With Spring Break looming around the corner (almost ready to leap into my very-open, very-willing arms,) I’m allowing myself one ramble-y post without a specific theme, because my peace of mind may depend on it. This week has welcomed a (perhaps permanent) stint of beautiful weather and blue-blue skies and butterfly and hummingbird sightings. The schoolwork load almost comically clashes with this happy picture (but in a tragic-comedy sort of way, I feel, as one of its victims.) This happens every year like some reoccurring pre-break curse, and somehow, I still don’t have a handle on it.
I’m currently sitting on this one couch in this one spot in Smith Campus Center’s fireplace lounge that gives me a perfect view of a straight path to one of the Admissions Office’s large windows, and there’s a group of children playing together on Marston Quad in between us. This is transporting me to some simpler, sunnier time (despite the current sun): a time without essay due dates and problem sets and impending midterms.
I was thinking similar thoughts yesterday, lying in bed, my computer (and a Hobbes PDF) flipped on its side so I didn’t have to lift my neck. I listlessly read a paragraph, forgot what it said, tried to re-read it, and somewhere in there drifted past the margin, off the screen, and into a nap. Slowly waking up, I vaguely asked myself why this was such a struggle, given this paper of all papers was something important to my major, something I’m actually interested in, and something I’d usually get through without such a struggle.
Perhaps it’s just “that time of the semester,” that time where I feel like a low-battery cell phone or a child who falls asleep in the backseat of a car after some soccer game. That time when schoolwork and lab work and activities collide into a weeklong temporal microcosm. With two more days until spring break, I’ll accept this explanation without worry or thought (mostly because I don’t have a choice) and finish this pile of stuff while I (day)dream of a very long nap.