Graduation Columns

ROSENBAND | It’s Here and Then It’s Gone 

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I’m two months late on my Collegetown rent. If I’m being honest, I actually have a very kind landlord so this isn’t one of those revenge-seeking situations and I know that I’m the real asshole here. The reason I’m two months late on my Collegetown rent is because once I pay it, that will be it for me. I will have no more home in Ithaca. 

Childish, sure, but I don’t want to believe that I’m leaving Cornell or possibly even getting kicked out. The idea of graduation is so tacky and so absurd and so absolutely rotten that it’s exactly how I imagine it would feel to get punched in the throat by someone capable and willing.

Opinion

ROSENBAND | Keep a Journal

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In the corner of my childhood bedroom sits a stack of journals about as tall as my waist. Black marble notebook on top of black marble notebook, mixed with the occasional moleskin or legal pad, in that dusty nook exists an exhausting, and haunting, log of my day-to-day existence since I was 14 years old. Some days were just lists, others were angry tirades, and sometimes they were tickets of gratitude. Now, in my Collegetown apartment, my stack keeps growing, it just looks a little different this time. Black marble notebook on top of an overpriced textbook, on top of a black marble notebook. 

I’m not overselling it when I tell you that keeping a journal is one of the greatest gifts you can give to yourself.

Columns

ROSENBAND | May Her Memory Be A Revolution

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On the night of Sept. 18 the world lost a shining light and a bulwark of our democracy with the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’54. A beloved wife, mother, grandmother, a champion of women’s rights and human rights, Justice Ginsburg carried the burdens of the world on her shoulders. At just 5’ 1” tall, oftentimes soft-spoken but always fearless, she towered over us all and will be remembered as one of the greatest women who have ever lived. I have never cried this hard over someone I never knew.

Columns

ROSENBAND | Public Shaming: Mourning Cornell in Real Time

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I’m a junior now, but the room key to my Collegetown apartment still hangs from the distinguishable lanyard I received when I moved into Dickson Hall as a freshman. If you were smart, you probably discarded it right when you got it, trusting that your amateur status went in the bin with it. Maybe it has stayed with me more as a matter of convenience, but I continue to cling on to that bright-red rope that pulls me right back into the heart of freshman year as a souvenir from a past life — a time when I felt as if I existed in the cross-section between 22 Jump Street and Pitch Perfect. I expected Cornell to change me in a humongous, colossal, monumental, *insert superlative* way, and although it probably has, this mid-pandemic existence forces me to not only mourn the life I lived, but mourn the place I hold dearest even as I’m walking its campus. Even if you’re technically a senior, this year we all start over as freshmen: Overwhelmed, paying too much attention to the little details, fearful of not meeting new people and just generally confused at how this is all going to work.

academic life cornell

ROSENBAND | When Hospitals Become Our Battlegrounds

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When 7 p.m. arrives, my neighbors gather on their porches, banging pots and pans and cheering for doctors, like my dad, as they arrive home. It’s a sweet tribute. But in this period of social distancing, when every pursuit is a solitary one, I pinpoint those moments of camaraderie as my loneliest ones. I wait for 7 p.m., and when it rolls around I welcome a dispirited substitute for my father, void of his trademark optimism. I quickly scan him up and down — he has a face shield and mask in one hand and a bag of pomegranate licorice in the other, a blank face, a few drops of dried blood on his sneakers, a loosely tied Cornell sweatshirt hanging from his waist  — and then I continue to stir a pot of butternut squash soup.