Cali offers no stress relief

October 29, 2002 by David Blackman

I seem to have lost the ability to manage my time since I got to college. I could always do it in high school, but here I just can't get it together. A paper isn't due for a week; therefore, the appropriate course of action is to spend six days sharpening my Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 skills, and then on the seventh day finding the cheapest price on a case of Red Bull, so I can pull an all-nighter and finish the paper. What happened to me?

What's really going on in my head is that I'm still an overstressed New Yorker at heart. I'm so paralyzed by fear that I won't get all my work done that I just haven't been doing my work.

Instead, I've been surfing the web, hanging out, sleeping late, chatting on AOL Instant Messanger (obviously an evil Communist plot to kill all semblance of American productivity) and generally wasting my days away while the work piles up.

And now it's Sunday night, before the start of my most stressful week of college so far, and I have a column I'm not happy with, a paper I haven't started, a midterm given by a sadistic ex-marine I'm not prepared for, and 300 pages of I-Hum reading I've barely scratched the surface of. So excuse me if my ranting this week is a little disjointed - I'm a little stressed.

I should be able to cope with this stress. I should be used to it. This was what high school was all about, but it really did come a lot easier and maybe I'm having issues because for the first time in my life, I'm taking challenging classes, and I can't suck up to the teacher for bonus points.

I should be able to just hunker down and do the work. I know I won't let myself hand in a paper late, or fail a midterm, but is this really the right way to go about it?

I guess this is the week I learn that I'm going to need to reevaluate how I spend my time at college. I have classes everyday from 9 a.m. to around noon. I don't go to bed until 2 a.m. So I'm exhausted during my classes, sleep through my lectures, and am totally incapacitated for the rest of the day.

By the time I'm fully awake, it's time to be social in the dorm, and I'm having so much fun that I can't rip myself away and go to the library.

I still haven't found a place that makes me feel like doing work. Back home, it was the reading room of the central branch of the New York Public Library. If it wasn't for that room, I probably wouldn't have submitted a paper to the Intel Science Talent Search.

In lieu of a transition between the previous paragraph, and the next paragraph, I will take this space to let out a scream and hopefully destress a little. Observe: aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh! Thanks for bearing with me.

I came to California to try to loosen up, to lose the New York edge. I went to a high school that was so competitive that if we had ranked students by G.P.A., there would be regular assassination attempts in the upper echelon of the student body.

I didn't want or need that. But it seems like I haven't figured out how to balance the California mellowness with my New York sense of time, and instead I spend all my time chilling out, and worrying about the work I should be doing.

A month into college, and we all seem to be getting stupider. I find myself losing the ability to properly conjugate verbs. A few days ago, a friend asked me to help him edit a paper. He'd been up until 3 a.m. writing it - at which point his computer crashed and took the paper with it.

So he'd been up since then rewriting it, taking 10-minute naps on the hour to stay "focused." After about an hour of editing, neither of us could even form full sentences and ended up breaking down laughing every time we noticed a new rhetorical flaw in the paper.

Not that I was much better off. I hadn't gotten any sleep either but not for any particular reason. I'm mostly worried about the opportunity cost of going to sleep.

There's so much you might miss when you go to bed. So many "in-jokes" you might never understand. So much fodder for breakfast conversations you can't participate in (not that I've seen the breakfast table on a weekday since classes started).

And the worst part is when you go to sleep, you can hear the voices in the hall, and you think to yourself - "They might be having fun."

It's been an emotional, tumultuous week. I'm still alive. I still think I'll make all my deadlines, but just barely. Thanks to my lack of foresight, while everyone is off at Flicks getting their pants scared off by "Signs," I'm here trying to polish this column before the turn of the hour so I can start on my PWR paper.

My older and wiser college friends tell me, "College is all about procrastinating and then doing everything at the last minute."

They tell me, "You'll get used to it eventually."

I hope they're right.

David Blackman continues to be an overstressed, under-slept freshman. E-mail him at blackmad@stanford.edu.

David Blackman continues to be an overstressed, under-slept freshman. E-mail him at blackmad@stanford.edu.