Midterm Comic Relief: It's time for a really good laugh
By Douglas Sulenta
The Collegian
Hey college students, tell me if any of this sounds familiar.
You’re coasting through September without a care in the world. Nothing really going on in school other than monotonously going to classes and fighting off sleep. Your instructor drones on about something you can’t even think about comprehending in the sleep deprived state you find yourself in. Nothing to do but go home and watch the latest installment of “Lost” or “Survivor.”
Not a care in the world. After watching television or before getting wasted, you sneak in a little study time to gloss over what you were supposed to have learned in class that week. Maybe you open up the book you are supposed to be reading or look at the notes you were supposed to be taking but haven’t. It’s all a part of the typical life of a college student.
Then BOOM, here comes October and midterms.
Suddenly you are thrown into some parallel universe where there is more work to do than time to do it. Next week you have two papers due, a group project to prepare for, two midterm exams that account for about 40 percent of your grades, which you haven’t even thought about and no time to prepare.
Life stinks!
You’ve lost all the time to watch “Lost” and now you’re just trying to survive this semester. You think wistfully about the time you wasted getting wasted and wish you actually had something in your binder other than a bunch of personal drawings like those flowers you drew while your professor was up in front of the class wasting his breath.
All of a sudden you’re trying to read 400 pages a night and accomplishing only about 70 of those before you finally go to bed for the night, kept awake by thoughts of misery, regret and lamentation for the work you should already have done, but didn’t.
Death seems a nice alternative to living through the confusion of a midterm exam you don’t know anything about.
But we are college students and what we do is persevere and procrastinate.The paper you knew about for two months you finish in two hours and somehow, it’s beautiful.
Luckily you befriend the smart girl in class who’s taken diligent notes every day of the semester and sweet- talk her into letting you copy them.
Somehow everything on the midterm exam is everything you’ve studied for and you sneak by with the C you needed to survive yet another day.
And alas, you made it through midterms again, alive and well.
You don’t have to call home to mom and dad, making up stories about this nightmare professor you had who failed half the class. You don’t have to drown yourself under a waterfall of Budweiser to kill the pain of failure (though you still do for reasons of celebration instead).
You can look at yourself in the mirror in the morning and know the bags you’ll be wearing under your eyes for the next week or so were well worth the trouble.
Because you passed. Whew
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