As a senior in college, I have become an expert on mid-semester breaks. I know the protocol now: coming home for a few days to catch up with the family, snuggling with my cat (who will permit about two tiny pats before he grows weary of me), attending some sort of school-related activity to support a sibling, giving lots of rides to this sibling and their ungrateful friends, and sleeping only a little bit more than I do at school. I also have a much more realistic idea of the things I will actually end up doing despite how many things I would like to accomplish (homework never gets done, but I do watch lots of cable). All of this experience puts me in a particularly excellent position to reflect upon how breaks from the nonsense of college should go versus how they actually tend to go.

Somehow I always end up forgetting how weird it is to step away from the college environment and willingly put myself back into my childhood home. Don't get me wrong, I love my family and I always miss them when I'm gone, but after spending the better part of three years independently cultivating the kind of person I want to be, it's weird to come back and stay in a bedroom filled with terrifying porcelain dolls and unfortunate memories from my past (who doesn't just love looking at their bookshelf and seeing the multitude of journals filled with embarrassing diary entries and melodramatic poetry written for the crush you had in sixth grade?)

It's also sometimes weird to come back just because you never truly know what kind of state things will be in when you just pop back into the everyday lives of your family members. In my experience, coming back for break always leads to some absurd situations, mostly due to my own confusion at the fact that things change when I'm gone (why are they allowed to do that?), but also quite frequently due to the strange nature of my family. For your own amusement, I have spent some time reflecting on these bizarre situations and compiled a list of things I have dealt with that you probably would never want to experience when you're home for break.

1. You come home to an empty house. At least one family member knows that you're supposed to be coming home this weekend but they might have forgotten and it's likely that no one else will even know you're home until the following morning.

At which point, when you come stumbling down the steps at noon, bleary-eyed and still exhausted, they will probably not even bother to look away from the television to ask, "Why are you home?".

2. You come home to a full house, but everyone is pretty much confined to their own rooms for whatever reason and you don't want to interrupt them. You sit on the couch and watch TV, assuming someone will come down eventually, but no one does. They will not notice you're home until the following morning.

At which point, when you're craving cereal like nothing else, there will be no clean bowls so you just load up the dishwasher and run it out of a lack of other real options and it's like you never truly left.

3. Your brother won't tell you who has been sleeping in your bed, but will let you know that there was a "whole, fully cooked Hot Pocket" sitting on your bedside table for five weeks.

I still don't really know how to react to this. When I confronted my sister about it, she just laughed and left the room.

4. You find out that it was your sister who has been sleeping in your bed (despite having a perfectly good bed in her own room right next to yours), but she won't tell you where all of the crumbs in your sheets came from.

Using my carefully honed critical thinking skills, I'm gonna guess that at least some of them have come from a Hot Pocket or two.

5. Someone has left you some candy on your dresser, and you eat it assuming that it was some kind of welcome home gift. A few hours later, your brother comes looking for it to throw it out because he found it half melted under his bed last week and didn't know what to do with it.

In retrospect, this definitely explained why the Krackel didn't taste quite right.

6. Your closet is no longer filled with your stuff; it now primarily holds your sister's clothes, dresses, and shoes. But when you check out her closet out of curiosity, you find a few of your own items in there.

The most messed up thing is that many of my dresses are still unaccounted for. I'm seriously considering the possibility that my sister has opened some kind of void between our closets and just randomly tosses things in there to clear space every now and then.

7. There is never any toilet paper. Ever.

It truly feels like an elaborate practical joke, how often I change the toilet paper rolls when I'm home for break. It gets to the point where I have begun to wonder if anyone else ever does this when I'm not around.

8. There is never any soap in the shower. Ever.

I think sometime in the past three/four years, my siblings started using strange body washes and never told me. That's the only logical explanation I can think of for why there is never any bars of soap in the shower (like we have used for the first 20 years of my life) when I arrive, unless, of course, they have actually just stopped bathing.

9. Your brother spends several minutes pointing out the places where he has recently killed bugs in the living room and then promptly drops his dirty towels in a heap on your floor.

I never know whether I should be thankful that he wants to fill me in on whatever he's been up to lately with the bug killing, but things are a bit soured by the alarming number of towels he has accumulated and decidedly abandoned in the middle of my bedroom. I don't know why he does this; I'm caught between general laziness or something far more sinister.

10. Furniture and other strange accessories are accumulating in your bedroom and you don't know who is putting them there.

I'm currently up to two chairs (a rocking chair and a broken bungee chair), an old bookshelf, a suitcase, a Harry Styles cardboard cutout, a guitar case, and a small fan. There is also a terrifyingly large stuffed penguin that resides in the rocking chair and stares at me while I sleep.