Subiksha Baskaran

Let me guess how your day starts: your “WAKE UP!!!” alarm goes off, but you don’t want to get up because your bed is a million times cozier than it normally is. You wish you could be in a blanket burrito forever. Eventually, you turn off your alarm (or maybe tune it out) and doze off again… until your backup alarm goes off. This cycle repeats a few more times until eventually, you guilt-trip yourself into getting ready for school. 

“It’s not that cold out,” you think to yourself. “I’ll have to get up eventually.” With great willpower, you remove the “tortilla” from your blanket burrito and drag yourself out of bed to get ready.

As you step into the bathroom, the cold tiles send shivers through your bare feet and up your entire body. Sure, it wakes you up, but not enough to shake the desire to return to your bed and escape from the cold. You brush your teeth, pick an amazing outfit, and get into the shower. The steaming hot water feels so nice, it almost puts you back to sleep right then and there. You spend a bit too much time in the shower, and when you check your phone, you panic at how late it has become.

Then comes the hard part (as if getting out of bed wasn’t impossible already). You barely make it out the door on time, only to discover it is so freezing outside, you fear you’ll turn into a popsicle before your shoe even hits the pavement. As you walk to the bus stop, you run intense calculations to determine your minimum walking speed to make it there before the bus leaves without you.

A giant hurdle is presented to you: the weather. Especially in winter in Edison, it’s usually rainy and almost always cold. Like a frog, you hop from dry spot to dry spot on the cracked sidewalks, pleading desperately with the icy puddles to stay away from your warm dry socks. Nobody wants to deal with wet socks first thing in the morning, especially not freezing wet socks.

Upon your arrival at school, you are faced with a set of challenges. The journey to the front of the school looms ahead like an obstacle course in a military movie. Obstacle number one: crossing the street directly over the school. It can be hard to get out of the car or bus and get to the sidewalk, but luckily the crossing guards are there to help you. Even though you safely cross the street, you can’t walk in a direct line to the pavement, because sometimes the buses stop in the most random places, including over the crosswalk.

After that comes looking for friends in the mob of people. People crisscross back and forth in your line of vision, and you are forced to stop as someone with the giant backpack briskly cuts you off. Bitterly, you wonder if they have a 10-course meal in there, but you shake it off and waddle like a penguin in the crowd until you finally find your friends. Instantly, you break into a conversation about the latest difficult test.

Almost every JP student knows the struggle of arriving to school on time. With all the vehicles and weather, some students opt to show up a few periods late. All we can do is wait until the winter season of slushy snow is over, but until then, make sure to keep warm…and get here before 7:40!