Right now, I'm sitting in my dorm room attempting to convince myself I'm actually making some kind of progress on my work. The wonderful weather aside, this happens to be a fairly normal Sunday. It is ripe with unfinished assignments, notebooks lying half-open, unread on my floor and unnecessarily loud music (which I pretend will help me concentrate on the task at hand). This is the way it goes: You slowly inch through what is there so you can begin to do what has yet to be assigned. It's an incremental process designed to grind concepts into the student, similar to honing an axe on a whetstone.

I suppose none of this work has to be done — no one's holding a gun to my head (and at that point I'd still have some options). When it comes down to it, the only reason I continue meandering through the murk and mire is pressure. Pressure takes many forms; it has many denotations and connotations. Some of these are technical, some emotional and even a few that could only be described politely as highly colloquial. All in all though, pressure is simply any kind of force that brings about a result or an action that otherwise would be absent.

From where does such a force arise? We might put it on ourselves, but frankly, if this were the only source it would rarely cross our minds on a daily basis. The pressure is from outside us — money, job prospects and teacher recommendations — and we never make peace with it. We spend vast amounts of time running away, trying to hide and when all else fails, numbing our minds to it. To some this is college, to others it is life in general and to me it’s just obnoxious.

We spend our entire lives submitting ourselves to the whims of others. We never get what we want because we never ask. There are elements of past stoicism in our prospective futures. Somehow, instead of pursuing any form of contentment, we merely follow whatever pathetic fad to fill the empty spaces that define the vacuous regions of our under-utilized minds. I'm not talking about any type of hallucinogenic visions of independence from materialism that can be found in "Fight Club." This movie, while watchable, simply offers very little in the spectrum of actual philosophy. I'm not asking you to destroy the edifices of our capitalistic history, I'm just asking to look at your hands and ask the question "What the heck have I done?"

Of course, the answer to this question is rather simple: You sold yourself short. You looked for security instead of adventure. You took promises instead of moving into more uncertain areas. Maybe it's just me, but there are some mornings I wake up and wonder what I plan to do. Most of those mornings, I haven't a clue.

Right now, I'm sitting in my dorm room attempting to convince myself I'm actually making some kind of progress on my work. The wonderful weather aside, this happens to be a fairly normal Sunday. It is ripe with unfinished assignments, notebooks lying half-open, unread on my floor and unnecessarily loud music (which I pretend will help me concentrate on the task at hand). This is the way it goes: You slowly inch through what is there so you can begin to do what has yet to be assigned. It's an incremental process designed to grind concepts into the student, similar to honing an axe on a whetstone.

I suppose none of this work has to be done — no one's holding a gun to my head (and at that point I'd still have some options). When it comes down to it, the only reason I continue meandering through the murk and mire is pressure. Pressure takes many forms; it has many denotations and connotations. Some of these are technical, some emotional and even a few that could only be described politely as highly colloquial. All in all though, pressure is simply any kind of force that brings about a result or an action that otherwise would be absent.

From where does such a force arise? We might put it on ourselves, but frankly, if this were the only source it would rarely cross our minds on a daily basis. The pressure is from outside us — money, job prospects and teacher recommendations — and we never make peace with it. We spend vast amounts of time running away, trying to hide and when all else fails, numbing our minds to it. To some this is college, to others it is life in general and to me it’s just obnoxious.

We spend our entire lives submitting ourselves to the whims of others. We never get what we want because we never ask. There are elements of past stoicism in our prospective futures. Somehow, instead of pursuing any form of contentment, we merely follow whatever pathetic fad to fill the empty spaces that define the vacuous regions of our under-utilized minds. I'm not talking about any type of hallucinogenic visions of independence from materialism that can be found in "Fight Club." This movie, while watchable, simply offers very little in the spectrum of actual philosophy. I'm not asking you to destroy the edifices of our capitalistic history, I'm just asking to look at your hands and ask the question "What the heck have I done?"

Of course, the answer to this question is rather simple: You sold yourself short. You looked for security instead of adventure. You took promises instead of moving into more uncertain areas. Maybe it's just me, but there are some mornings I wake up and wonder what I plan to do. Most of those mornings, I haven't a clue.