Sensitivity precludes an adequate hyperbolic description of burnout

One of the things that bugs me about The Way Things Are Now is how difficult it's become to be flippant about certain matters. Don't get me wrong: that's hardly the worst thing about the current world situation, but still, as a fairly flippant newspaper columnist, it's still an aspect of things that affects me in a rather profound manner. In this case, it affects the way that I had planned to start my column this week. What I had originally wanted to say at the start was "I feel like a refugee." Now, in other times this could perhaps have been taken as merely a bit of amusing hyperbole describing the sensation of exhaustion and burnout that the work and travel at the end of the fall semester produces. Nowadays, though, I can't really say it with a clear conscience. After all, the traveling that I'm doing is going home to a loving family where they practically beg to feed me and make me comfortable (thanks, Mom). If I were actually a refugee, I would be traveling because my home was destroyed by marauding warlords; and rather than having had a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat over the weekend, I would probably not have eaten for weeks.

So you see the quandary that I'm in. I'm looking for an image to describe a stressful, but comparatively benign situation that afflicts me as a comfortably bourgeois American college student, and all I can come up with is one that once would have been more or less innocuous, but is now rather grotesquely inappropriate. Of course, one could make the argument that I'm being terribly insensitive, given that the world has had a substantial refugee problem for some time now and my being sensitive to it now is not only somewhat naively facile, but perhaps even exploitative. To those criticisms I reply that this column is about me, so I'm just going to drop the subject entirely now.

Thanksgiving weekend could, in theory, be the ideal holiday. After all, what could be better but a four-or-five-day break just before we have to plunge into the maelstrom of finals? It rests us and gives us a chance to gather ourselves before we continue on to the culmination of our carefully planned research and schoolwork.

Of course, this assumes that we've all done things like research and schoolwork to start with.

In actuality, it seems that Thanksgiving becomes the dividing line between the beginning and the end of the semester. It becomes the point at which we all heave a sigh and realize that we just can't procrastinate anymore. In my case, that means that these next four weeks or so will produce two research papers, two finals, a big chunk of a Long Work, and various other odds and ends. It doesn't really help that I have a powerful case of senioritis. Things are looking grim. After all, between editing the News-Letter, holding down a job, worrying about my future and pursuing my longtime goal of single-handedly raising the per-capita alcohol consumption of the JHU student body, who has time for schoolwork?

Is my lack of motivation with regard to schoolwork (a construction only a Classics student could love) really a factor of these influences, though, or is it something deeper? Am I really so very busy that I can't work, or is it really just so late in the game that I don't want to? After all, I did wonder out loud to a friend the other day if I could just receive, instead of a diploma, a certificate of "almost-completion." It could read "To all and sundry, this is to inform that S. Brendan Short has more or less completed most of the requirements for a Bachelor of Arts degree at The Johns Hopkins University, and is therefore awarded most of the rights and privileges appertaining thereunto." Would that really be that difficult? I mean, I've done almost everything. couldn't I get something that says that and then spend the rest of the year playing video games or something- Is that really too much to ask?

Probably. Especially since I doubt that my parents would be too happy with a certificate of almost-completion for the trouble they took to send me here in the first place. They'd probably also want me to get a job, rather than play the aforementioned video games. Damn.

To try and make sure that this column continues to have some relevance to people outside myself (as I desperately hope and pray every single week), I'm going to assume that most of you readers are probably having many of the same feelings, and would be in much the same difficult situation should you try to act on them. If I were a self-help guru of any merit at all, I'd probably use the remaining space to present a bulleted list of ideas to help us all shake off the apathy and plunge into the ocean of work with renewed vigor and alacrity (and if I were a self-help guru of even more merit, I would try to sell those ideas to you for three easy payment of $19.95). Unfortunately, I'm not much of a self-help guru at all, and since I'm devoid of ideas for me to use to how to finish off the semester without going crazy, none of you will be getting any help. All I know is that those research papers won't do themselves. Anyone know anything about medieval military technology?