I'm leaving early for winter break, right in the middle of finals week.

I thought my excitement for my trip would be enough to motivate me to do my best for the end of the semester, but it's not.

The habit of handling issues for extracurriculars is on lock, so there is one stressor and time consumer down. Limiting my accessibility to certain social media outlets has been helpful, but not quite enough either. Tucking away my travel excitement has just barely done the trick.

For as long as we can remember, the common college student has struggled with focusing and not procrastinating. Even when we do know how early ahead to start our assignments and study, some unspoken force pulls us away.

It's not that we don't want to be responsible (if we can help it), but even with outside distractions cut out and stress on our minds, something makes us turn our heads.

In theory, we love the notion of looking back and thinking, "Wow, I worked so hard. I've come far and I've earned it." But is that sufficient to trudge through a solid study week? No. Maybe a study hour, but not a week.

I pulled myself away from my friends and locked myself in the library quiet area. This has been effective in the past, and was mildly effective recently, which is much better than not working at all. Yet, my brain still swirls with "what ifs" and "this" and "that."

The noise of the world is so much that you can't study with it, but when you sit down to work, you get suspicious without it. There is something fun and irrelevant happening out in the world while you sit here and read.

Somewhere out there, in the depths of the college campus, is an email that I definitely forgot to answer. I'm sure some part of me has earned a blue ribbon for not Sparknoting the book I have to write about (because how did this stuff work before the era of the Internet?), yet another part of me is asking, "Are you really going to study for the LSAT next year or nah?"

Is it not more fun to think about other things—literally, anything else— but the actual subject you're reading? Even if the topic is interesting, you'd rather ponder on five different ways you could have told off your archnemesis in ninth grade, because that is somehow more important than your GPA.

Ah, active studying. I took repetitive notes on the book I was reading to feel productive. Notes that I know I will not understand when it comes time to study.

Okay, so maybe notes have turned out to be helpful in the past. And taking notes on transitioning topics with different colored pens was useful, not only when I looked back at them, but in the process of actually writing down the notes.

Maybe when my social media is cut out, all the weird, but artificial stuff playing out on it became as insignificant as it deserves to be when I don't get constant notifications about it.

Somehow, Nietzsche's reality became more relevant than the who-said-what's of the outside world.

Before I knew it, the political theory paper had itself typed out, even though I knew I would be in a rotten mood during class as I handed it in on half an hour of sleep. I would rather let that pass me by rather than sitting wide awake and wondering if I could have done more.

It is more bearable for me to board my flight to the other hemisphere for break thinking, "I did all I could have done," rather than, "What more could have been done?" as the dark memory of my finals fades into irrelevance behind me.