I am three weeks into my Sophomore Slump. You know, that icky, sticky feeling deep within the depths of your soul. The one that makes you despise everyone and everything around you. Sound familiar? No. okay, I guess it's just me then.

Sophomore year seems to be an intrinsically bizarre year - one where we're still treading the water, unsure of where we stand... and yet we're trying our absolute hardest to convey a state of perfect ease with regards to our newfound promotion. I am still grappling with the fact that I am no longer an excited and ditzy freshperson. The bright lights of the Philly skyline now signal nothing more than the familiar, while the uncomfortable reality of how much it costs to actually feed myself - now that Dining Dollars are a thing of the past - is just beginning to settle in. I am not a senior, teetering on the cusp of being a real adult-person-type-thing. And I am certainly not abroad as a junior, reliving the excitement of newness all over again. I am now a sophomore and that, well, kind of sucks.

For most, sophomore year is a year of experimentation. The arrogance that comes along with no longer being the youngest members of the undergraduate population seems to unleash a distasteful disposition among Penn's illustrious second-years. If it's not a superiority complex that develops, it's a lustful pursuit of fresh meat that causes many an over-zealous frat boy to lead a rotating roster of naive freshmen to his underground dungeon of love.

There seems to be an understanding among most sophomores that this is our semester. The juniors are away, and the seniors are either drowning in LSATs or their own depression-over-the-end-of-the-glory-days-tainted vomit. These three and a half months are seen as an opportunity to establish ourselves as independent from our freshman versions. As most girls are comfortably relying on the fact that at the mere drop of a Greek letter or two they can sum up their reputation, the boys are clamoring to try and throw the loudest downtowns or the most outrageous theme parties.

Having grown bored of the party circuit a mere three weeks into class, I've taken to distancing myself from the social stratospheres that I once used to enjoy. I now find myself doing laundry on a Saturday night instead of donning my highest heels and my Chatty Cathy smile. I seem to be waiting for the old order to come back, so that my hermitic ways can stop. But the truth is, I know that the old order no longer exists, so I guess I'll just have to wait for a new one to strike my fancy.