It’s pretty safe to assume that, by now, you’ve had at least 20 people ask you that repetitive, impersonal question: “”How was your weekend?”” Sure, it’s nice to ask about someone’s weekend, but at this point in the year it seems to be that the once polite question has turned into just another irritating reminder that you’re still in school.

With the holidays ominously looming in every place you go, from the grocery store to the bookstore, it’s hard to thwart the cheery feeling on your own. But don’t worry: That’s what finals are for.

For most of us, last weekend was like being given a dinner roll and then being told that before we can have a real meal, we must survive two more weeks of famine. The airports on the way back from bliss were packed this weekend with students who lacked the motivation to even pick up their bags from the baggage claim. Many stood around the rotating metal machine watching their bags pass two or three times before thinking about grabbing them. It seems as though, in some small way, we were all holding onto our last bit of sanity. On the ride back, the reality began to settle in that there were still projects to do, homework to finish and finals to study for.

At this point in the year most everyone starts to lose motivation, patience and sanity. In essence, we start to lose more and more of the glue that holds us together on a daily basis. Lack of motivation and concern is a constant among many students. Holiday cheer hardly seems an appropriate description for the emotions that begin to arise at this point in the year. Those who retain their drive and concern seem to be, rather than positively encouraged, negatively affected by their “”motivation,”” as it comes in the form of worry and frantic desperation. Grades rule our lives. The difference between an “”A”” and a “”B”” or, more likely, a “”D”” and an “”E”” seems to be, at this point in the semester, a few more lost hours of sleep a night for the next two weeks.

Energy drinks will fly off the shelves for the next 18 days as everyone crams in their last-ditch efforts to maintain or attain a good, or at least decent, grade. For those of you who don’t fall into either of the two distinctions (e.g., the stressed out or the careless), get excited! Your life will be smooth sailing while the majority of us grow our first gray hairs.

In order to avoid leaving you with a hopeless feeling, I’ll offer a small ray of light through the metaphorical dark clouds of the end of the semester. There are only five more days of regular school left! That should be a nice refreshing dose of joy amongst all the stress. Just endure five more days of projects, five more days of lectures, five more days before the homestretch.

This last weekend lasted four days and it flew by before we could blink. In other words, you only need to find five more days’ (just a day more than last weekend) worth of activities to help you procrastinate before you finally crack open the textbook and read through all the things you’ve ignored all semester long.

It’s coming down to crunch time, so grab onto any bit of hope or drive that you can find and ride it out for a few more days. Don’t lose hope: just a little more studying before we can all bring our heads up out of the water, a few more essays before we can give Microsoft Word a rest, a few more times we’ve got to open our textbooks before we can sell them back and get a little extra Christmas money.

Lastly, if you can find no other reason to continue on for the next two weeks, consider this: Christmas is right around the corner, which means that we’ve got an entire month to do nothing but enjoy our gifts before we need to think about school again! Just don’t forget to register.

– Isaac Mohr is a journalism freshman. He can be reached at

letters@wildcat.arizona.edu.