Maud and the Sun

Hasn't the weather been great lately? After a bit of a false start I think it's safe to say we've fully crossed over to spring now. The drab days of winter are behind us – gone, forgotten, crammed into a cardboard box and left to gather dust somewhere in a far corner of the attic. If it were up to me it'd stay away for a very long time.

I love everyone's euphoric reactions to the descending summer. "Put together all the happy moments I had this past winter," someone said to me this weekend, "and you get the feeling I wake up with every morning now." Though it might not be this extreme for everyone, spring does improve the general mood considerably. My Facebook feed is filled with status updates about happiness and cold beer on terraces. And the other week, when the train network near Rotterdam was down for over an hour, no one complained; instead, many stranded travelers seized the opportunity to stretch out across the stairs of the Central Station and catch some much-needed sun.

Although it's nice to see everyone this happy, the collective weather-induced ecstasy is not entirely practical. We still have six more weeks to go. Final presentations and exam dates are accumulating, and essay deadlines are approaching fast. We should be spending most of our time studying. But the weather makes it hard. It's more fun to wander around town with your sunglasses on, shopping for summer clothes. It's more fun to crash a barbecue with a handful of girls and chat the evening away. It's more fun to sit by the sun-drenched waterside and eat sushi from a plastic to-go box.

Of course there's a middle ground I could be striking here: write essays out in the sun, take my books to the park… for now, though, the spring is still so young and exhilarating that I think I'm allowed some leisure time as long as my grades don't suffer. As Jamie Cullum says, catch the sun before it's gone – that's good advice, because you never know when the sun might disappear again in this fickle and self-willed country of ours.

My name is Maud and I am a second-year student of Linguistics & Literary Studies. These are a few of my favorite things: books, sneakers, loud music, and coffee.