I don’t know about you, but if I am speaking frankly (and I like to speak frankly), this year has been a difficult one. If you cannot relate, then just try to appreciate my difficult life for a moment. Have pity on your fellow student who is feeling… well… burnt out? Lots of uphills, very few downhills and every turn seemed to bring another boulder to scramble over. Exams back to back. Projects accumulate like the dust bunnies in the corners of my room because I haven’t vacuumed since October. Because of the eternal busyness, a scared ritual has fallen by the wayside. This ritual was started by my roommates in an effort to make one night of the week special. We’d forsake our homework for a precious thirty minutes or so to indulge in a luxurious mixture of butter, sugar and some form of chocolate or candy pieces.
Welcome to Cookie Night, dear friends.
It is usually my roommate Audrey or Mal who make the cookies. I usually sit at the table, studying for whatever-big-grade-defining-exam is too quickly approaching while my other roommate Reesh snapchats all of us videos of ourselves. On this night, whatever bikini body diets we might be convincing ourselves we are following are recklessly abandoned as we lick the spoons to determine if the dough is ready. We sample the chocolate chips (if they are chocolate chip cookies). We slump in our chairs, eyes fixed upon the glass panel over the oven door. Ten minutes to make the perfectly soft, melting, loving, graciously encouraging and perfectly affirming orb of warm chemical bends made strong by baking soda. Or maybe it’s the extra dash of vanilla I sneak into the batter. Or maybe it’s my roommate Mal’s special fines with the spatula in forming the cookies. Whatever it is… it’s magic.
You may say I am being melodramatic. It’s just a cookie for goodness sake, right? It’s a lot of extra calories that my thighs certainly don’t need. It’s a time investment. It’s a money investment. (Did you notice that the price of salt went up this week? I did. I guess that’s what being grown up means.) Putting aside the investment or the melodrama with which I am pouring out my soul to you my dear readers, I think, at least for me, Cookie Night has become a ritual of enormous impact.
In fifty years, I won’t remember the neuroscience project I slaved over for hours. I wont’remember the countless organic chemistry mechanisms I drew on the whiteboards of Payson Library (shoutout to my fellow ghosts who haunt the library at ungodly hours). I won’t remember the itty nitty gritty pieces of life that seem so overwhelming now. I’ll remember the smell of sugar wafting from the oven. And I’ll remember my roommates, dear friends that they are, and how we popped out the screen of our apartment so we could crawl through if we forgot our keys (some more than others — oops), how we would have handstand wall-twerking competitions or how we’d all pile onto someone’s bed just to gossip about who is taking who to formal, eat carrots like rabbits, or shed a few tears about how unsure we are about our futures.
I’m almost done. This is a short article on purpose. If you are wasting time reading my articles, I have one thing to say to you: start your own Cookie Night. Maybe you don’t have access to an oven or maybe you don’t have the 30 minutes to devote to homemade goodness. No matter. Maybe your Cookie Night is a five second vent-session about your grades with a friend in the sushi line on a Friday afternoon. Maybe your Cookie Night is an excursion to Alumni Park for sunset with your significant other. Maybe your Cookie Night is picking up a packet of Oreos and a bag of Doritos and crashing somewhere in the HAWC to ask someone genuinely, really, and truly: “how are you?” It takes a friend. Let’s be friends. Feel free to come over for Cookie Night, too. We’d love to have you. Bring your work, your stress and your love for all things sugary and chocolate-y and real. Ayo waves.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Follow Taylor Nam on Twitter: @nam_nam330
