Eliot Sherman: Under pressure, not handling it well

I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more," blares my stereo, blasting Rage's cover of Dylan's semi-classic. I nod my head and do the "white boy" in time to the music. I am sneering. I am angry. I am...writing a paper.

Oh yeah. That's paper writing -- to the extreme.

Full of nervous energy and about 40 ounces of coffee in preparation for what is sure to be a long night, I get up from my chair and start shadowboxing. I come close to throwing my arm out of its socket, and then trip over the coffee table, collapsing in a wheezing heap onto the floor.

It's 7:40 on a Sunday night, and there's got to be a better way to do this.

Yeah, it's closing in on finals time again. All my friends' away messages run the gamut from "doing lots of work" to "Sleepy Weasel writes his paper, sob sob" to the minimalist "coffee, goddammit," with a few clever variations on the common theme. All of a sudden, Wawa is jam-packed at one in the morning. And I, mildly grumpy at the best of times, find myself distinctly lacking in holiday cheer. 'Tis the season to stay outta my way.

Every time finals roll around, I begin to think that I wasn't cut out for school. The people I see around me have a way of dealing with all this that I somehow never developed. I'm sure not many of you happened to stop by Huntsman on your way home Wednesday night, but it was packed. Granted, a lot of those people are MBAs, but still. It makes me want to scream. Where the hell do you people get your work ethic?

I think I go through several stages before actually dealing with my work. The first one is convincing myself that fate has conspired against me to prevent me from doing well -- for example, the Bond marathon that comes on TV right when I'm about to start a paper.

Then I convince myself that I'm John Nash, that classes are inhibiting my creative processes and that I need to free myself from them before I can have my truly original great idea. This thought process inevitably leads to the conclusion that I am in fact not a mathematical genius, but just really lazy.

Of course, even though there's no conceivable use to it, I also waste time comparing my workload to that of my friends to see who has it the worst. Well, I'm taking four classes and I'm overloaded. Beat that. I know many who could, but it's futile; no matter what kind of ridiculous schedule you've made for yourself, there's always a kid in M & T with worse (I know him. Dave Young. He's a good guy).

Next of course is procrastination, the final and longest stage. This is when I clean my room, or do my laundry, or just do anything to avoid actually starting my assignments. Once I actually start the work I feel better, but there's a certain feeling that I can't quite shake: a feeling that this might not actually be the best four years of my life.

This is not the feeling I get "when I look to the west." This is the feeling I get when I walk out the door on the way to class and the wind pins me against the wall, and I think, "Oh, so it's going to be one of those days. Again."

And it makes me wonder...

What makes finals even worse for me is the knowledge that -- no matter how much stress I find myself under -- compared to the rest of the world, I should be thankful for every minute of it since I'm not starving and I'm not living under the gun.

And most importantly, no matter how badly I do on these tests and papers, my life will not be that deeply affected. This is not a life-or-death situation, by any stretch of the imagination. So why can't I chill the hell out about it all?

In any event, we're all in the same boat. So if you're the kid who's already got their study schedule for reading days planned out on a color-coded chart, well, I respect that. Best of luck, not that you'll need it. And if you're like me, just suck it up. We're almost done.

In the words of Reel Big Fish, "Everything sucks, yeah / and this is the last time you're gonna hear me complain."

That is, until next semester. Eliot Sherman is a junor English major from Philadelphia, Pa and editorial page editor-elect of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

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