework assignments, these exams, these STDs. But until then, our curiosity and anticipation is uncomfortably akin to torture.

2 weeks. It's the home stretch.