A + B = C

School is a monotony far deeper, far more complex, than the pure and simple couch canoodling lifestyle. It goes a little something like this: class, eat, nap, work, study, prepare, class, nap, eat, work, study, prepare. Notice there is no conception of "sleep" or "bed" in this continuum, only naps, because the scale does not allow for true inactivity of the nervous system. Even the weekend seems to usher in due dates for endless assignments, and most everyone has by now realized that drunken obliteration in itself becomes a tedious repetition.

Such is the predicament of college, of the proclaimed best years of our lives. It's ho hum and humdrum, and I'd rather be planning weddings or popping out babies or working on my memoirs.

I wonder when American universities and professors will realize that the steady increase of allocated readings and papers and presentations does not yield balance, productivity, or our supposed self-defined ideas about success.

There aren't even challenges anymore, other than that of fitting incalculable amounts of work into the twenty-four hours distributed to a day. Let's face it: excess no longer can solely be associated with our literal waste and lavishness. How long will it take for the world to be exhausted by its own intemperance?

The Teacher from the Black Lagoon

I told myself that I wouldn't do this anymore; that I wouldn't succumb to the grips of melancholia, that I had thrown that out in high school with my fat jeans and donated myself to a better cause: good, old fashioned, high quality living. I'm trying to approach my depression with a sense of humor, trying to imagine it as the Teacher from the Black Lagoon - an empty, harrowingly dark shadow that, in the bright light, actually turns out to be a overweight croc with red hair, bad lipstick, and a penchant for issuing math exams, who just so happened to swallow me hole. But here I am anyhow, trapped in the pit of her stomach, trying to hold my ground amidst the churning gastric juices and particles of yesterday's dinner.

Here, there is not much left for me. I polish my shoes. I make dinner. I cleanse and de-clutter my space. I watch sitcoms and a few worthwhile reality television shows. I read. I go dancing. Occasionally, I talk to people. I use my exorbitant amounts of free time to think about how little free time I will be left with once I return to school. I go down the checklist of glaring symptoms of depression: loss of interest - check, insomnia - double check, irritability - get the fuck away, weight gain - check plus star, et al.

What is different this time around, though, is that I am acknowledging it: I can admit its existence to my best friend and not feel like a piece of bruised, rejected fruit. Though I don't remember the ending to The Teacher from the Black Lagoon, it was a children's book, and I am therefore sure that it was a happy one. I don't write frighteningly masochistic entries in my journal, and I don't mentally vote on the most artfully beautiful form of suicide. No, that era of self-loathing, of wanting to press the delete button on my own pneuma and self is as gone as my teenaged acne and hopefully, with time and retrospective thought, will only seem to have lasted as long as I can last without hacking at my own bangs. Which is to say, not very long. And while I may not yet have the courage, the motivation, the want to roll out of bed and spear through this phase with a tribal war cry and proactive action like some Indian chieftess, I can, at least, begin to imagine myself applying the face paint, crouching in the depths of a colonial forest, on the verge of vaulting to attack this enemy.

Happy New Year to You, Too

What a girl should resoundingly never do on New Years' Eve is get drunk off champagne and try to piece together what the History Channel has to say about The Knight's Templar and Free Masonry while all too comfortably sitting in her mother's recliner. What a girl should resoundingly never do on New Years' Eve is resolve that the oh-so-riotous sequined top she very decidedly bought to showcase at a holiday party on the night of December 31st is left better off to step out on the town at a later date.

I should've known that living room laziness on the birth of the fresh year would only propel what's made a week and a half rut drive even deeper, so that I have become like a wheel wedged in a pothole, unable to pry out of the chipped pavement no matter how much pressure is applied to the pedal in the dire attempt to achieve acceleration.

In the New Year, I've baked double batches of five different kinds of cookies and apparently made a resolution to engorge myself on as many different kinds of chocolate as I could possibly dream up. I've filed and painted my nails canary yellow and drawn myself a bubble bath to get my creative juices flowing. I've gathered all the materials to redesign my inspiration board for 2011, but am patently too uninspired to decide what inspires me. I've planned my wedding, right down to the cake topper, centerpieces, and table themes. I've discovered whitening strips gathering dust in my bathroom cabinet and applied them to my to my upper and lower teeth, something that I haven't done since high school. I've gone on an aerobic walk through my neighborhood, up all the biggest hills and past all my favorite Victorian houses. I've done arm exercises while sizing up Oprah Winfrey's new Network, OWN, whose initials worked for her, as I'm sure you've heard. I've even gone so far as to watch the Lifetime Movie Network with my mother, in the hopes that witnessing melodrama would make me grateful for flat-out monotony. I've bought impractical heels, gone to the movies, and eaten Mexican for the first time in four months. I've read all my favorite blogs, updated my own, and looked at more Facebook photos than dough I've formed into two inch balls on pre-greased cookie sheets. I've started and stopped all too many activities, like cleaning my room, loading the dishwasher, making a list of resolutions, and reading that book I've been meaning to get to for years.

All of this, and I feel utterly unfulfilled, like I'm furrowing myself deep into the supposed comforts of rest and relaxation, and before I can poke my head back out from underground to be greeted by sunlight, I've realized that someone's kicked dirt over my nest of doing nothingness, and I can't dig my way out.

Obviously, I need a hobby. Or maybe some friends. Or a prod in the ass with one of those wrought iron pit pokers, heated in the hearth of meaningful productivity.