Finals week is here, seemingly coming out of nowhere to catch everyone off guard. This is probably my last post of the semester, which is an important landmark, I know. I know none of you have the internet at home and it will be virtually impossible for you to access the site until late January. In all seriousness though, I won’t be running the site the same way next semester. I’ll be going on with the Towerlight and getting an official weekly column (or at least thats the plan at the moment), so I’ll probably cut back my writing to just that. I’ll still post the articles here, and of course they’ll run in the Towerlight. With the extra time, I want to “pursue other projects.” I’m brainstorming on ideas for a site similar to this, but with a more global appeal. Let’s face it, no one outside of Towson students or people that know me personally has any reason to read this. I want to write about something bigger, but I don’t know what yet.

In honor of this manufactured occasion, I want to clean out the site and start fresh. What I mean by that is that I am going to post some of the drafts and dead end articles that I’ve started over the last couple of months. These are all things that, for whatever reason, I wasn’t able to do anything with. I started with what I thought was a good idea, wrote a funny sentence or two, and then completely submarined. Without further ado, here are some of my favorite dead ends, raw, unedited, and unfinished:

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“If I’m old enough to go to war, I should be old enough to drink!”

You’ve heard it/said it/agreed with it before. It’s a pretty heated debate, with people under 21 arguing their side passionately while people over 21 read the paper and drink coffee or whatever it is that they do.

I had a similar argument in a class of mine. My group was discussing whether you should have to be 18 or 21 to be a police officer. Then there’s strip clubs, where you have to be 18 to strip, 18 to spectate, 21 to drink, and over 40 to get any attention.

All of this made me wonder, what are the differences between an 18 year old and a 21 year old? Are there any? Who would win in a fight?

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Almost everyone I know is a self-identified procrastinator. No one will ever tell you that they are very prompt and deliberate.

Most people who claim to be procrastinators are, in fact, lying. The most diligent people I know will be the ones freaking out about an exam they have in two weeks, that they’ve “put off studying for.” Please, I’ve never even heard of studying for an exam more than two days in advance, and I count the day of the exam as a day.

Procrastination is both a vice and a virtue. It can screw you badly if you’re not careful, but it has some perks that no one seems to ever talk about.

The pressure of an approaching deadline will light a fire under your ass like nothing else. Screw outlines and proofreading, toss aside the flashcards, and just wing it. You sort of become possessed, and by the time you’re done with the assignment you can’t remember anything. You have no idea what your paper says because you only read it once, and you can’t remember any of the questions from the test… let alone how you answered them. When you get the graded copy back it’s like Christmas. You get to see your grade, yeah, but you will also be amazed at how much you knew at 4am the day you turned it in.

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If you keep up with my site, you’ll probably find that the one aspect of being a college student I don’t touch on very often is going to class. That’s because going to class is boring. I mean, sure, I could write up some sarcastic bulleted list of ways to make class more fun. Off the top of my head, though, I can’t think of anything that won’t get you thrown out of the classroom or cause you to fail out of college. While I have, in previous entries, advocated underage drinking, binge drinking, assault and battery, Vicodin, insurance fraud, and evading the law, I can’t in good conscience promote poor study habits. I can’t even bring myself to joke about it.

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In one of my classes this week we are doing individual presentations. It doesn’t matter what class it is, but the rubric for the presentation specifically says “3-5 minutes.” I went the first day and kept my presentation within the time limit, and you know what? I got an A. Everyone after me happened to choose a topic that apparently moves them to tears, and proceeded to ramble on for 15 minutes extra about irrelevant nonsense. So today I went to that class for the sole purpose of listening to these presentations. We should have gotten through everyone and been let out of class early, but because people are inconsiderate, we stayed the whole time and will end up running over a day or two. I know this isn’t an isolated incident or a problem of mine alone.

One of my favorite Facebook groups is “Keep Your Fucking Hand Down in Lecture and Shut Up, No One Cares.” This really doesn’t require any elaboration because I’m sure just reading that sentence has enraged most of you. I know I am already starting to get angry. People who ask questions, repeat shit just to clarify, request elaboration, or tell stupid anecdotes in class are just part of one subset of annoying ass people in class. There are other people who deserve groups dedicated to hating them, too.

People Who Nod in Agreement: The occasional “oh, I get it,” nod is acceptable but some people take the reasonable nod and just shit all over it. Your professor doesn’t need you to advertise your agreement while he’s telling the class about how he got stuck in traffic. He’s probably not even looking at you because he knows eye contact will lead to you asking a question. Here’s a hint for people who do this: Every time you feel the urge to nod in class, shove a thumbtack in your eye instead. If you still want to nod after that then go ahead.

People Who Bring Laptops to Class and DON’T Use Them to Play Games: God damnit. I hate it when I look over at someone on a laptop and the only application open is a plain old Word document. I’ll often scan the task bar to see if Minesweeper is hiding out in the background somewhere. If it isn’t, then that person sucks. Look, asshole, if you’re going to distract me with your technology, at least make it interesting. Play solitaire, read the news, hell throw some porn up there. You wouldn’t like it if I brought an old-style typewriter to class to take notes with. That would be annoying as shit. And not the least bit entertaining.

People Who “Make an Entrance”: Dramatically removing your sunglasses, rapping along with your iPod, and talking loudly on your cell phone should all qualify you for immediate removal from class and possibly the human race.

People Who Are “The Unofficial Tech Guy”: There’s always that one kid in class who thinks he is MacGyver, and when the VCR won’t work properly he steps up to the plate to fix it. I mean, hey, if you know what you’re doing then by all means fix it. But 9 times out of 10 this person doesn’t fix a damn thing.

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Good luck on your finals. I’ll still be writing over winter break, but for formalities sake, see you next semester.