inside Rhodes

First off I am writing this as Rhodes students across campus are gathered in basements and on first floors because there are tornadoes in the area. Shout out to the Bellingrath residents of whom these pictures were just taken. Y’all rock my socks off!

As a follow-up to my last post, I am happy to report that my Organic and Physics tests are over! They went okay. I didn’t do particularly well on them which is a bit disheartening, but it is only the beginning of the semester and I have much time to redeem myself.

Unfortunately, my studying in which I was so diligently engaged on Tuesday became interrupted when I got a call from my dad telling me that my dog, Sam, had been hit by a car. Now Sam was a pretty awesome dog. I mean… really awesome. He was a catahoula (i.e. a pretty big dog) who thought he was a lap dog (if not human). He loved to have his belly rubbed so a simple command of “sit” often led to a brief moment of seemingly postural sitting and then he was on his back wagging his tail, his blue eyes begging you to rub his tummy. Needless to say, his passing was way more devastating then I ever thought it would be. While I took the phone call pretty well, as soon as I hung up the phone, I started crying. As I am not someone who cries often, this surprised Stephen (my boyfriend- from here on to be referred to simply as Stephen), but he was there for me just to let me cry.

You experience so many of life’s milestones while you are at college and so many of them are great. You may get into a great relationship, make life-long friends who my friend and fellow RA Albie says, “you will call when you have a baby,” and you decide on a career path. Sometimes though, you hit those milestones which aren’t so great. You may lose a pet, a friend or a family member (none of these being exclusive from one another). You may make the first failing grade of your life. Your long distance relationship that you were trying to cling to may just not work out. And those times… are hard. What makes it so great are the various support systems that you find here. As an RA I am in a community with 35 other RAs and 4 supervisors who will do anything for me. My residents are just as supportive. Though it is my job to be there for them, they are there for me as well. The professor-student relationships are such that you will find you can tell them that you are going through something and they will be there to keep you on your feet. Even in not-so-hard times, these support systems are your motivators to succeed in whatever journey you may choose.

I mean look at the pictures below… how can those people not be totally awesome!?

Speaking of RAs and awesomeness and diverging from my seriousness… how about that Super Bowl? That may seem like a totally random diversion but there’s logic there. You see, the group of RAs responsible for campus-wide programming held a pretty awesome SuperBowl party in our Lynx Lair (our pub on campus) and lots of people came!

Though at the beginning of the game I felt that more people would be cheering for the Patriots to have a perfect season, it became apparent that there were more Giants fans in the room. So, who were you cheering on? Personally, I was going with the Giants… I mean I went to the Manning’s alma mater (and by that I mean their high school alma mater, Newman, in uptown New Orleans). So, clearly, the next best thing to the Saints in the Super Bowl are the Mannings in the Super Bowl, so I was cheering for Eli.

And that last play of the game- intense.

One last thought: Happy Mardi Gras! Laissez les bonnes temps rouler. (It’s possible my French is just a little off.) I missing NOLA a whole lot right now.

Anyway, that’s really all I’ve got for today…

Peace Out,

Sarah