Why, yes, we DO do more than read big books!
7:30 am – Trip over your Norton Anthology of Criticism getting out of bed. Curse your history class that fulfills a minor requirement for it’s early-morning timing. Study the rhetorical devices on the back of your cereal box. (Do Cheerios really start with family? Oh look, an anecdote about a guy named Phil.)
10:00 am – March off to your language class wondering if you’re finally competent enough to read Arabic poetry. Google poems in Arabic. Realize you are not competent enough and stick to reciting Whitman in your head.
12:00 pm – Eat lunch in the library so you can finish your methods homework before 1:10. After another read-through, you have no idea what Derrida is saying. Realize you have an essay due in two days relating “Harrison Bergeron” to Aristotle’s “Poetics;” cry when you remember you haven’t started and trudge off, defeated.
2:00 pm – Workshop in creative writing. Make too many comments about sentence structure and fluency, only to receive frosty glares from your peers. Turn red when someone compliments your work, and even redder when someone critiques it.
4:00 pm – Hello, library, my old friend. Is this your second coffee of the day, or fifth? Wince as the Norton Anthology falls onto your knee; you have once again fallen victim to literary criticism. Finally work up the courage to look at the paper your professor handed back to you yesterday, let out a sad little sigh at the plethora of red pen marks. You step onto the long road of revision.
6:00 pm – After a quick nap in one of the library’s upholstered chairs with something deconstructionist in your lap, you decide to pursue sustenance and end up consuming a few dozen milkshakes to make up for the calories you burned sweating over your next creative writing assignment. You might throw in a vegetable or two.
8:00 pm – Your mind and body systems have temporarily defected and you throw your books to the floor in anguish (you don’t want to admit it, but you’re still thinking about Whitman’s definition of the poet in “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads). Blow a few hours watching “Bob’s Burgers,” regret nothing.
10:00 pm – After an episode (or ten), you decide it’s time to get back to work, only to remember you have an assignment due for your science requirement class by midnight. Slam face into Norton Anthology in anguish. Eat a Poptart or two to regain energy, and start inserting words like “perspicacity” into your scientific analysis. A little diction never hurt nobody.
11:59 pm – You experience the cathartic release of finishing all your homework for the next day.
12:00 am – S***, got a lot of homework due tomorrow.
2:00 am – In the midst of working on your novel, you realize you have a great idea for a new novel. In the midst of this realization, you remember that Aristotle essay. You also feel a sudden urge to direct a short film based on “The Eve of St. Agnes” done entirely in mime. RIP John Keats.
4:00 am – Fall asleep to a recording of JRR Tolkien reading selections of The Hobbit. Sweet dreams, young English major.