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"Time for a Break"

December 3, 2006

Monica looks up summer jobs in Tahiti.

Mid-afternoon the day before exams start. Rachel, Aimee, adopted roommate Monica, and I are in our room, the floor strewn with books, articles, pens, notes, pillows, and food. Our Honors exam is at 8 a.m. tomorrow, and our heads are spinning with Supreme Court cases, Mill’s On Liberty, and countless other free speech issues. The atmosphere could not be more focused and studious . . .

Or not. Rachel and Monica are planning a summer trip to Tahiti, where they’ll pay for their tropical bungalow by teaching sailing. Or English. Or something. Aimee may actually be working, but she was definitely rereading a favorite book earlier. As for me, I’ve abandoned essay planning for the free-form world of R-Journaling.

My doodle

We’ve been working diligently since this morning, and our brains are seriously about to burst out of our skulls. (See doodle—from another break I took last night.) There just comes a point when your brain can’t take any more and you just have to do something easy, or mindless, or ridiculous in order to let the cognitive swelling go down.

Since yesterday, campus has felt like a taut rubber band, stretched tight with tension over exams. The dorms are unnaturally quiet due to strictly enforced round-the-clock quiet hours. The snatches of conversation you can catch on our hall are almost exclusively about the Honors exam—half the floor is filled with Honors girls. It’s impossible to escape—especially Mill, who has popped up in every topic since the beginning of the semester and features prominently in the exam.

Rachel studying (or pretending to study).

I’ve never had exams like this before. Sure, I had finals at the community college where I dual-enrolled, but they were part of normal classes. Here, there is a mystical table which tells you when your exams are depending on what your class schedule is. Exams are in two-hour blocks on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday are “Reading Days,” which I guess references the idea that students will spend most of the day studying, feverishly rereading every article, every page of notes, while their eyes slowly cross and the words blur into a meaningless blob until they finally give up and take a well-deserved break. Reading days are intense.

Aimee laughs at a comment of Rachel's

The stress gets to you after a while. I’ve been alternating between chewing a gum (a pack and a half since yesterday) and eating chocolate (not mentioning how much). And the four of us have spent the last hour or so doing anything but study for Honors. But considering all the work we’ve done so far today, I’d say we deserve it.

Rachel is playing Spider Solitaire. Monica is drawing a picture. Aimee has returned to Supreme Court cases. And I need to wrap this up so I can hit the books again. By this time tomorrow, the Honors exam will be several hours past, and I will likely be diligently working on one of the two papers I still need to finish for the semester. By this time next week, I’ll be home with my family, and exams will be but a distant memory. But for now, several hours of intense study stand between me and bed, and several days of writing and more study stand between me and break.

Sigh. It’s going to be a long week.

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