We hear so much these days about how beautiful Kenyon is. In fact, if you Google image search Kenyon College, almost everything that comes up is a picturesque scene of happy students walking through Middle Path in autumn, leaves fluttering around them as they stroll merrily to their dorm, a fringed scarf draped casually and stylishly around their neck. But is Kenyon really as idyllic in fall as our pamphlets and tour guides claim? Aren’t there those little things about Fall that really just get to you? Luckily for you, I am here to ruin your beautiful Kenyon autumn. Here are the worst things about Kenyon in the fall:

1. Weddings — Everyone wants to be married in Kenyon in fall because it’s so damn pretty, and much as you might like admiring the wedding dresses/bridesmaids and the  joy radiating from the truly in-love as they celebrate the happiest day of their life, they are seriously hogging Middle Path, and worse, New Side. We all know the best part of weddings is the open bar, so what better way to make us resent them than to take up an ENTIRE hall in our one dining hall on campus and then deny us their cocktails? Besides, who wouldn’t want drunken college students slurping up Shirley Temples and grinding like it’s an Old Kenyon party?
2. Asian beetles — Not to be confused with the similarly colored cute ladybugs, these beetles get everywhere, and then they bite and smell. It kind of puts a dampener on opening your window to let in a wonderful fall breeze when the breeze brings with it a horde of bugs.
3. Leaf blowers — So loud. All the time. Leave the leaves alone!
4. Midterms — Okay I know these happen in the spring too, but nothing ruins a glorious fall day like an upcoming midterm that you have to study for when all you want to do is clutch your pumpkin spice latte as it lurches precariously while you chase falling leaves like you did in kindergarten, back when you were an innocent little kid blissfully enjoying your short-lived youth, bless your little heart.
5. No heat — I know you people in apartments and Aclands and whatever get to control your own heat, but the rest of us in dorms are left to our own devices when maintenance fails to turn on the heat even when it’s like 50 degrees and raining. Just because it’s fall doesn’t mean it won’t get cold. But just because it’s cold doesn’t mean maintenance will turn on the heat.
6. Freshman optimism — I mean people just come in here so excited about a new year and their classes and professors and all the fun new friends they’re going to make and adventures they’re going to go on and everywhere you look there’s some grinning first-year having a blast. Luckily, it wears off. By February, they are jaded like the rest of us and you can maybe catch one or two of them sharing a cigarette outside Mather at 2:00 a.m. staring off into the distance contemplating what could have been and inwardly having a panic attack about that Quest essay due by noon the next day. But in the fall there is just so much bubbly enthusiasm.
7. No one shuts the heck up about how pretty it is.