So much for lazy summers
It’s July 14, more than halfway through the gap between spring and fall semesters that is inhabited by the mythical “Summer I and II.”
It has become eerily normal to turn left onto Mission without having to wait through a few lunar cycles and perhaps offer a sacrifice on a dashboard altar.
Even here at Central Michigan Life we know our time of weekly summer publications will soon yield to our nail-biting thrice-weekly schedule.
For students enduring the rigorous grind of a busy summer course load, however, the fall can’t come soon enough.
The fall brings with it a sense of normalcy to the small town of Mount Pleasant and proper life as a student will resume. Ratios of time spent crammed into uncomfortable classroom desks to time spent suspended by one’s ankles above a keg will begin to equalize.
Be sure to take a moment before those days come to appreciate the flexibility life as a summer college student demands.
A brief period of leisure after the completion of spring semester collides into a brick wall of three hellish weeks of daily four-hour classes, which flat lines into an idyllic holiday vacation spent at home around the barbecue.
Sepia-tinted flashbacks of idle summer times flit back from childhood. Super Soaker fights on the beach and endless rounds of “Mario Kart” seem inevitable.
Then, WHA-BANG, it’s back to the grindstone of studying and testing before you have time to get the sand out of your trunks.
It’s sort of like watching a DVD with the “Skip to Next Chapter” button stuck.
Why do summer students do it to themselves?
The thrill of constant about-faces?
The harrowing uncertainty of watching grades pour into a wildly swinging GPA calculation as semesters begin and end within the time it takes for long-tenured professors to figure out how to advance to the next PowerPoint slide?
Not usually. In my experience it’s often all instrumental in a tightly orchestrated plan to graduate on the part of students whose required course load would otherwise populate the better part of their natural lives.
A condition that only seems to be growing more prevalent.
So much for lazy summers.
