I'm a slacker. I'll be the first to admit it. I don't like to go that extra mile for an A+ instead of an A, and waking up for classes that start before 10:30 a.m. is like asking me to hit a half-court basketball shot: every now and then I'll make it, but it's going to be a real embarrassing showing.
With all that said, you'd think that I would love and cherish our winter vacation the way a mother loves a newborn, but I don't. Now don't get me wrong, the first two to three weeks of it are great. There's Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year's, college football bowl games, and sweet, tasty home cooking. But once that last college football game is played and there's another week and a half left to kill, well, my life turns into shambles.
The major aspect of my life that turns sour is my sleep schedule. I'm not a healthy sleeper as it is. Staying up late and waking up late is my comfort zone, somewhere in the realm of 1 to 2 a.m. bedtime and an 11 a.m. wakeup. By the end of winter break, I was falling asleep at 4 a.m. at the latest and waking up at 3 p.m. at the earliest.
Now you're all saying to yourselves, "This kid needs help; he's partying way too much, and it's just not healthy at all." I wish that were the case. I stayed up doing absolutely nothing. I was a crack addict ... minus the crack. Honestly, it is a pretty depressing feeling to go to bed when it's almost light out and wake up when it's dark - a vampire in Medford.
The thing is, I know a lot of my friends have said the exact same thing, so I wondered how we could do this to ourselves when 90 percent of the time I was awake, it was sheer boredom. I just find it so difficult to go to bed early when there is literally nothing on the following day's agenda. I've narrowed it down to two major culprits, both dangerous in their own right.
Culprit number one: On Demand. This truly is the devil on any boring night. At first it seemed normal, because I was renting cool movies like "V for Vendetta" (2005) or catching up on HBO shows like "Entourage" or "The Sopranos". That was week one.
By week four I had succumbed to the On Demand gods and started watching programs that are actually embarrassing to admit. You know you have a problem when "Big Momma's House 2" comes on and you change the channel ... because you've already seen it twice. Talk about a wakeup call; I felt like my family could have given me a TV intervention that is normally reserved for substance abuse, and I would have understood.
Culprit number two: video games. I know, I know, late night TV and video games ... this townie is a real winner. You can make fun of me all you want, but every guy secretly loves to play video games. I'd be willing to guess that there's even a gene in our DNA specifically for Playstation. The first game that ruined my life was "Guitar Hero" ... 2.
Yeah, my housemates and I already dominated the first one, so the sequel took over a large number of hours during winter break. For those of you who don't know the game, the controller is a plastic guitar and you play songs by artists like the Rolling Stones or Guns n' Roses. I consider myself to be nearing virtuoso status (no big deal). And if any of you just said "Why doesn't he just get a real guitar instead of being a nerd?" then keep it to yourself, because frankly, that hurts.
The second game, and one of the most addicting objects on the face of the earth, is "Grand Theft Auto." I had the San Andreas version, which means I lived in a pseudo-LA ghetto and I needed to shoot my way to the top. No joke, any person under the age of 18 shouldn't even be able to see a commercial for this game. You're supposed to kill innocent people and run from the police, and you can only beat the game if you excel as a criminal/townie ... it was invented for me.
It made for some interesting real-life driving too, making 40 mph in a residential neighborhood feel like I was in a slow crawl. There's a solid chance I would have fled the scene of any accident or crime just on reflex, but then again, I'm a townie anyways, so that's nothing new.
All in all, maybe Tufts should come up with some limbo period where all students come back a week early to turn the boredom into debauchery. Unfortunately, that really doesn't concern me anymore, because this was the last winter break of my entire life. Maybe I should start worrying about other things, like learning the food stamp system or, I don't know, getting a job or something like that.
Pete McKeown is a senior majoring in English. He can be reached at
peter.mckeown@tufts.edu.
