Every time I compile my schedule for the upcoming term, I always spend a moment or two looking at it on DuckWeb and wringing my hands. A schedule looks so harmless on the Internet, all laid out in text – Spanish at 9 a.m., humanities at noon, grammar at 2 p.m., marching band an hour later. But I wring my hands anyway and fret that perhaps this will be the term that finally does me in. Basking in the glow of my laptop, I futilely remind myself that there’s no way one of these classes will provide a workload so great that one night my head will explode, killing me and probably voiding the rental agreement on my apartment.
It’s at about Week 5 every term that I realize how close I am to that inevitable explosion. The classes aren’t much harder than I’d expected, but if the classes were the only thing I had going on, this would be a walk in the park. If I had trained monkeys to do all the other, non-school related tasks in my life, I have no doubt that I’d be able to achieve fluency in Spanish, a mastery of classic literature and perhaps a basic grasp of what the hell a verbal is. But alas, once again my life suffers for lack of monkeys. There’s laundry to do, groceries to buy and from time to time I have to use the bathroom. These activities cut into my study time and make what would have been an easy schedule considerably less simple.
These distractions never show up on a class schedule. On Thursday evenings I don’t have 23 minutes blocked out for “Go Through All The Cupboards Looking For Something To Eat, Then Give Up And Have Pop Tarts For Dinner.” My schedule doesn’t tell me that on Friday night I have a 1 1/2-hour lecture called “Impromptu Halo Deathmatch With Roommates.” I receive no school credit for “Girlfriend” (a class that meets just about every day) and I don’t think she’s getting any credit for it either. I have no way of predicting what’s going to pop into my life and forcibly put my coursework on the back burner. These little interruptions are why it can take me all weekend to do an assignment that ought to take 15 minutes. I tend to get a bit resentful about my troublesome social life when I’m staying up two hours past my desired bedtime to finish an essay. If not for life, I’d be sleeping more, eating right and probably not chewing my fingernails quite as much.
On the other hand, without these interruptions to the deluge of work there’s an even greater chance that my head would explode. Unexpected interruptions are like mini-weekends: vacations from work intended to remind you there are a few other things going on in the world besides academia. So even though I might wind up working longer and later because of the unrelenting presence of chores and friends, I’m OK with it in the long run. While interruptions may put me behind schedule, they also help me hold onto my sanity, which I find much more valuable than sleep.
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