Thanksgiving break is a welcome respite from the increasing pressure of a quickly closing semester. A week to relax, reconnect with friends and family and catch up on some missed sleep is desperately needed by the time Thanksgiving rolls around.
Unfortunately, like many students, Clyde is having a hard time getting back into the swing of things after a week of only walking 200 steps a day.
On Sunday, Clyde opened Canvas to tackle the thousands of pages of reading his professors assigned. This would be a typical load for Clyde, except for one thing: whatever was left of Clyde’s poor brain seems to have been swept away in the transition from fall to winter.
In an act of pure academic mastery, Clyde spent three hours staring at the same page and not taking in any of that nonsense. Like many of us, Clyde has lost his ability to read.
Clyde’s only wish is to lay completely flat in one position for 13 hours. Education, while very important to Clyde, has taken a back seat to watching “Pride and Prejudice” over and over again until it departs from Netflix to another streaming service he cannot afford.
Discussion posts languish in neglect while Clyde gets very familiar with Phoebe Bridgers and the depths of his Instagram For You page. Emails collect dust, but Clyde is really interested in what campus looks like on Google Earth.
This week, Clyde hit new depths when he genuinely related to the seasons passing montage in “Twilight: New Moon,” and is beginning to think that the TikTok witches are right about this Mercury in retrograde business.
In a frantic search for his motivation, Clyde has foolishly slammed three energy drinks. With no real direction or discipline for all of that caffeinated drive, Clyde has been cleaning out the same drawer in his room for eight hours — somehow, the situation is worse than when he started.
Panic is usually Clyde’s best motivator, but it has taken an uncomfortable, simmering backseat to rewatching all of “Stranger Things,” which he doesn’t even like, but at least the noise distracts him from his own thoughts, all of which involve impending deadlines and looming academic disaster.
Maybe Clyde will go for a walk today to reconnect with nature and center himself in preparation for finals week — or he might take a nap, we’ll see.
Clyde experiences burn out. Photo from the UCCS Photography Database. Edit by Josiah Dolan.