Rainy

Welcome to the rainy season.

To those new to Harvard, that's the next few weeks, when the weather goes Biblical and first-years surreptitiously wonder where they tossed their acceptance letters from Stanford.

Come November the rainy season will be supplanted by the snowy season, whose chief benefit is that it makes the rainy season appear positively benign by comparison. The snowy season will continue until shortly before Commencement, when the sun will return in time to provide a natural light source by which visiting alumni can write hefty checks to the Development office.

It will remain unclouded and delightful for the summer-school students and hordes of College visiting seniors, warm and invigorating through Freshman Week.

Then the last of the parents leave town, and the cumulus clouds begin to gather.

The reason for this, of course, is that the Harvard Corporation, with oversight from the appropriately named Board of Overseers, controls the weather, along with the core curriculum, the fate of football coach Tim Murphy and the nutritional content of Savory Baked Tofu.

And the venerable and illustrious Corporation has no reason to squander precious good weather on impecunious undergraduates such as ourselves.

If we gave more money, we'd have sunlight too.

In the meantime, however, we're going to have to put up with the detritus of the Harvard climate: Yard puddles big enough to canoe in, library books that look like they've been through the rinse cycle, and the disturbing fact that the Science Center, despite its many architectural charms, leaks like the Nixon White House.

Students can expect to see the most salient manifestation of the rainy season's onslaught, a mass epidemic of gloom-induced depression, arriving soon. This phenomenon is the result of individuals who spent their summer basking on the beach suddenly finding their primary source of light reduced to a $2.95 halogen bulb.

The best way to beat the mood, and the rain, is by getting out of the muddy slough of despond and taking decisive action. Quadlings would be well-advised to invest in hip boots and waders. First-years would be equally well-advised to make the pilgrimage to 29 Garden Street so that they can be properly grateful they don't live there. And if the roaches in Dunster House start lining up two by two, leave town.

There is, of course, a certain twisted charm to rainy days. They make the pleasures of a morning spent in bed or a steaming cup of tea (particularly in those fabulous new dining hall mugs) all the more evident. And one could view the endless drizzle and fog as the final symptom of Harvard's incurable institutional Anglophilia.

Nonetheless, there are times when the sight of the iron-grey ceiling we used to call the sky, and the voice of the meteorologist calling for another thunderstorm, and the thought of pulling on sodden boots for a trek across campus conspire to make Harvard students wish that they had chosen to pursue their higher education in warmer climes. Suddenly, California earthquakes don't seem so bad.

But in those fleeting periods of despair, we take the rain too much to heart. A little water is nothing to be truly afraid of; nobody will melt. A change of clothes and a hot drink can take care of most precipitation induced woes.

All in all, it could be much worse.

It could be snow.