You immediately wake to the sound of your alarm wailing. In one swift motion, you switch off the alarm and leap out of bed. It’s time for your second week of classes.

Class doesn’t start until 12:15 p.m. You woke up early to go to the gym. Go you.

Once you get back from the gym, you shower and start getting ready for class. You pick out a nice outfit from your drawers of neatly folded clothes and put volumizing mousse in your hair.

Then you decide to have a balanced breakfast at not just any dining hall, but Ernie Davis Dining Center. Who cares if it’s a walk? You have so much extra time, why not have a nutritious meal at Syracuse University’s finest?

Before you go, you answer some emails, double check your next class’s syllabus and maybe even get ahead on some work. Look at you go.

After you’re out of your classes you head to the activities fair. There, you sign up for not one, not two, but five clubs. Looks like this might be a busy semester, but you can handle it.

You walk out of the activities fair, mini Twix bar from the Entrepreneurship Club, refrigerator magnet from the Catholic Association and multiple DanceWorks flyers in hand and head back to your dorm room. There, you complete all your assignments given to you that day, eat a nice salad, watch some Netflix and get to bed by 11 p.m.

Fast Forward to:

Tuesday, Nov. 14

9 a.m.

You abruptly wake up to the sound of your alarm. You check the time and see it’s 9 a.m. Angry, tired and confused, you turn off your alarm and go back to bed.

12 p.m.

You roll over on top of your bed, covers nowhere to be found and check the time. Your class starts in 15 minutes. You stumble onto the ground, while angrily contemplating why a professor would schedule a class this early in the morning and navigate through some stray shoes and dirty laundry over to your desk to gather your stuff for the day. You would take a second to sit down, but your chair is already being occupied by an old jacket, five shirts and a pair of pants.

Once you brush your teeth — one stroke on each side — you search for clean clothes to wear. Realizing you have none you grab what seem to be the least-weird smelling sweatshirt and sweatpants out of your overfilled laundry bin, put them on and walk to class.

After you’re out of classes, you decide to spend the rest of your money at Schine food court on a quesadilla and some mozzarella sticks. It’s not Tender Thursday, so you really have no interest in the dining hall. Once you’re filled with cheese and back in your room, you briefly check your email in hopes that your 9 a.m. tomorrow got cancelled.

After scrolling through what seem to be thousands of emails from clubs you never actually ended up joining, you discover class is not cancelled.

Disappointed, you fall into the deep abyss that is Netflix. You will remain trapped until realizing there’s a paper due at midnight.

Once you submit your paper at 11:59 p.m., you take a long look in the mirror. You remember the bright eyed, ambitious student you once were and sigh.

Feeling bad about yourself and what you’ve become, you guilt yourself into actually doing an assigned textbook reading for one of your lecture classes. You grab your textbook out from under a tissue box, a pile of papers and an empty mechanical pencil and bring it over to your bed. After staring at the table of contents for about two minutes, you decide against putting yourself through this torture as you will not remember a word of the reading anyways and retire to bed.

Annabeth Grace Mann is a sophomore film major. Her column appears biweekly. She can be reached at agmann@syr.edu.

Published on September 4, 2017 at 10:11 pm