Senior slump

This week I would like to ask one simple question – what the hell is going on here?

Just to point this out before I start, I am not using this as a reason to say my high school was easy, just that this year sucks. You know what I remember about my senior year in high school? I remember getting to economics 15 minutes late every day for 30 straight days at one point, and still getting exempt from the exam.

One of my friends would bring in his little 14-inch TV, I’d bring in my Playstation and controllers and we would set it up in the middle of senior hall so throughout the day during study hall we could play eight player NHL 1998. Then, to make it even more ridiculous, we would leave the stuff at school and cover it with a sweater, and no one took it. Ridiculous.

My schedule went something like this: class from 8 – 11:45 a.m., 2 and 1/2 hours of nothing, followed by class from 2:15 to 3:10 p.m. – three hours with nothing to do and off-campus privileges. Every day the routine was go eat, go to Best Buy, play video games and then still have time to sit around and do absolutely nothing.

Also, I don’t know how many people experienced the dreaded senioritis to the levels that my friends and I did. Literally, we wouldn’t do homework for two to three weeks at a time. Now, this may not sound like very long, but you have to understand that there might be five papers due in that time period, which meant five lunches spent in the computer lab.

It didn’t even seem like school, more like some god had finally answered my prayers and given me a year to do basically whatever I wanted.

Now we come to this senior year. Before I write this, I am going to point out that I am not necessarily complaining. I knew what I was taking and essentially brought this on myself. But damn, it’s taken me till last week to get used to this semester. I’m writing my honors thesis on Western media coverage of the eastern front in WWII, which requires about two hours a day in the library, if I’m lucky.

I have stayed in the library so late so often that I can honestly say for the first time that the morning classes that I have missed have all been from staying up too late studying.

Not that I don’t usually put effort into my work, but to sleep through an 11 a.m. class from being in the library until 2 a.m., getting home and going over my info in addition to whatever other work I have is just insane. This will take me all year, trying to get it up to around 60 pages.

I’ve also got three other history classes, which leaves little of my spare time to do anything but read books. Next semester I have to take my senior seminar class as well as finish up my dissertation, so that is going to be even more of a beat down.

I know everyone around here speaks of senioritis, but who has time for that? I’m working harder than ever this senior year. Maybe it was just bad planning, or maybe I am just an exceptional student who self-consciously desperately needs to challenge himself.

But if you had told me in the summer of 1999 after graduating high school that senior year was the most time intensive thing ever, I would have laughed in your face. I don’t know who’s laughing now, and I’m sure someone is, but I wish they would just shut up.