Senior accounting and finance major
There are few things in this world worse than tedium. You wake up in the morning, have a normal day and go back to sleep. You wake up again, have another normal day and go back to sleep again. Nothing changes: nothing new under the sun. Tedium is the silent killer.
During the semester, tedium can be easy to combat. Between Thirsty Thursday, Surprising Saturday, and Why is This Happening Wednesday, our days are filled with excitement. When winter break comes though, things start to change.
After the long, grinding road that is the first half of December, it can be difficult to remember how to have fun. Sure, you can sleep all day for the first week. Yes, there will be Christmas and New Year’s. Of course, you will have time to see your friends from home, your family members, your pets and your game systems. It may seem like you won’t have enough time to do anything.
Winter break is five weeks long, though — 34 days. That is a lot of time. Speaking from experience, you can watch the entire series of Community, How I Met Your Mother and Adventure Time and still have enough time to work an 8-hour day and get a good night’s sleep. With all of that time, tedium is inevitable.
Tedium is not incurable, though. Though it may climb in through your window, creep up behind you when you’re not looking and surround you with its tentacles of despair, it can be beaten back by a simple solution: a hobby. When you have something interesting to do, you’ll never fall into rote: no rote, no tedium.
For example, my hobby is reading old campus newspapers. Ever since the spring, I’ve been reading through issues of The Diamondback from the 1970s. It started out as a search for a single article and has since become a multipronged research project, complete with assistance from the archive and a few friends. Just by visiting the library for an hour a day, I can learn new things about the campus, explore our world in a different time and take screencaps of funny articles to share with all my friends.
Your hobby could be something similar — there is a ton to learn — or something completely different. Start making snow sculptures. Collect funny hats. Become a troll on a forum. Become a funny-hat-collecting troll on a forum for people who make snow sculptures. Be creative! There are endless options to be had.
Once you find your thing, share it with your friends. Find some people to share your hobbies with. Without the help from my friends, my project would just be a sad tale of a man and a library; with them, it becomes a fun thing to do on a Friday afternoon. Even stamp collecting can be an adventure if your friends do it too.
So have an adventure; grab your friends. Use your hobbies to explore the distant lands of interest you’d never thought of before. Once you get going, the fun will never end. You’ll have a great break and, I hope, one completely free of tedium.
Ezra Fishman is a junior accounting and finance major. He can be reached at opinionumdbk@gmail.com.
