(via kenyon.edu)

Ah, the new school year and the joys it brings: new friends, new hall, new ridiculously nice NCAs, new stress, new complaints about AVI—you name it! Unfortunately, some of us are stuck in the past and will resist change with our heels in the mud and our heads in the sand (shout out to all y’all who still have the 2003 Motorola RAZR or a shitty scratched up phone because those smartphone things are too damn confusing). Without further ado, here are several drastic, shocking, modern and radical-ish changes made for the 2012-2013 school year:

1. MiddleGround is gone. I know we’re all thinking it. Ever since the email that broke the tragic news to us, everyone is Facebooking, tweeting and tumblring (is that even a verb?) sadfaces and nostalgic anecdotes about their happy times at MiddleGround stuffing their faces with sweet potato fries. If you went to the screening Sunday night (#JoshRadnor #BedazzledNuge #SomethingExcitingAtKenyon), you can’t have missed the audible sigh of despair from the audience when the MiddleGround sign was shown on the screen. On the bright side, we can now anticipate fewer cheesy jokes about “I wish we could find some middle ground here … OMG, wait, there totally is a MiddleGround I am so imaginative and probably the first person to ever make that joke!”
2. Second floor Olin. Okay, I know I should be thankful for the nice new computers and shiny chairs and open space and whatever, but there was something comforting in the crammed and dusty setting that once was. I thought I was on the wrong floor when I walked back into Olin for the first time; I had even factored into my schedule the obligatory five minute wait for the shitty ’90s PCs to actually log me in. You can imagine my surprise when I was met with a spacious new setup and computer screens that look like TVs. I was like a little Amish kid at Walmart marveling at the glory of all this new and unfamiliar technology.
3. The new Moodle page. Moodle is silly. Helpful, maybe, but it’s just so hard to take a professor seriously when they talk about something that sounds like a cross between “moo” and “noodle” (I’m actually surprised I don’t hear more bad cow puns about MOOdle), and for those of us who are technologically challenged, there’s always a mini panic attack after submitting something online two minutes before the deadline and wondering if it’s actually uploaded or if there was some error that ohmygod I have no idea how to fix.
4. Office hours. Apparently these things change every year. Which makes it really annoying when your advisor, whose office hours were at the abysmal hour of 8:00-9:00 a.m. last year, decides to change it to a more reasonable time but then you wake up at eight and go in and he’s not there AND YOU WOKE UP FOR NO REASON AND CAN’T GET BACK TO SLEEP. It’s totally the worst.
5. The Peirce ice cream cone dispensers. Let’s be real, it looks like an alien. Or a rocket ship (actually this would be really cool if you could, like, press a button and then it would shoot a cone at you). But these things are shiny and metal and turn my ice cream cones into crumb-y messes when I pull them out. The stress is really enough to make me want to ruin the environment by getting soft serve in those disposable cups. (Shame on you if you do this. Shame!)