Spring Broken

Writer: Kyle Pearson

Spring break can be an amazing time for college students, while some enjoy their week off of classes, most travel to distant beaches in an attempt to escape their life they will soon dreadfully return to. Having a set plan for spring break trips seems full proof, however nearly all of them don’t go the way intended leaving students feeling spring broken.

One of the most common ways to becoming spring broken is simply running out of money. Most vacationers focus on the cost of their essentials like the hotel they will be collapsing at every night or the endless amounts of alcohol they plan to consume. Most fail to incorporate a very important component of spring break, food. Without proper planning on what one will eat throughout the day they may result to drinking their meals to compensate which usually concludes in waking up in an abandoned back alley wondering why you are covered in sand yet smell like cheese, completely and utterly spring broken.

Even when finances seem the least of your concerns do not be weary and doubt the mind of the college student, the limits will be pushed. What place is better than a beach to get alcohol poisoning three times in one day? One of the quickest ways spring breakers find themselves quite broken is run ins with law enforcement. One of the problems many people realize is that if you decide to try and run from the beach cops you really don’t have anywhere to escape to, you’re on a beach. Most of the law enforcement equipped with four wheelers and an enormous amount of backup, a college student drunker than newborn Irish people stands no chance, you’re better off swimming for the nearest island.

Planning a spring break trip can seem to be the most stressful part of the trip. It’s important to realize trying to stick to a fixed plan on vacation can make you the party police of the whole trip. If you don’t want to be the buzz kill of your friend group, it’s best to just go with the flow rather than babysit your group and have to wheelbarrow friends home from the beach to the hotel. One may even suggest picking your group carefully by having a pre-spring break trial where you get everyone hammered and see how tolerable they actually are and if they are worth the potential trouble.

Even with the perfect spring break executed flawlessly a sense of emptiness will reside when you return home to the realization of six weeks left in the semester. At the end of the day it may seem like spring break trips are more trouble than they are worth. However, you’re only young for a petite set of years and time will creep up on you faster than you can count on, you might as well get out and get spring broken on spring break.

North Texas Raising the Roof

Writer: Kyle Pearson

When passing through Denton Texas, it’s hard to miss the University of North Texas campus. An increasingly growing student population has forced the campus to start growing to accommodate the new wave of students. With the campus growing the surrounding city is having to adjust to these changes as well. Over this past 2017 homecoming weekend many events transpired but one specifically caught the attention of seemingly everyone.

It is no shock that in a college town such as Denton there will be numerous students throwing numerous parties. Typically, Denton PD shuts down the large parties before they can become dangerous to anyone attending. However, over this homecoming weekend a particular party literally went too hard. The Ridge at North Texas was the apartment complex where the party took place, at about 1:45am on Sunday morning a group of students were partying, jumping up and down only to find themselves crashing through the floor, falling into the apartment below. For the complete floor to fall through there must have been hundreds of people attending the party, videos on social media show the entire function jumping up and down only to come to a complete stop when the floor collapsed. Although there was extensive damage to all surrounding apartments there were no reported casualties from the incident and injuries were limited and not extreme.

It is obvious that the apartment with the collapsed floor is not in livable conditions and neither is the apartment with the newly added sun roof. However, this incident is not only affecting the surrounding apartments but the entire apartment complex as well. When the floor collapsed many pipes needed for water supply or sewage disposal were broke leaving many apartments without water or with too much, causing flooding. The incident, although put many students out of their homes, caught the attention of national news.

Social Media has assisted in spreading the news of the incident providing much comic relief to what could have been a tragic incident. In a world where ‘Raising the roof’ isn’t good enough, young adults are crashing parties in a new literal sense. Having the floor go out from under you can change your perspective on life, it is a relief that no one was killed in what could have been a terrible turn of events. Only time will tell how the damages will be repaired but one can only wonder what kind of consequences the owner of the apartment will face for putting so many students out of their homes.

At the end of the day this incident costed no one their lives but many their homes. Hopefully a valuable lesson was learned and a new appreciation for ‘Maximum Capacity’ was obtained.