There you are, at your desk, starting morosely at your calendar which hangs on the smudged, windowless white wall in front of you. Like a jerk, a long time ago, you carefully penciled "Spring Break" across the appropriate squares. You weren't just making it up. You, in fact, work at a college, so it is, in fact, Spring Break for most of the people who would normally be there on a beautiful Wednesday afternoon in March.
But staff don't get Spring Break off. You know your fate. You will sit for endless hours under the fluorescent lights during Spring Break, your skin getting paler as your soul shrivels up and falls out. Over the course of the week, you will morph into a strange goblin-like creature who subsists on microwave burritos and develop twitches in the soft bags of skin that form under your near-blind eyes. You will learn to speak in a tremulous whisper of The Outside and whimper in fear when the cleaning person opens the door and allows fresh, clean, evil air to slide through the office.
Faculty and students? All gone. Roadtripping to Mexico or riding ponies across a beach or relaxing with frosty beers in the sunshine or swimming with shiny dolphins. You feel certain that if you had a window anywhere near your cold, hard desk, you'd see hoardes of these people skipping across the parking lot, singing and yelling cheerily and wearing sunglasses with rhinestones on them and flip flops and shorts and bikini tops, some of them, and waving brightly colored scarves around their heads. Isn't that what people who are on Spring Break do? With scarves, I mean? I would. If sunlight didn't burn so.
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