I'd like to say that my college academic fallacies can be traced back to second grade, the year I rocked the charts and skipped a whopping 29 days of school.
At an early age I discovered there was a world outside the confines of idiotic sock-puppet classroom humor. It was a world where door number three might contain an all-expenses paid African safari, and your destined love connection was in the hands of the studio audience's locked-in votes.
Daytime television -- oh, the endless possibilities! It dawned on me that the key to happiness was reclining on the couch with a bowl of tomato soup and a full schedule of "Press Your Luck," "Family Feud" and "$25,000 Pyramid" ahead of me. Ahhh, simple pleasures.
Each morning that the school secretary tallied up my absences, I laced up my skates and raced across our hardwood floors like a convict who'd just tunneled out of the slammer with a nail file. I felt the rush. Yes, 1989 was the year I started taking personal holidays
and I'll tell you, once you taste the good life, there is no turning back.
I never meant to get so addicted to taking personal holidays, but that's the problem with experimenting with things when you're young. You get hooked. Skipping school with the overused sore throat excuse was only a gateway to absences for "paper cuts" and "jammed fingers."
This Tuesday morning I woke up and celebrated the torrential downpour like Cub Scouts who'd just performed a rain dance at the annual jamboree talent show. The snooze button and I got real touchy feely. Then, I declared a personal holiday for my own safety, feeling it was not wise to trudge to art history in such treacherous weather. Haven't you heard the reports that wet leaves are the silent killers?
Now, there definitely are some students out there who view poor class attendance with pure hatred and are trying to light this paper on fire with their eyes.
They have listed the act of taking personal holidays as the eighth deadly sin. They'll preach: Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wife and thou shall not miss class unless thou hack up a lung.
The need to cough up organs to stay home from school is the blatant cry for personal holiday justification. I feel too old to have to justify my personal holiday decisions -- just as I feel sadly too old for the cute high school boys I noticed at the Episcopal versus Woodbury game this past Saturday.
Remember: I'm OK. You're OK. Personal holidays are OK.
That is why under no circumstances should anyone throw his or her personal holiday down the drain by racing to the local health clinic to seek professional relaxation validation. The white-coated staff are not doctors, nor do they even play them on TV. Furthermore, I have noticed shady deals going down at some health clinics.
I am not na
ve. The nurse practitioners are peddling this mysterious drug called "guafinex" like it's peanut M&M's. Broke your arm? Try some guafinex. Failing out of school? Guafinex is the answer.
Even if you are on the verge of respiratory failure due to bronchitis those nurses will tell you to take two guafinex for a month, go to class and don't come back until you hack up the other lung. They are out to annihilate all self-proclaimed personal holiday-takers and clearly have enormous stock options in some pharmaceutical company.
Little do these anti-personal holiday-ers know that taking days off from school actually makes us better people.
Around this time of the year, students' morals start sinking as low as a soggy Cheerio. They can't spare time for Harris Teeter, and instead steal their roommate's milk. Sure, at first it's just a drop of the white stuff for their morning coffee, but that leads to a splash for their Special K. Soon the roommate is making milkshakes and smoothies out of the thieved goods.
Remember: Thou shall not steal. Personal holidays on the other hand provide us with well-deserved free time. They enable long luxurious trips to Whole Foods (for the granola cruncher Soymilk lovers), Teeter (for those hoping to meet someone special in the dairy section) or Kroger (for the cheap stuff). There's nothing better than waking up in the morning and being able to look yourself in the mirror, knowing the carton of milk in the fridge belongs to you.
And if you don't wake up in the morning, at least you are not a Diet Cokehead. You see, those who don't take personal holidays are frequently torpedoing through a sea of artificially sweetened beverages to stay awake. I would not be surprised if they floated away from too many carbonation bubbles. Relax. Taking a day off will not kill you. The aspartame and NutraSweet is more dangerous.
You see, no matter how much we accomplish, there's always going to be that one more thing to do. There's no need to rush around constantly -- the world isn't going to end tomorrow. And if it did, you'd be glad you took some advice from the holiday expert herself.
No, not me, I don't have any credentials
but Madonna does. That blonde is wiser than she looks.
"If we took a holiday. Took some time to celebrate. Just one day out of life. It would be, it would be so nice."
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