I always forget how insane life feels right after returning from break. School has its own rhythm—classes, homework, friends, the occasional other random event—and then I go on break and without even realizing it, I’ve changed the rhythm completely. I don’t have a set time to get up, I can spend hours just reading (reading! For pleasure! It’s like a revelation or something!), I can lounge around the house and not do anything productive. Sometimes I barely even leave the house for a week. Actually, probably the only thing that stays the same is the amount of time I spend on the internet (a lot).
It’s easy to get used to that, in the way that it’s easy to get used to living a life where you have very few obligations, except whatever homework your professors have given you. Coming back, on the other hand…
I like the rhythm of living at school, but coming back to school always makes me feel a little bit like I’m running about five times more slowly than I should be. It’s like I’ve been dipped in molasses. I have a particular schedule for my work—I try to do all my reading for my daytime classes (one Russian lit and one British lit) on the same day it’s assigned. For my one night class (TV Storytelling), I do most of the reading the next day. I write my weekly class journal (for TV Storytelling) and my fiction assignment over the weekend, along with whatever response papers I may have due for my other two classes.
I’m behind schedule now. Half the time it makes me want to tear my hair out, especially because I have to start thinking about my term papers and final projects not; the rest of the time, I’m probably procrastinating and trying not to think about anything at all. Procrastination is tricky like that.
(Sometimes the internet is really a dangerous, dangerous place. I suspect I need some sort of twelve-step program, but I think one of those steps is supposed to be avoidance, and I don’t think that the internet and I could really bear to be parted from each other.)
Added to that, I just got drafted to fill in a position in Into The Woods, one of the shows going up this semester. I’m incredibly excited—Sondheim! fairytales! musicals!—and I definitely don’t regret agreeing, but it is another thing to work into my schedule somehow.
I know some students who have ten million zillion extra-curriculars and very busy social lives, and yet somehow manage to get As in all five of their full-credit classes. You might be one of those types of people, for all I know, but I am most definitively not, and for the most part I’m okay with that. I work eight hours a week, I do my homework, I’m writing a musical with the Wesleyan Musical Theater Collective, occasionally I’m in a show, and I repeatedly get dragged out to do things by my friends—and that’s quite enough for me. The rest of the time, when I’m not in class, I tend to lock myself up in my room and get my work done. It’s not a bad life, all things considered, as long as I’m not struggling to get back in gear.
I’ll get back into the groove within the week, I suspect. I’m great with rhythm, as I’m sure anyone who’s seen me dancing to the radio in my kitchen would tell you. (That’s a trick statement. I don’t let anyone see me dancing to the radio, not without Obliviating them afterwards. Some things are just too glorious to be contained in human memory.)
…This is probably supposed to be an introductory post, isn’t it? Well, clearly that didn’t happen. This is probably what you can expect from me over the next few weeks: I’ll start out trying to say something about my life that I think is profound, and then I’ll just end up rambling, making Harry Potter references and talking about the internet. Be prepared.
And frig, I definitely have to stop procrastinating on homework, now. Well, maybe next time I’ll say something actually interesting, or maybe something about myself. (Those two goals may or may not be contradictory. I guess we’ll see, won’t we?)
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