Cultivating One’s (end-of-semester) Self

Stepping into a burning house, boarding a train that will inevitably wreck, walking down the middle of the street when a bus is hurdling towards you. This is the end of semester.

It changes you.

Days you would regularly go to bed at (gasp!) before midnight or close to 1am are now transformed into late night logic sessions that happen only at 3am. Or you find that you are most awake only at 3am. So you start shifting your schedule later and later so you can work while most of the world is in REM. However, it leaves you sleepy at 4pm while at work, so your world thinks that you’ve become a deranged zombie that smells like coffee and pens and who’s skin is permanently smudged with highlighter.

It’s almost like a marathon. No, it is the marathon—the only one I will ever be in. Every meal is an opportunity to carb load and pack on the protein, which translates into protein shakes made with coffee taken multiple times a day. It is my medicine for survival. Who has time to cook when one needs to philosophize? Who has time to sit in a public restaurant when all you can do is scream is “POWER STRUCTURES”?

Coffee shops turn less into cool-chill-zones-of-wonder and more into frenzied areas of distress. The baristas learn to disregard any of your facial expressions and comments because all that matters are the five words you shout out (shout because you haven’t talked to anyone in hours and don’t realize what volume is), “I’d like a small COFFEE!.” They have learned to not read into your reply, “thank you so much, you have no idea what this means to me,” nor into your actions when you get stuck in your snood and almost fall over whilst spilling coffee everywhere.

Professors start to actively oppose you as you forget what class you’re in and forget that life isn’t your term papers. So when you scream about Islamic Democracy in Poetry or about Foucault in Philosophy of Language, they frown and ask, “how is this related” and all you reply is, “society.” Then you realize that you are awake. Living. You must cope by fleeing the room and getting yet another coffee.

The end of the semester is a time to play around with your mode of life. Embrace the crazy, embrace the spontaneity, embrace a you that only appears every four months.

But keep in mind it is every four months. Either one semester is ending, another one is ending, or summer is ending. Something is always ending four months from now and the determined feeling of emptiness is only a third of a year away.

This isn’t a sad fact though. To me it’s become a way of life. Every so often I allow myself to live differently. Create a new existence that opens up new experiences (write proofs during sunrise), new forms of pleasure (coffee and protein shakes), and new ways of living (not caring about anything else besides thinking). It not only gives perspective for my “post” end-of-semester life, but also allows for a little break from the mundane and banal.

It creates a new existence and transforms you into something fresh. End of semester is a chisel and I am a huge mound of marble.

Carve me till I’m beautiful.