You have a lot to be thankful for after your freshman year of college. I mean you should feel thankful for simply surviving it! Between finals, packing, and moving home, you haven't really had time to reflect on the busyness of the year. However, with things starting to slow down a little for the summer, let us reflect on what we should have been thankful for all along.
1. Tide pods.
Doing laundry in college sucks: the washer and dryer barely work, you have to choose random times to do laundry in order to avoid the brawl of college students fighting over washing machines, and you have to pay over a dollar for each machine you use! But thanks for Tide pods, you were able to skip the hassle of measuring detergent and fighting pizza grease stains by hand! Shout out to Tide and Procter and Gamble for making laundry day slightly less awful.
2. Drying racks.
On the note of laundry day, shout out to drying racks from saving my jeans and dress clothes from being shrunk in the dryer! You are the real MVP, and one of the best purchases I made all year.
3. Food delivery services.
Special thanks to Postmates, Grubhub, and Amazon Prime for bringing me nourishment when I didn't want to brave the Chicago weather.
4. Uber.
Dear Uber, I have been blessed by your invention, and I am forever in debt to you. You are the only way one can survive living in a city without a car, although you do have some really weird Uber drivers, and I think you should further research some of these people before hiring them. Regardless, shout-out to you, Uber, for making the lives of college kids so much better!
5. Your crazy liberal English teacher.
Regardless of your political leanings, there are some teachers that just voice their opinions on politics way too much! Like this is English I, why are we talking about your stance on gun control? Can we just go back to talking about parallel structure? Unfortunately, you never did learn the proper way to utilize semicolons; however, you did learn all about minimum wage! While this teacher might have driven you crazy at times, it taught you how to respect the views of others by simply nodding with a smile and writing essay in which you pretend to be very passionate about the same things as your teacher to secure an "A." Sorry not sorry.
6. Coffee.
Without coffee, you probably would have flunked out of all of your 8 a.m. classes. Thank you for keeping us late to write that paper, and waking us up early to get to class pretty much on time. Not so thankful for the damage you did on my budget though.
7. The crazy roommate.
Is it really freshman year if at least one of your random roommates doesn't end up being crazy? I don't think so. Thank you for giving the real college living experience, and for giving me countless crazy stories to tell when people ask about my roommates.
8. FaceTime.
Without FaceTime, how would we be to see our precious puppies and kitties? Oh, and seeing our friends and family too... They are pretty cool too, I guess.
9. Care packages and letters.
Thank you for the small little reminders that someone somewhere loves me while I am stressing about passing my econ final. Also, shout-out to those random little $5 bills grandma would send that ensured you a cup of coffee from Starbucks.
10. Your new college friends.
In the end, these are the people that made freshman year survival possible. Thank you for getting through some of the most difficult times, and thank you for all the amazing memories from this year!