The Post Semester Slump

I have news. Dancers should be dancing. Crowds should be cheering. Birds should be...flapping.

Ladies and gentlemen...Freshman year is officially over! Hurrah! It's a miracle we've all survived the tortured "if I do another math problem, I'll stab someone with a spoon" screaming you heard coming from Thompson Hall.

So now that I've acquired all these skills to read analytically, write critically and eat a lotally, I can conquer the universe! I can use all this free time to analyze Beatles songs and write essays with impressive words.

So what exactly have I been doing?

This.

 With periodic spurts of watching The Riches and obsessively checking this:

This is what we, friends, call the post-college slump. It's where you've spent the past 8 months sleep-deprived, stressed, and independent-but-kinda-not-really, and now you're back home in your bed and you're so tired, happy and confused, you sort of want to die.

Back in high school, I watched Lena Dunham's film Tiny Funiture, which follows the life of a semi-depressed, very clueless college graduate.

And I was all "gosh Lena Dunham, just put some pants on and show your new found creativity out into the world!"

Now I understand. Oh boy, do I understand. Anyone got any chocolate?

I have a very extensive list of things I'd like to accomplish over the Summer. Getting out of bed is required for 80% of these things.

Guess that's one of the perks of being a writer...20% of your to-do list does not force you to leave the comfort of your pillow pet.

I've found that there are two kinds of "slumpers":
1) The guilty slumper.
This person has got plans. They're going to fix world hunger by breakfast. They're going to write the next great American novel. They will sleep no more than four hours each week this Summer.

Then they find Tumblr. And facebook. And YouTube. Welcome to the internet, where we put the "act" in "distraction!"

The guilty slumper tries to make excuses for their lack of productivity, but really, they just want to sleep and watch Scrubs marathons. No shame in that.

2) The "I deserved it!" slumper
This slumper uses the "I was stressed in college; give me a break" card to sleep forty hours each night (screw time limitations, we invent new clocks!). They'll periodically bring up how challenging their science class was, or many papers they had to create out of thin air to remind their parents that they're not being lazy--they're simply...re-charging. And they're one slow battery.

Then you have the kind who's a little bit of both, whose dreams end up a conflicted mess of "you're wonderful! You're awful! You're a unicorn!"

Let's all just be unicorns instead of confused college students, shall we? 

I'm sure I'll have some witty, "let's get motivated!" post once I too put publicly acceptable pants on. But for now, I'll just hide under my covers for a while.

Maybe that will give me some writing inspiration.


Namaste.