Half-Time
Posted October 25, 2021 by Abbey Metzler
In October, I know how I am supposed to be spending my weekends. I’m not talking about the fabled New England leaf peeping or the apple and pumpkin picking we wait all year for. I mean that mid semester rush of projects and presentations and paper deadlines that loom large over the first half of the class and rush to arrive before any of us know it. The midterm season in graduate school is less defined than its undergraduate counterpart. While I used to have midpoint tests to look forward to, now my calendar is filled with a handful of assignments worth increasingly more percentages of my total class grades. It’s less a midterm schedule and more a mounting panic at how quickly the semester runs by. I spent the first few weeks at Simmons feeling like I wasn’t doing enough. And now, I wonder if it is worth bringing my laptop to work with me so I can look for entries for my next paper’s bibliography on my commute home.
With my mental and physical to-do lists piling up, I made the choice not to spend one of my Saturday’s learning about authority control metadata. Instead, when the offer came in, I decided to go to one of the New England Revolution’s soccer games.
While I love soccer (the American definition), I am not a football fan (also, the American definition). I know of the Patriots of course, but I had little interest in visiting their stadium just a bit outside of Boston while I am living here for school. I was going for the tailgating and the chance to see my new home team beat my previous one. The Revs were playing the Chicago Fire and I love some healthy competition. As soon as I saw the Gillette Stadium, looming large and bright over the trees and visible from seemingly an impossible distance, I knew I made the right choice to step away from the grad school pressure for one night. I could use one hundred adjectives here to try and explain to someone not from Boston how big that stadium is, and it would not be enough. I can only ask if this was how the Romans felt about their colosseum?
The tailgating was fun, lots of open flames and parking lot soccer matches. Our seats were high off the field, and when it began to pour we were the only fans to stay dry. The Revs started strong in the first half. But Chicago brought it back in the second and the game ended with a tie. As long as the weaker second half of the match does not portend the rest of my semester, I say it was a midterm break well spent.