It seems as though every weekend is a struggle between my desire to make plans - even if it is just to get food at some establishment I happen to be craving - and homework.
Really, just a small excursion, even if it's to a nearby eatery, falls victim to whatever assignments that happen to eat up my time.
I really only have three food goals to do on some weekend at some point sometime in the near future.
Yes, I am being very vague and indecisive, but I prefer to see it as a sort of flexibility. They're really small goals: just a nice crepe for brunch down near Penn Station, a yummy bowl of pho up at Towson or some frozen yogurt down in Federal Hill.
My reality, though, has been spending time on campus to do homework.
I really cannot focus in my apartment on weekends, especially with the food supplies in my kitchen, so I look for other options.
Once, I found myself in the Jenkins Hall computer lab, working on a python script for bioinformatics while my friend worked on her research using Matlab. Her own computer lacks some of the software components, which make her thankful for taking the Biophysics department's computing course, and the room is a very pleasant environment on the weekend.
Another time, I got my friends together in a study room on C-level, thinking that our mutual determination to get our work done would keep all of us focused, thus allowing us to have fun later.
Being a Saturday, it was actually a lot tougher to stick to our work - one of my friends started playing spades on her iPad, two were on Neopets, while I started solving Sudokus. Needless to say, that was not a very productive session in the library for any of us.
This inevitably leaves me in the same place as most Hopkins students: violating some rule from the Ten Commandments that says we should not work on the Sabbath.
Despite the allegedly harsh penalty for doing so, it seems like most of us really could not care less, especially when we care about our grades and putting in a good, honest effort on our assignments.
So why is it again that you are reading a column in the Your Weekend section that has devoted a great deal of time to doing homework?
Probably because you identify so much with it.
If you don't, you are either a slacker, your workload is too light or you are a Jedi. You dream about exploring someplace new, trying a new restaurant or finally spending a day together with your friend/boyfriend/girlfriend/mother/whoever.
You wind up trying to do your work instead because you are so worried about not finishing it on time or you just want to get it done early.
Although if you are as optimistic as I am, things are probably not going to be that bleak.
Heck, I am actually looking forward to devoting some time this Saturday to working on homework in the PUC lab, solely because it's such a well lit room during the day.
Of course, I'm not aiming to finish everything and thus devote my entire weekend to doing homework. Perhaps a few hours should suffice.
Instead, I aim to knock off at least one of my food goals off this weekend, maybe two if I have a travelling companion willing to put up with me for a huge chunk of the day. I am somewhat tired of my cooking.
Perhaps I should also spend a good amount of time taking in the Baltimore downtown, especially as I realize how odd it sounds that I look forward to doing homework this weekend. I'm sure if you find me writing again for this page, I will not ever mention homework again, no matter how relevant it is for most of us.
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