Surviving finals week

Advice to prevent insanity and hair pulling due to stress

Finals week, the culmination of a whole semester's angst and anxiety, is upon us. This week is the whole semester compressed and distilled into a 180-roof liquor designed to drain your life's essence.

Not counting high school, this will be the tenth time I'll have survived this seven-day pressure cooker, if you count summer school.

Hopefully, by the fifteenth, I'll still have hair I haven't yet pulled out, and can resume summer school on May 26th with some semblance of humanity still about me.

With knowledge comes responsibility, so to assist my fellow students in lowering their blood pressure, I have listed a few techniques for public use.

1.) Spend as much time as you can away from this place. This university is a breeding ground for insanity, as can be seen in the past semester's happenings.

From the building formerly known as Porteus Hall to the ongoing budget crisis, madness has been running rampant throughout campus grounds all year.

George Hall, the Japanese language finals testing center, should have police on hand to prevent despondent students from committing hara kiri after the 7:30 a.m. test.

Students go into their two-hour exams with the knowledge that 30 percent of their semester grade rides on how well their minds retain unpatterned ideograms with no predictable meanings arranged in grammatical structures that in no way resemble anything close to English.

These students, especially the ones in the third and fourth years, have earned both my respect and my pity. I'd be wary of George Hall 227 on Thursday morning -- it might get nasty.

2.) If you didn't do the work in the first place, don't bother cramming. Hook up with someone who did, and spend as much time as you can hanging out with them.

Besides, you won't be able to remember diddly on the day of he test anyway. If you know how to cook, have the smart guy over for dinner. Take him to a movie, or pay for a couple rounds of billiards at Campus Center.

Nine times out of ten, he'll be feeling pretty self-righteous and arrogant about having done well, and gladly show off all his wisdom in exchange for these small favors.

In my opinion, there's nothing more frustrating than putting forth your best effort to get a C for four months' work. If you feel the same way, you might get comfort from his way of thinking: if you don't do your best, then you won't feel bad about not having done well.

It's the underachiever's maxim: no one knows just how smart I really am, because I never really tried in the first place.

On the other hand, the best feeling in the world is when, after not having studied, you do better than people who spent four hours reading the text and eight doing all the problem sets. This all happened while you were out surfing the Pipeline.

3.) Sleep a lot. One of the foremost defense mechanisms is avoidance. Since there's not a whole lot of distress involved with sleep, I guess it's pretty effective.

The only problem with sleeping is that you've still got the same things to do when you wake up. Therefore, be sure to clear your schedule before you take a nap.

Take off from work, cancel appointments -- do whatever you have to do to get the rest you want. This is a stressful time, so the more you avoid your problems the less stressed you'll be, at least in the short term.

For long-term stress remedies, psychology doesn't offer much advice except to face up to your responsibilities and deal with your problems, but I haven't found too much enthusiasm to support that.

4.) Kick the bad guys' butts in a video game. I love this one.

There honestly is nothing quite like spending 50 cents and thrashing some ugly-looking cartoon character, releasing reflex-heightening adrenaline into the bloodstream and getting your shoulders tense as a tightrope.

With proper outlets such as this, the apprehension surrounding finals week can be greatly decreased.

What I appreciate about the Campus Center is that it meets the sleeping and gaming needs of those who can't escape the confines of UH.

If you can't make it back to the dorms or find your car is too hot to sleep in, check out the student lounge near the Campus Center Ballroom.

A chance to slack off is a terrible thing to waste.