Stress, part two.

This is less psychoanalytical and more a kaleidoscope-like picture of real life mixed with college stress.

Yes, I said that word again: STRESS.

Every college student has a word for it, and it happens at least once, more often twice or more, a semester. That's two to four plus times a year that a college student grinds him or herself into the ground, running on empty and doing everything s/he can to stay alive. You stay awake until you either pass out on your desk/kitchen table/plastic TV tray that somehow, somewhere, must count as a working surface, or until you realize that class starts in ten minutes. Apparently a lot of people think it's an exaggeration that so many 18-20somethings are running around on 2 hours (and that's if you get lucky) of sleep a night with so many demands on their time that one would think that the various governing bodies in their lives were not, in fact, in communication with each other. You need to be in two places at once. You need to finish everything at the same time. Everything your entire livelihood rests on is due, is happening, is being tested, or needs to be written about RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND and you might only have found out about certain events like this a few days ago.

That's right, folks: Hell week.

Hell week is the convenient culmination of every requirement in that syllabus that looked intimidating on the first day crashing down on you all at once. Hell week is realizing that yes, you HAVE been studying all along but you still aren't ready (or you haven't, and now you're screwed), the state really does expect more of you and your class than your teacher apparently feels necessary to mention, and that this is the week where you'll know if your (or your parents') money is well-spent.

I wish I was exaggerating. You will find that every major exam (mid-terms or finals) will be if not on the same day, extremely close together. Every paper that you never heard about will be due at the same time on the same day. Every class project that you haven't been able to find a partner for will suddenly shift in priority, becoming THE MOST IMPORTANT THING on your list... and yet you still need to cram.

That's where all-nighters come in. You stay up as long as you possibly can, relying on your short-term memory to carry you through where you or your professors have not properly supplied the information to your brain. You can plan ahead as much as you want, and have everything you know about done - you can begin studying months in advance, but new information will continuously crop up. An assignment that clearly was not listed in the syllabus will suddenly appear on the white board, in your email, or postmarked yesterday, stamped directly on your forehead.

That, my friends, is Hell week.

Adults will be extremely unsympathetic. "Welcome to the real world, where everything piles on you at once." Maybe so. Recalling every bit of information, regardless of its actual meaning in the "real world," must be preparing you for something, surely. Have you listened to everything your boss, significant other, or mother-in-law has said for the past three to six months? Are you sure? There's going to be a test on that, and depending on how you rank in the class, you could fail out. You didn't know that? So sorry.

Those projects that are all due on the same day, the papers? Yes, I'm sure that your boss might require projects and papers of you. I highly doubt he or she will demand that you rewrite the Employee Handbook by rote, interpret the data of the last six months' customers including what they have purchased, why, and what it means for the global economy, and mathematically compute the likelihood of you needing a raise of $0.50 in the next three weeks versus the statistical likelihood of you actually receiving it, all due Friday. It's Wednesday at 4:55 pm. Feel any pressure yet?

That's a little what college is like. College is not a big party (for those of us who actually want to do well). College is not a trial for real life, because the things we are being asked to do often have little bearing on what, exactly, we want to do with the rest of our lives. Barring that you are actually a statistician or a linguist (or, you know, a native/fluent Spanish-speaker), when is the last time you calculated the standard deviation of the milk production of cows (per pound), or needed to conjugate a verb to an imperfect tense in Spanish in order to explain a habitual action that you *used* to do? Does your boss require you to memorize that Excel spreadsheet full of thousands of phone numbers, checking account numbers, and percentages? No?

College is stressful. Stress is preparing you for the fact that life is stressful, sure - but there are two arguments against this: Life is stressful before, during, and after college, and college has its own special brand of coma-inducing numbness.

It's called Hell week, and it's roughly beginning around now. And December. And March and May and...

If you see a 18-20something looking a bit haggard, offer him a bag of Fritos. The poor guy probably hasn't eaten or slept in days.