Each year, between Winter and Spring Breaks, college students across the nation experience a "second-semester funk," catapulting them into a nightmarish world of more work than they predicted and less sleep than they would have liked. If there is a God, truly He be a cruel one, as He allows us to endure such soul-shatteringly inhumane acts as warm-then-cold-then-warm-again weather, a do-it-yourself sandwich station in the Deece and people you hate returning from JYA. But fear not, fellow oppressed! Don't let the fact that we have an endless two-some-odd weeks before our next break ruin your semester—follow these few simple rules, and turn that funk into fun!
1. Homework is a social construct.
I mean, I guess it's okay, assuming you want to be oppressed. Oh wait, you don't? Then drop that book, burn those problem sets, uninstall OpenOffice and watch the free time roll on in! With time, your professors will understand that it's wrong to subject their students to participate in an inherently biased system, in which those who do their work are always graded better than those who watch 10 hours of Yu-Gi-Oh! a day. If you stop participating in the homework-grade machine, I guarantee you'll see a big change in your life; whether it's good or bad depends on the Dean of Studies.
2. Sleeping at night is a social construct.
Psychologists at the University of State Tech recently published research showing a direct link between the amount of sunlight we take in daily and our general happiness. I didn't actually bother reading the rest of the article, but I can only assume that it justified my life-long fear of the sun's rays and their joy-destroying, happiness-sapping photons. Solution? Start sleeping from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. (Don't worry—you can still make it to one of those super-late macro classes.) You'll find that the massive Vitamin D deficiency will be well-worth the bursts of glee you'll receive from being alone in the dark for hours at a time, watching everyone else enjoy sleep as the skin on your forearms visibly pales and shrivels before your eyes. The never-ending madness, loneliness and paranoia will certainly jar you out of your funk. Heck, you may be too terrified of the noises you hear outside your window all night to actually feel other emotion. Emily Dickinson did most of her writing alone at night, with nothing more than a dim candlelight as her company, and she was famously un-depressed!
3. Eating healthy? Social construct.
I believe it was some stranger I met crouching in bushes outside of Cushing who said, "I ain't never met a bowl of salad that could recite the quadratic equation." Powerful stuff. And as he robbed me blind and cut off my hair lock by glorious lock, I took his words to heart and vowed to never let healthy eating ruin my day again. We live in such troubled times—failing economy, conflicts overseas, Joe Biden—why should we have to also stop eating sticks of butter covered in M&Ms? No more mumbo-jumbo words like "fennel" or "sauce" or "locally grown" or "(insert any word that isn't cheese) soup." I say, a world without my Taiwanese shrimp-soda-and-saltine-surprise pie is a world begging to be de-funked. Do what comes naturally—prepare for the winter via massive caloric hoarding. May I suggest Chili Wednesday?
4. Surprisingly, friends are not social constructs. (But they are heteronormative.)
"Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer" Sun-tzu. That Chinese general who lived 2000 years before we were born has an incredibly relevant point: A life filled with friends will never bring you the same energy and singularity of purpose that a life filled with hateful and malicious enemies can provide. Friends support you, listen to you, make you laugh—in other words, make you weak. Enemies keep you on your toes (and possibly Zoloft prescription), constantly belittling your actions and endangering your life. Is it possible to feel swamped with work when you're tied to a metal table, trying to convince a villain with an eye-patch and quasi-Bulgarian accent not to activate the laser cannon? I think not. Friends want to split an order of fries and hear about how tough your week has been; enemies want to go back in time and sterilize your grandfather. Talk about your welcomed distractions!
5. Social constructs are social constructs.
Seriously, you'll feel a lot better once you stop saying "social construct" every day in my English class. Or at least I will.
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