Observations from Second Semester, Senior Year

About three months before your first day of freshman year, your laziness culminates. You've come down with a case of senioritis so extreme that just thinking about how lazy you've become is incapacitating. But then you're thrown into the academic trenches, and all the carelessness you once knew evaporates into a musty fog hanging above some overcrowded fraternity party.

Unless you actually become a homeless person, will you ever get to live like a bum again?

Yes! Yes you will! It's called second semester, senior year. And though it sounds hard to believe, after three-and-one-half years of pre-test testiness and unemployment upset, senioritis will find a way to tackle your intellectual immune system once again.

Here are some telltale signs that senioritis has spread among the senior class with a vigor swine flu would be jealous of.

First, my peers and I have started to notice that the weekend has a very distinct second wind. In fact, the bipartite week we used to know is now totally irrelevant. In our minds, there's the work week, which runs Monday through Wednesday afternoon, the weekend, which kicks off Wednesday night, and then the Oh Shit! It's only Friday? period of flux, which starts Friday morning and lasts until Trivia Night on Sunday. As far as we're concerned, the week lasts five days, and those two extra days are merely fortuitous glitches in the time-space continuum.

Second, my peers and I have started to complain about the most absurd things. Like one time, I heard a friend say, "I feel like all I do is put on outfits. I'm so sick of putting on outfits." And then another time, a different friend complained, "I do want to go to the movies, but I don't feel like moving." Oh, and then there was the time yet another friend growled that her "damn spa treatment" was "running late," and would "totally get in the way of dinner plans." Keep in mind, during the zenith of my academic intensity, frivolities like dinner were usually optional.

I could think of more anecdotes - "I think I'm going to Aspen next week"; "I haven't been outside in two days" - but I'm too goddamn lazy.