A wise person once said to me that being on break from college is like "a vacation to being fifteen." You live with your parents, which means you can't drink or smoke or make out with random strangers because you have no place to do it besides your car (which is I guess something different from being fifteen, except that you're now at a point in your life where it seems ridiculous to do any of those things in a car because you've gotten so used to doing them in your twin XL).

Now that I'm no longer in college, however, I'd like to submit for approval that having two weeks off from work for Christmas is like "a vacation to that week before classes start when everyone's just come back from break and you haven't seen eachother in a while and basically don't do anything besides eat and sleep and drink" (aka Camp Yale, for those who share that particular allegiance). Essentially this is the opposite of the "vacation to being fifteen" because you can drink and smoke and make out with random strangers because everyone has converged in New York and it doesn't matter that you don't have a car because you have an APARTMENT! (or a friend's floor, or a random stranger's floor, if you're trying to do the "make out with random strangers" thing).

Except the return to work is even more brutal than the start of classes because it's a return to something old, rather than something new and potentially exciting, and because having a job doesn't have the same interesting plot arc that classes have. With a job, you either have it and it's the same, or you don't have it and you either got fired or promoted, which is more of a steep cliff than an arc.