THEY SAY COLLEGE is all fun and games until you look at the calendar and it’s May. Once again that time of year has rolled around and like every year before, people are desperately looking for excuses to not study. The sun really isn’t doing anyone any favours either. Here are the things that everyone regularly hates doing over the rest of the year, but suddenly would rather do now than study:
1. Cleaning up
You could be the messiest person in Ireland, but when it comes around to the first week of May all of a sudden you become Kim and Aggie from How Clean is Your House? This week, a huge number of bedrooms in Ireland belonging to 18-22 year olds are completely spotless (maybe for the first time in weeks) because for once tidying up is not the last thing that they want to do. Plus, it’s impossible to concentrate in a messy room.
2. Checking every single email you have gotten since last May
All of a sudden, those emails from ASOS and Twitter that didn’t mean anything to you for the past year are more important and need to be seen more urgently than Hillary Clinton’s emails. Huge deadline looming? Exam that’s worth 80% of your grade tomorrow? It’s time for a major clear out of your inbox. Once your exams are over, you can start collecting more for next years exams. It’s impossible to concentrate with a full inbox.
3. Showering
Now that you’ve gone through all of that effort to clean your room and your inbox, you can hardly study when you’re not clean. A shower is an achievement. It requires a huge amount of effort, especially for those of us with long hair that’s going to take a considerable amount of time to dry afterwards. If you have a shower you’ve achieved something and that actually makes you feel a tiny bit better about wasting the whole day procrastinating. You shouldn’t feel better though, because the shower itself was procrastination. You’re lying to yourself.
4. Putting a lot more effort into cooking food
The whole semester you’ve probably been mashing crisp sandwiches together and eating one in each hand while watching TV, but now all of a sudden you have a keen interest in making a very complicated and time consuming dinner with real vegetables just as an excuse to get away from the books for a while. Maybe you’ll even use this as an excuse to go out and get the food shopping. Everyone’s got to eat, right?
5. Making an extremely well decorated study plan
This is when you know things are starting to go downhill. You’ve wasted enough time arsing around and you’re ready to lay out how much time you’ve got left to cram the last few bits into your inhospitable little shriveled up brain. So what better way to plan out how you will spend the rest of your completely invaluable time than spending an hour or two decorating a timetable with gel pens? This will probably overlap into one of the slots you initially intended to use for studying, meaning that the whole timetable is now wrong and you need to make a new one again tomorrow. Repeat over and over every day until you reach your deadline.
6. Watching every single Snapchat story that has been posted that day
On a regular day, you can’t even force yourself past the “Hi guys!” of an overenthusiastic blogger whose Snapchat you added to hate-watch. First week of May? You’re there for the entire story. They could be Snapchatting themselves shopping for mattresses, but it still is considerably better than knuckling down and doing the one piece of work you promised yourself you would do. You might as well flick through the filters to see what new ones they added today while you’re at it.
7. Going to the library even though you know the chances of getting a seat this week are incredibly slim
You spend a while circling the whole library looking for somewhere to sit and begin to hate every single person who leaves their books and laptops on desks when they aren’t using them. Maybe you’ll find a seat and then realise it’s in the corner of the library that wifi has forgotten about. Ultimately, unless you got there at 9am, you’re going to give up and just go home. Maybe you’ll try again the next day. And the next day. And it will keep on happening and at least you can blame the higher power that isn’t providing you with a desk for your lack of effort. It wasn’t meant to be. You might feel a tiny bit better for making the effort to look for a desk, but you wasted all of that time getting dressed and commuting. You would have been better off just spending all morning cleaning your room.
8. Deciding it would be a good time to go back and play The Sims 2
An hour long study break playing this turns into you putting your sim the entire way through university in less time than you spend studying on one single module.
9. Reading articles about procrastinating
Is this meta? You’ve already come this far, there’s no point in stopping now.
10. Watching extremely, extremely weird Youtube videos
Since we’ve already accepted that you’re procrastinating right now, here’s one of those really terrible videos you only watch when you should be doing something really important to get you started. Good luck with the exams.
