Another year, another dissatisfying reading week.
I guess the fact that our time off is called “reading days” instead “reading week” has a lot to say about our lives as York students in comparison to other universities and colleges.
I remember my first year at York when the co-curricular days, as it was called at the time, first made their appearance. I was excited. I thought, yaya break. A time for me to say I’m going to catch up on readings and finish that essay I was supposed to do a month ago. And although I was pretty much getting prepared for a week of procrastinating and watching Supernatural on Netflix, my initial reaction to finding out that the co-curricular days did not cover an entire week was not pleasant.
At the moment I am successfully (I say successfully because it takes quite a bit of skill to be this rubbish at the whole school thing) behind on just about everything I have to do. Since I don’t have classes on Fridays or the weekend, my reading days basically fell on one day, Thursday, which I decided to spend at school anyways. When I got home I took a really long nap, woke up, and did nothing.
I spent the next day preparing for a Halloween party. Yes, it takes that much effort. Little did I know I would spend the entire party awkwardly standing around texting my brother and my best friend things like “get me out of here,” “take me home,” and “entertain me,” to which my brother proceeded to talk entirely in song lyrics until I got home.
On Saturday I spent most of the day cleaning my house and doing last-minute errands to find snacks for Halloween. The rest of the night consisted of a Halloween and chill session, the chill part being me spread out on my living room floor watching Shaun of the Dead and Beetlejuice, and later realizing that I had to set my clock back an hour. This didn’t really matter because I stayed up way too late anyways.
And on Sunday I woke up immediately thinking, shit, I should do some work. So I finally started to be a responsible university student and did most of my work in one day, which technically shouldn’t even count as a part of the reading days because who has class on a Sunday?
It’s quite difficult to be a normal human being and get more than one novel or a few articles read in the span of three days, and let’s face it, I’m sure the majority of students have more than just a novel and a few articles on their to-do list of death.
So, dear comrades, as we come off of our reading days with little done to show for it, let us remember that December is only a month away. Three full months of bashing our heads into walls and finally, we’ll actually be able to relax for more than two days and a weekend that we probably already had off anyways.
I can smell the gingerbread cookies and procrastination already.
Eulalee Lumsden
Deputy Copy Editor
