How Do You Know You Are Having a Busy Semester?

Week four of every semester has an uncanny way of being the busiest and craziest week of that semester for me. This time last semester, I was just as whipped. To make things even more interesting, I accidentally dropped my phone in water. I felt it slip through my fingers, and I could do nothing but watch helplessly as it fell. How I wished I could go back and just hold on to it more tightly. I fished it out and removed the batteries and dried it. Rice! Put it in rice, my friends told me. The rice would have to wait as I had two classes and I was to give a speech in one of them.

But, I survived all that, my phone’s fine, my speech went well. It reminded me of something I’d heard nearly a year ago, “If your nose is still on your face, you are not close enough to the grindstone.” At least, that’s how I think it goes. Keep yourself busy.

And you can tell you are having a busy semester when…

• You don’t pick up a pencil you dropped on the floor in class. There’s a good chance you might drop something else eventually, why not pick everything up all at once?

  

• Your attire is decided by your schedule to minimize the number of times you have to change.
• You have multiple alarms all within 10 minutes of each other; extra redundancies to ensure that you wake up.
• If you have 15 minutes when there’s nothing due in the next 20 minutes, you feel like there could be no greater joy in the entire universe.
• You’ve started mapping and timing routes in order that you get to places in the shortest possible amount of time.
• You have figured out that “golden” interval of time when at least one, if not more, of the washers and dryers are not occupied.
• Every time you see a shooting star, you wish for Hermione’s time turner. Wait, it’s actually Dumbledore’s isn’t it? (On a side note, I just realized that I don’t remember reading about it in the later books, wonder what happened to it…)
• You wish you could brush your hair as you read your notes and cook.
• Your to-do lists remind you of the Calculus II problems where water flows into a tank at one rate and out at another, slower rate.

• You don’t live by dates, you live by due dates: today is Quantum Quiz day. Oh, and it also happens to be a Wednesday.
• Your ideal weekend is sleep and more sleep.
• You feel like you blinked and weeks flew by. Wait, it’s February already?

As long as you are in control of your work and also having fun, being busy is good; someone once told me, “Life is busy but [I’m] getting to learn a lot,” and that’s how it should be. Have a great semester, Panthers!