Despite our greatest efforts to strategically ignore the due dates on our calendar, midterm season is finally upon us. This is a mystical time of scantrons infiltrating dreams, dusty textbooks finally getting cracked open, and the concept of Saturday being completely redefined.
The alarm goes off and you immediately question what horrible sins you could have possibly committed to deserve punishment on the most sacred day of the week.
You give your mom a call in the hopes of eliciting even a whisper of sympathy, but she is simply too busy to fully commit to your whine-session.
After slowly eating breakfast and trudging to your car, you realize that the odds of finding any free parking on campus is almost laughable.
As you walk through the glass doors of Willis Library you can’t help but lock eyes with the other despairing students and feel the deep, unbreakable bond of group suffering.
You scour the floor for a nice study spot and, all of a sudden, the weight of every assignment you put off hits you like a freight train filled with partially-formed essay topics.
After obsessively checking social media for possible distractions, you finally get into a productive groove when the cackling study group that decided to meet on the silent floor shatters your reverie.
A few more hours pass and you make the mistake of glancing out the window and thinking about all of the fun things that people with fully functioning social lives are probably doing at that exact moment.
Every so often you send your friends sad selfies with the “Club Willis” geofilter in hopes that they will reply with both pity and admiration for your dedication to academia.
You power through writers block, sift through endless pages of academic journals, type until your fingers are cramped, and continue to work until you realize that every single item on your to-do list has finally been completed.
You shove everything into your backpack and strut out of the library with the vigor and excitement of someone who definitely drank 6 cups of coffee within the span of 3 hours.
You are finally able to lay down and relax, completely unburdened by the due-dates and assignments that once hung over you like a dark cloud…
…at least until you look at the agenda for Sunday.