Three whole months of holidays.
This is an idea which any university student goes absolutely crazy about towards the end of the year. After 9-plus months of endless assignments, early mornings, and often unsuccessful grading negotiations with ruthless faculty heads- a break from all the daily demands of The System is more than welcome.
That’s exactly how I felt at the beginning of the final exams last year, and each day I pulled myself through all the mind-numbing studying with the quiet mantra of: ‘…just a few more weeks, and it’ll all be over. I’ll be free!’, which I used to keep myself motivated as I waded through the ridiculous amounts of learning work I had to do in the small hours of the morning.
I can only keep myself motivated up to a certain point though, so I didn’t find it surprising when my last 2 or 3 exams placed really (really) low on my list of priorities, and I ended up finding other ways to while away the long, daunting hours. I found myself spending copious amounts of time in friends’ rooms, watching movies, having “tea parties”, taking embarrassing photos (which would later turn up on my Facebook news feed), and just generally wasting my life.
Every so often, the (very real) possibility that I could actually fail the year if I carried on the way I was going occurred to me, and it prompted me to spend a few hours cramming the theories of Gunder-Frank, Erikson and Marx into my brain. Even as I did it, it seemed like a futile exercise: the ‘knowledge’ was clinging onto the very edges of my mind, and threatened to fall right off and walk out of my life the minute I sat for the exam. I survived it, though: my dad’s not-so-idle threat to kick me out of his house if I didn’t make something of myself made very sure of that!
I couldn’t bear staying in res for longer than was absolutely necessary: the walls appeared to literally be closing in on me, and the dining hall food seemed to just get worse and worse by the minute.
Two days after my last paper, I was so glad to finally be going home!
During the drive home, I blocked out my dad’s irritating questions (‘how was the paper?’, ‘how good do you think the results are going to be?’) by thinking about all the fun and exciting things I was going to do now that I had all this Free Time.
Would I spend most of my time at the mall? Or get a job? Would I make time to visit my friends? What about spending a week or two at the sea…? I had so many ideas.
When I arrived home, my sisters couldn’t wait to tell me all their stories from school, and I couldn’t wait to hear them. But first, I had to get settled into the (clean, comfortable, and otherwise unres-like) couch and reacquaint myself with the DSTV remote. As I did, I thought ‘aaah…home’.
Over the next month or so, I did all the things people do when they’re home for the holidays: I slept until 11:00 on most days (past 12:00, and you might as well get up the next day!), I ate all the food in the house, I read magazines, I spent hours at a time on my phone, and I wore a pretty snug little dip right in the middle of what had become my favourite sofa. I was enjoying myself.
Until Christmas time rolled around, and something about the “season to be jolly” seemed to bring out the worst in everyone around me. Then it felt like February was light years away, and I did everything I could to stop myself from pulling out my hair and running away. (Okay. Maybe I didn’t quite stop short of pulling out my hair. I decided to try a new look- hence the picture in the top right corner…)
I mean, I love my family, and being home was great but- you know what they say about “too much of a good thing…” right?
New Year’s came and went without any consequence- again- and I was cool with that. Should it bother me that, at 19 years old, my lack of a Social Life doesn’t bother me anymore?
January. I wished time would speed the hell up so that I could go back to having a purpose in my life. Yes, I don’t like school- there’s too much work and everyone is always expecting something from me- but at least when I’m there I’m doing something with my life.
The way I see it, the second year of university is the time to do everything you didn’t do the first time around, and get it right. Put more effort into learning, and less into wearing yellow patches into the grass on the library lawns- and all that other good stuff people do when they’re spending their time working hard towards Becoming Something.
Of course, it’ll take a while to get my brain back into Learning Mode (because memorizing what time of the day and how often in a week Jerseylicious or Run’s House plays does not count as an academic activity), and there are definitely some social situations which I would rather not get involved in again (The Fresher: Part II? Not a chance!), but once that’s out of the way things will go much better.
The same way people make (and quickly break) new year’s resolutions, I always start a new academic year off with about a million ideas about how to make this one my “best year yet”, and end up forgetting all about them 2 months in.
Well, Becoming Something requires unwavering commitment to the cause, and this is the year that I will do everything on my B.Y.E (Best Year Ever) list. I mean, I have to- otherwise the whole university experience will have been wasted on me, because I will have learnt nothing and grown very little.
Here’s to making this the year!
Nkhensani Manabe 