Week of the ‘Living Dead’

Dead week? Yeah, right – more like death week. Isn’t this the one week out of the semester that is supposed to be free of major exams or important lectures so that we have more time to study for our finals and meet with faculty? So then why does everybody’s grade for every class seem to depend on the exams and papers that are due within this deadly five-day span?

What exactly is supposed to be dead during dead week? I’m still seeing some signs of life. My classes are certainly not dead, nor is my workload or my desire to throw myself down a stairwell in Ballantine Hall. No, those things are all still very much alive and well.

The only thing that is really dead during dead week, as far as I can tell, is my free time. Oh, and my social life. And my health, both physical and mental. And my ambition. And my natural sleep cycle and soul.

Maybe they call it dead week because dead is what we would rather be. I do not even have a little bit of desire to exist this week. I wouldn’t mind lying down in my bed, pulling the covers over my head and not waking up until Christmas morning.

Or maybe they call it dead week because, at any given moment, we are only one step away from damaging our bodies beyond repair.  One more sleepless night, one more sip of Red Bull, or one more early-morning alarm might set us over the edge into cardiac arrest.

At some point this week, each of us must mourn the death of our motivation. This generally happens around 4 a.m. when we stop and ask ourselves if it’s really worth it, we start obsessively calculating and rationalizing. “Well this project is only worth 25 percent of my final grade,” we might say. “If I can just pull off a 36 percent on it, I can still get a 59 percent in the class, which is almost a D, and there was that one time I shared that story about my aunt’s alien abduction, so that should bring up my participation grade a few points, so I am probably not going to fail. Besides, graduate schools and employers probably won’t even care how I performed in underwater basket weaving, right? Oh my gosh, will they?”

In this way, our anxiety-riddled minds become such a hopeless inferno of hell that we can no longer be sure that actual hell could be that much more unpleasant. This could also be why it’s called dead week.

But instead of “dead week,” I’ve been brainstorming a list of terms to propose to the University that could more accurately describe this week preceding finals. My runners-up are “Brain-dead Week,” “My-body-feels-like-death Week” and “I-envy-the-dead-because-at-least-they-get-to-sleep Week.”

But so far my favorite is one a friend suggested to me, which is “Week of the ‘Living Dead.’” Because, really, what are we this week if not possessed paper-writing, presentation-giving, caffeine-chugging, bubble-filling, living-dead zombies?