Winston Churchill once said, "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." In an earlier time and place, Jane Austen declared "I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them." To all of this, Carl Sagan added, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
"Now what," you may be asking yourself, "could these three quotes possibly have to do with one another?" Answer: Nothing.
You see, after spending days wracking my brain for story ideas (uphill in the snow both ways, might I add), I realized that I had nothing. I started out trying to mock Charity Ball, moved on to a now happily deleted commentary on the beginning of our basketball season, and ended up staring at my wall of quotes (aka Sharpie-covered cardboard that I didn't feel like recycling so tacked to the wall instead), resulting in those three opening gems which will now, I'm sure, be permanently ingrained in your memory and class discussions. You see, despite my best efforts, my brain seems to have, along with the Writers Guild of America, gone on strike. Original thoughts? Nah. Creatively engineered perspectives? You must be kidding. And homework? Well, let's just skip that one.
Now, as aggravating as my mental fatigue is (and heartbreaking, I'm sure, for you, the reader), I'm also sure that this is not a unique or unheard-of condition. In fact, I would argue that across this campus, across this country, and maybe even across Carl Sagan's apple pie, college students are suffering from (what I like to call) the Big Bang. This is not, mind you, the whole "this-is-how-some-guy-in-a-dingy-lab-coat-thinks-the-universe-was-created Big Bang," which is taught alongside the lie of evolution in American high schools. Rather, I'm referring to the ear-ringing, forehead-splitting, human-size-hole-making "CRACK" that inevitably results from the impact of the universal college student with an academic brick wall.
As our final exams become less a hazy nightmare and more of a stomach-churning reality, we have only to glance at our planners and syllabi to realize the truth of our impending doom - we have so. Much. To do. Sure, I complained about our one-week midterm stint of tests and papers, but little did I realize how pleasant life actually was. In the face of two five-page papers, I conveniently forgot that, in most of my classes, at least 70 percent of my graded material was yet to come.
You see, the term "midterms" is decidedly misleading. In many classes at Gonzaga, the work is not dispersed evenly throughout the semester. I distinctly remember, for example, my freshman Critical Thinking class in which I received a B. This would have been fine, had the professor not then told us that these Bs (which everyone received), were in no way indicative of our actual grades. We could have an A, we could have a D. He just didn't think that we had done enough graded work at the midterm point to warrant calculating our actual grades. While this is an extreme example, I think it aptly demonstrates the heart-sinking realization of many students that, halfway through the semester, most of the pain is yet to come.
This means that much of our post-midterm time is spent not writing the pages that will balance out the academic teeter-totter of September and October but piling them into a catapult that will launch six weeks of work at our GPA, for better or for worse. And so we start loading . . . and beating our heads against brick walls (as all healthy stressed people do).
So if, having typed 13 pages on the indescribable lightness of being, you find yourself unable to form coherent thoughts, work out the key-to-mailbox conundrum, or carry on a complete conversation, don't feel bad. You aren't alone. You're simply suffering from an academic concussion.
After all, as Norman McLean said in his classic American novel, "The world is full of bastards, the number rapidly increasing the further one gets from Missoula, Mont."
Katie Sheehy is from Missoula, Mont. She is feeling a bit concussed.
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