Going to bed last night, I set my alarm for 7 a.m., thinking I would press snooze once and then get up by 7:15, giving me more than enough time to get ready and then migrate to the library to write my Odyssey article. 7 a.m. rolled around this morning, and I was jolted out of my deep sleep by the blaring alarm that never fails to make my stomach churn. But that didn’t stop me from clicking snooze and rolling over, only to be thrown out of sleep once more at 7:15 on the dot.
As I hazily turned off my second alarm, I began to reason with myself, searching desperately for some kind of justification to set an alarm for 10 minutes from now and roll over again. In my desperate, sleepy mindset, I always find a reason that makes sense, and this morning I found a few more reasons after that. 8 a.m. came and I was 45 minutes behind schedule and stressed already – and I’d barely even opened my eyes.
Coming back from spring break, the end of the year has been weighing heavily on everyone’s minds. I’ve been back at school for less than 24 hours and have already talked to five people about how the end of our sophomore year marks the middle of our college experience. Two years ago, we had just graduated high school, and two years from now, we’ll be real, functioning adults. That’s jarring. Every time I feel like I’m still a baby freshman, I have to snap myself out of it and remind myself that not only am I no longer a frosh, but I will be an upperclassman in just a few short months. Seriously, though, oh my God!
With college come four years of both stress beyond compare, and utter euphoria. There are never enough hours in the day to do all the reading for that one class, or participate in all the clubs you're passionate about, or get lunch with all the people you haven’t caught up with in a while. College, at least to me, has been a series of snooze alarms on both a micro and macro scale. Have to read that Econ chapter sometime in the next week to better understand tomorrow’s lesson on the Production Function?
Snooze it until tomorrow before class – you already have that essay to write and you promised your roommate you’d watch "Broad City" together this evening. Have that internship that you need to apply to for next summer? Snooze it! You still have months until June and you’ve asked around and it seems like everyone is pretty much in the same boat. Do you see that French test in two weeks that you promised yourself you’d start studying early for? Snooze, of course! How can you possibly think of two weeks from now when today you have three meetings, a paper, and a quiz to study for?
College itself is four blissful, intermediary years, where we are getting prepped to take on the real world, and yet can get away with continuing to act like kids because we aren’t quite on our own yet. But the reality of adulthood looms ever more menacingly as each year passes, and at some point we must accept the inevitable. We must finally get out of bed.
Looking at each year of college as allowing yourself an extra little while to snooze, no wonder prying ourselves from this dream is so difficult. But, with each new alarm I set, I prepare myself for two years from now when I will do exactly what I always do eventually: throw off the covers, set my feet on the ground, pull myself out of bed, and face the day!