We did it everyone! Guys, I know how awful it has been for everyone during these past few weeks (well, the past year or so). However, we’ve all seen the University Instagram posts and Tweets denouncing the virus and the vast amounts of carnage it has wrought across campus.

Well, it’s finally happened. The University Instagram posts cancelled COVID-19. After a multitude of warnings to triple-mask, social distance and forcibly locking up all the close contacts and infectees (thank you, anonymous reporting service! ♥), not to mention parental phone calls from home threatening to cut off financial support and tuition payments for non-compliance, the coronavirus has officially decided to pack it’s bags and leave Pennsylvania out of pure shame. Good luck to all those border states out there (except New Jersey)!

I cannot wait to get out and see everybody’s faces again. Not only that, but we can spend the rest of our time together doing the exact things the University’s Instagram account wanted us to avoid: hanging out in groups, having huge all-night ragers, coughing on each other and having fun. Speaking of the rambunctious party scene, not only are they allowed (and totally encouraged!), but I no longer will have to hide in someone else’s closet when PSafe busts in to arrest the hosts. Perhaps the greatest outcome from this turn of events is the amount of student freedom present on-campus. For instance, now I can go back to my daily hobby of throwing eggs at frat houses and blaming it on the sororities.

With the recent lack of COVID-19 anything, classes are free to meet in-person, allowing professors to see which students actually attend class, as opposed to entering Zoom, but keeping their camera and microphone off. Returning to in-person classes also has the issue of students actually interacting with one another. Since everyone has had so much experience with online classes, students kept trying to mute the teacher.

In unrelated news, students choosing at-home options have increased around 30 percent in the last day or so. Faculty has no idea why students have been transferring home so rapidly, especially since COVID-19 left Pennsylvania entirely. My only guess is people are more used to looking at their computer screens than at each other at this point in time, and sometimes that’s okay. You can forgive yourself, Gary.

Of course, there will always be change, and with change comes difficulty. We all faced difficulty last year, in one form or another, but like it or not, we’re still here now. Then again, you’re still here now, reading this. As long as you are, I can smile. You have given me the greatest gift of all: the time you spent reading this article, which can never be taken back, no matter how much you regret it.