Holidays and homework shouldn't coincide

By Andrew Corcostegui
The Collegian

TEN MINUTES BEFORE I began writing this week’s article, I was lying in the fetal position on the floor of my bathroom, near hysteria with the realization that I had not yet started my four term papers.

All are due within three days of one another.

My friend Shannon was kind enough to call me and remind me that worrying about how badly I had procrastinated was in and of itself an act of procrastination.

Touché.

I would be lying if I said I hadn’t given much thought to the pile of homework that has accumulated over the last four months and all expected to be turned in within the next two weeks.

Seemingly unrelated, I was out shopping on Black Friday when I considered that holiday shopping and homework are virtually the same thing.

Both require personal fortitude that I don’t have, time that I squander elsewhere and a trip to my therapist that my health insurance company doesn’t want to pay for.

It would seem that the postponement of obligations like holiday hoopla and critical readings of “Hamlet” come coupled at completely the wrong time, which got me thinking about the placement of holidays in relation to the rest of the year.

How have we managed to put off all of the expensive holidays until year-end?

Wouldn’t it make sense, fiscally at least, to spread out Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s more evenly?

In the same vein, wouldn’t it make sense if our professors could coordinate assignments to not be due so near one another?

We have 12 months a year, yet they all occur within the same six weeks.

Nothing happens in August. Let’s celebrate Thanksgiving then. I don’t have any homework due during that month and the most pressing event in my schedule involves buying an overpriced parking pass.

It would give us all the opportunity to work on these dumb assignments without the interference of family or a day dedicated to the consumption of a 4,000-calorie meal.

And to top the year off, and begin another, we (most of us) celebrate in a manner that only impedes our senses and sets the year off with a bad precedent — an increase in alcohol intake and subsequent hangovers.

While copious champagne consumption might sound like your typical Tuesday night, the majority of Americans use it exclusively to celebrate the end of another year packed with stress, anxiety and weight-gain triggered by too much turkey.

On the one hand, it feels as though we deserve the relaxation.

On the other, it encourages us to act even sillier, move even slower and get even less done.

How proactive can you be when you’re drunk? Not any more so than when you have to buy presents for your closest friends and the taggers-on you really don’t like but know you have to buy something for anyway, even when you have a paper worth 30 percent of your grade looming in the back of your mind.

It would sound as though I’m excusing my laziness or alcoholism, but I’m not.

I’ve known about each of these assignments since the first day of class.

The holidays, like homework, are inevitable and no matter how hard I philosophize the situation, I know that I still have to plunk down in front of the ol’ iBook and churn out something that will probably be ripped to shreds.

In a perfect world, professors would recognize how criminally insane this time of year has made us.

In the real world, they spend their weekends in the fetal positions on their bathroom floors, knowing that they have to read 60 plus poorly-written papers about a book most of their students didn’t read.

Therein lies all that I need to validate my current state of crazy.

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