You wake up. Your alarm clock shows 7 a.m., but you are oddly awake and alert. You recognize this behavior is weird, even if you do consider yourself to be a morning person. After all, no college student should ever consider 7 a.m. a reasonable time to wake up. This time of day should be reserved for one of the following: sleeping, going to sleep or waking up with a raging hangover and running to the bathroom to throw up. So what's going on? Why is today different from any other day? Did you wake up early today to get some extra studying done before that big midterm? Of course not, that's ridiculous. Do you have a big CIO election to go to this morning? Again, that's ridiculous. As The Cavalier Daily's annual elections have proven, scheduling elections to take place before 10 a.m. will guarantee you a participation rate of roughly 10 percent.
Well, that's not entirely true. That number only really holds up if we're exclusively talking about the Life section; everyone else seems to show up. Oops?
Now back to the topic at hand: Why are you awake at such an unholy hour? And, more importantly, why do you like it? If it's not because of a test or an election, we're left with only one possibility. No, you're not an adult yet, so don't have a panic attack; it's the first day of classes!
The beginning of the semester goes the same way every year, every semester -- spring or fall. You come back from break refreshed and excited. It's been ages since you've seen your friends, and your new classes all sound infinitely more interesting than the ones you had to struggle through last semester. It's a fresh start.
The first week of classes goes swimmingly. Without any discussion sections, how could it not? Unable to contain your excitement about your classes, you begin to gush to someone -- your parents, significant other, best friend, that girl who lived somewhere in your building first year. Heck, things seem so peachy that you start to believe the resolution you made about working harder and getting better grades might actually happen. Life is good.
Then it happens. You never see it coming, and most of the time you don't even realize when it hits you. All you know is suddenly you don't want to get out of bed in the morning (or afternoon as we have already discussed). The professors who seemed so cool at the start of things now begin to grate on your last nerve. Their lecture style, clothes, voice, homework assignments and jokes all annoy you to no end. But hey, that's OK --- we're supposed to hate school.
The trouble sets in when the bad taste you're getting from your classes starts creeping into other areas of your life. Things just start to get stale. Your activities bore you and you put them off for as long as you can. Example: Between starting this column and now, I have chatted on AIM, Facebooked (obviously), checked my e-mail an obscene amount of times, read a story about Anna Nicole Smith's baby and watched a YouTube video of otters holding hands. Oh sweet apathy.
If it's late enough in the semester (like right now), you even start to hate your friends. This isn't so unreasonable if you consider the fact that you see your roommates more than most married couples see each other (since married people have eight hours of work while we sit around complaining about three hours of class).
So your cheers of, "Man, I love being here. Yeah Rotunda! T.J. is my maaaaan, woo!" have quickly turned to, "Someone please get me the [expletive] out of here." What do you do?
Nothing.
There's nothing you can do at this point. Just take a deep breath and push through to the end of the semester. I know it will be hard to keep feigning laughter at your professors' jokes and it will be even harder not to slap your roommate the next time he says either "your mom" or "that's what she said." But summer is just around the corner, and it would be an awful shame if you gave in now. Hey, look on the bright side: At least you have another one of my columns to look forward to before the end of the semester. That is, if I can find it in me to write another one before someone finally comes and gets me the [expletive] out of here.
Ed's column runs biweekly on Friday. He can be reached at cao@cavalierdaily.com.
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