Out of all the advice that I was given by the class of ‘14, the only thing they could all agree on was that senior year was much easier than junior year.
I don’t know when everything will suddenly shift to easy mode, but as of right now I’m feeling a bit misled.
With college app deadlines bearing down on us, AP classes piling on the homework and extracurriculars claiming a big chunk of the day, we seniors have little time to enjoy ourselves outside of school.
Thankfully, I don’t need much sleep, an effect of my early-onset caffeine addiction. This gives me time to watch some TV (or maybe even a movie on a good night) in bed.
What this doesn’t leave time for, however, is video games. (I can almost hear my parents cheering in the background.)
It has been a month since I last descended into the nerd cave. My games are untouched, and the divot in my desk chair that I thought was permanent has now almost disappeared.
What a change from the summer, when I would play for countless hours on end, breaking only to bike to the gym to combat the atrophy that 14 hours of sitting can inflict on a person’s body.
My gaming tempo is much different during the school year. As work piles up, the trips into the basement (Yes, I do play videogames in my basement, and, yes, I do realize that I’m a stereotype.) to play grow few and far between.
This phenomenon is due to a special procrastination technique that only a master avoider of work can handle: the ability to procrastinate from procrastination.
In the 45 minutes that I have in between work and sleep, there’s just enough time for a game or two, but it would require me to walk down not one, but two flights of stairs, turn on my computer and decide what to play.
No, I’d better just stay in bed, although even then I’m faced with some sizable obstacles.
If, through some unimaginable force of will, I can bring myself to type in “Netflix” in the search bar, I’ll still be confronted by the Herculean task of choosing what I want to watch.
Sometimes, I’ll already have a craving for specific movie. But if it isn’t on Netflix, then the whole night is ruined.
Ultimately, it’s much easier to just stay in bed and re-check my social media. Even though I know that all my feeds will contain nothing but pictures of the Jesuit homecoming and that I’ve already read the first 10 pages of Reddit, I still come back like a crackhead searching the floor for leftovers.
My life is an endless slog of hardships and misery.
Previously published in the print edition on Oct. 28, 2014.
