By Nathan Schmidt
Amid the beauty and growing greenery of springtime, a deep sense of dread has settled over the students of Fairfield University. The daily high temperatures have reached about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, a comfortable level for time spent outdoors, and students now face a newfound pressure to actually interact with other human beings.
This turn of events happens during every spring semester, yet it manages to impose a fresh challenge every time on Fairfield students, who have just recovered from midterm season and don’t want to have to pretend to be sociable. Stagnation reporters were made aware of this problem when they realized that many of their acquaintances were still spending most of the day inside.
“It used to be so easy,” said Louisa Gerette ‘22, who has relished the past two months of freedom during the spring semester. “No one would even bother inviting me anywhere because it’d be too damn cold. And if they did invite me, I could say: no, it’s too damn cold! Now what do we do? We can’t pretend anymore. There’s no hiding.”
Nicholas Havilland ‘21, a resident student who has gladly volunteered his perspective on human nature to anyone who will listen, had a much more cynical perspective on the matter.
“Look at them, sprawling out on the quad like they’re tanning,” he muttered, staring out the window of his dorm in Regis Hall at the handful of students milling about in the university quadrangle. (At the time of the interview, no students had begun yet to engage in the aforementioned sprawling.) “They’re all naive. They don’t know how awful it is to have to talk to people whenever it’s warm out. But they’ll learn. They’ll learn that everyone out there, deep down inside, is basically just annoying. And also they keep wanting to actually walk places.”
Students have generally found relief in the knowledge that soon, summer vacation will be upon them, at which point they can avoid interacting with anyone at home by claiming to be somewhere very far away.
Stagnation 