It came to me in a dream. Not Jesus. This body of text. I was in the Dominican Republic (a result of reading “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”@@http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Scott-t.html?pagewanted=all@@ before bed) in Portland. Because I haven’t seen Portland outside its airport and University of Portland campus, Portland didn’t look like Portland, but it was Portland. Why? Because that’s what my brain said in the dream. ‘Nuff said.
I digress: I was standing on a street with two Starbucks across from each other. In my hand, there was a Venti coffee. I was mad. The barista who made my coffee made the wrong drink. Instead of a double chocolate chip frapp, they gave me an iced gluten-free carmeltino something or another. The rubbish my brain comes up with when I slumber.
When I woke up I thought to myself: the final weeks of school are the worst. We have papers to be written, projects to be done, but quite frankly, we just don’t want to do them. We are burnt out from a long year of studying and attending class. Plus, the sun, after a 5 month-long hibernation, comes out. With rarely seen vitamin D in the sky, who wants to go to class or sit at a monotonous screen, typing that 5,000-word dissertation on the aesthetics of snow-capped mountains?
How you get the end-of-the year slump from a dream about a coffee order (especially when you don’t even drink coffee) is beyond me. Again, the rubbish my brain comes up with. No matter how my brain got me thinking about the almost summer slump, what’s important is that it did. If AA has taught us anything, it’s that acceptance is the first step.
Step two? Abandon the bandwagon. Sure, everyone is ditching class, enjoying the sun, tossing the Frisbee around, but they will be hurting when it comes to dead week; those class ditchings will add up. Slow and steady wins the race.
But that doesn’t mean you should lock yourself in a room without windows just to study for a class that might not matter at the end of the day. In order to beat the end-of-year slump, you could compromise. Instead of blowing off homework to go outside, take your homework outside. You can work and play at the same time! (Unless you are like me and once you start playing, work is gone with the wind.)
Another option is to blend work and play. Instead of meeting with a study group in a boring room and reading the PowerPoint slides on Blackboard for the zillionth time, take the group outside. Grab a Frisbee and toss it around, saying facts or important points for the test before throwing it to someone.
When you think about it, what are you going to remember more? The bone configurations of the face mapped out in some textbook or Dillon getting conked in the chin with a flying disc? (Dude! You just got nailed in the mental protuberance!)
With these helpful tips, we can hopefully survive the brain deadness that is the end-of-year slump. Once that last final is handed in, it’s nothing but beach season and GTL.