Mornings are my favorite time of day because the endless possibilities of life are upon me. I relish my first cup of coffee and sing out with the morning birds about the hopefulness that each new day brings. As the morning drifts into the afternoon and the sun moves across the sky, a sense of foreboding comes over me as I realize that the night is fast approaching. Suddenly, I find myself in the worst of all possible situations. It is 11:20 at night and I am in Lauinger Library with the weekend’s fun-filled abandon and laughter echoing in my ears as I confront the mountain of work that awaits me. Every Sunday night I come down with a very familiar disease, one that I like to call Sunday Night Syndrome. For those of you who don’t have Monday classes, this infection also goes by the name Monday Night Syndrome. Regardless of the label we assign to it, the signs and symptoms are clear, and there is no cure unless you are one of the lucky ones vaccinated by self-motivation and time-management skills.
Phase 1: realization. The small Catholic schoolteacher that lives inside my head is wagging her finger at me, saying, “I told you so.” I take out my planner and even a small child could know by one glance that the “To Do” list is much larger than the “Can Do” list. Sunday Night Syndrome is characterized by the sinking realization that I am trying to walk up a descending escalator, and that no matter how hard or fast I run, the downward motion of my assignments will push be back … back … back … into bed. I decide to aim for mediocrity. OK, so I won’t do the reading for my “Visions of Visual Visionaries” course, but I will write out the Declaration of Independence in fine penmanship to be turned in for my “America and America’s Americans” class. Life is a series of compromises, and I have to learn how to make some.
Enter Phase 2 of Sunday Night Syndrome: justification. Suddenly, it becomes clear to me what is really important in life. School is just an institution that has imposed arbitrary rules on me, and I need to maintain the clarity of purpose to recognize the difference between educating my-SELF and merely parroting the demands of teachers and following a rigid schema of conformity. Usually this phase is accompanied by a cigarette in front of the library while, along with fellow SNS sufferers, I lament my situation and justify the break as an investment in my-SELF. The looming figure of the clock tower is blocked from my vision by the haze of cigarette smoke drifting over my head.
Phase 3: biological backlash. My body is hunched over the desk and my eyes are trained on the 300 pages of text that need to be summarized, itemized and conceptualized by tomorrow at 8:50 a.m. If you peered into my brain, the electrical activity would be astounding?bursts and flashes of brilliance bounce around my cerebrum. Suddenly, my body realizes that it is undernourished and overtired. I went to bed last night at 3:45 a.m. after that AMAZING conversation with Drake about the meaning in our friendship and my goals for life after graduation. My body was then rudely reactivated five hours later when my sleep-swollen eyes were pried open by the sheer force of my will and some strong coffee. At around midnight on Sunday, my body goes on strike and demands that I give it a wage increase?some more sleep and something to fuel itself with other than french fries and frozen yogurt. The words on the page start to blur and my eyes start to close. Immediately, I am hungry and thirsty and really have to pee. Despite my best efforts to finally “hit the books” and to concentrate on my scholarly responsibilities, my body is demanding some TLC.
It is at this point in the night that the roads diverge in the woods. Some people chose to respond by the “submit and delude method.” Symptoms of this method are statements like, “I’ll just get up early and do it.” No greater lie has been made and propagated around college campuses than the get-up-early-and-do-it myth. Let’s be honest with ourselves?we never get up early. When that alarm goes off, your mind does a form of mental calculus that only makes sense in that warm, fuzzy world between sleep and consciousness. During those early morning internal debates, it becomes crystal clear that (insert assignment here) is not only clearly trivial and mundane, but it is also practically complete so getting up now would just be silly. Obviously, you can write that 10-page paper in 20 minutes because it is all in your head?it is only a matter of getting it out on paper. Easy as pie. Snooze. Snooze. Snooze.
Sunday Night Syndrome is a disease. It is not our fault that we are in the library at 1 a.m. with nothing done but everything to do. They say that time has a way of taking care of everything. Regardless of what we say or do, the mornings turn into nights, the fall semester turns into the spring semester and earth moves ‘round the sun. No use in stressing about it, right? We should all just relax and let time take care of itself.
Phase 4: yoga.
Helen O’Reilly is a senior is the School of Foreign Service. She climbs a ladder to get to
bed every night.
