Sydney Life

At this time of the year, the going gets tough. Lots of study to do, lots of essays, lots of research. It’s also the time of semester where you receive results from your earlier endeavours, which will bring you to the horrible realisation that: the semester will be over very soon, and you haven’t learned anything.

However, this is no cause for stress. Grab a textbook, hit the library or any of those great online databases (JSTOR is really popular among the English nerds), get under the covers and construct a cubby house from books, your laptop, a teapot, biscuits and a torch. You can learn anything you need to if you’ve got a couple of free days.

What really sucks about this period of uni is that you start to miss your peeps, compadres, komrads, chums, dawgs, bras, hombres, war-buddies and what have you. To paraphrase David Byrne: “You may ask yourself / where are my beautiful friends?”

Well, for one thing, by this point in semester your classes have just about finished (and if they haven’t then attendance has probably neutered them de facto). And you will experience a significant drop in the amount of friend contact hours right there: the people you debate and spar with in class fade into the background of your social life. Similarly, the possibilities of casual after-class coffee encounters diminishes in proportion to the reduction of these casual social encounters.

Since you’re not going to class so much, the amount of time you spend wandering the campus aimlessly is also drastically reduced; thus, the chance that you will bump into someone you know in your everyday doings is very small. At this point in the semester, you spend your contact hours either in the library or ... in the library. I can only speak for myself when I say that for the last few weeks, the only reason I have gone to uni is to go to the library ... In any case, the change in weekly routine and movements will disrupt your regular social patterns, probably for the worse.

But if that was just the extent of it, I wouldn’t be blogging it. For the worst part of it all is the self-imposed exile, the “I need to study” complex that infiltrates the brain and desperately extricates one from one’s dearest and closest. Involuntarily, you find yourself denying yourself the social privilege, and refusing invitations from close friends!

Sometimes it has to be done, sadly. But an even sadder happening would be to mismanage one’s time so badly that the time you could have spend with your friends is whittled away. I’m a believer in balance, although I don’t always practice what I preach. But If you can balance a healthy dose of the best stuff in life (friendship, chilling out, dialogue) with that all important university workload, you will be a happy, content student. I would like to hope so, anyway. If that doesn’t work, get some new friends :P

Finish with some Shakespeare? Well that’s just metalhand. \m/

BIRON: Tis more than need.
Have at you, then, affection's men at arms.
Consider what you first did swear unto,
To fast, to study, and to see no woman;
Flat treason 'gainst the kingly state of youth.
- from Love’s Labor’s Lost