I had a difficult time coming up with a column for this week. I couldn’t decide what I should write about, if I should try to be funny, since this is the last real week of classes, or if I should write about something serious — I was really in a quandry.

And then I remembered that earlier in the day, someone had asked me if I had a lot to do this week. I didn’t have too much this week, I told her. And she rolled her eyes, sort of looked down at the ground, shook her head and quietly said that man, she just has so much to do.

Fall semester is so odd. When it begins, it’s still summer, not many people want to come back. Then, things start moving, and classes aren’t so bad, and the semester just rolls right by.

All the sudden it’s November, Thanksgiving and you get a small taste of what break is going to be like. And then…it’s December. Just like that. It’s December. A million things are going on, the phone bill was due four days ago, tests, papers, finals — Yikes! It’s just too much.

Everyone is just so tense. We tend to start walking around in a finals fog, wondering if it’s too late to drop a class. Some of us hope that we’ll get a big snow like we have for the past couple years and that our finals we be delayed or, (oh, please,) cancelled. We start to come up with good reasons to avoid studying: going Christmas shopping, baking Christmas cookies, putting up Christmas decorations, chopping down a Christmas tree. Christmas is the ultimate excuse for not studying.

But it just gets worse. You know what I mean? All these great excuses to not study come back to bite you in the … nose. Tomorrow is FRIDAY. Monday is the beginning of FINALS WEEK. There is a hell. We’re in it now. It comes four times a year—twice for add-drop and twice for finals. Thank God we don’t have finals and add-drop at the same time. That would be worse than eating lima beans, squash and liver at the same meal. Yuck.

I remember my mother would always serve lima beans, squash and liver for dinner on the same night that she would have baked an incredibly yummy-looking chocolate cake. And, of course, I couldn’t have any cake until I ate all that other gross stuff.

And I cursed at her in my head. I wished that I would throw up my entire dinner all over her. But I never did. I just ate that food that should be thoroughly inspected by the FDA so I could get a huge piece of chocolate cake.

I also remember when I used to play the flute, I would get so frustrated while I practiced that I would be tempted to use it as a baseball bat and want to beat things with it. I always have displaced my anger. Well, my mom, being the wiser of the two of us, would tell me not to let my horn get me down. I always told her that a flute is not a horn, but I was missing the point entirely.

The point was that she knew I could play the flute. She knew I could beat it, that I could overcome all the misery it gave me.

So I guess the moral of the story is that sometimes you gotta eat lima beans, squash and liver before you can have your chocolate cake. And really, it’s not that bad. And, after all that crap, that chocolate cake tastes even better than ever.

I think that chocolate cake will be ready to eat in about a week.