On your marks. Get set.

BANG!

That’s not the roar of a cheering crowd of fanatics you hear, unless you happen to be reading the paper at a hockey game, in which case, you really need to sort out your priorities. No, that’s the sound of the collective student body’s mental gears pushing into overtime.

It’s that time of year: everyone’s running the Post-Midterm Six-Week Fight to the Finish, an uphill and ever-accelerating battle.  Papers pile on top of one another like so much birdcage lining. Daylight Savings has us wandering around in the dark at 5:30 p.m., taking with it whatever midnight oil we had left to burn. And it’s November.

November is the coquettish tease of the Gregorian calendar. The only thing that’s socially acceptable to look forward to is Thanksgiving, and since Gustavus only gives us three days off to stuff our faces, watch football and subconsciously fret about the state of our seemingly insurmountable workloads, Thanksgiving feels more like the big kid in the pool letting you breathe for three seconds after holding your head underwater for two minutes. A brief moment of hope and reprieve, and then it’s back underwater for more lessons in vain struggling.

Plus, Thanksgiving has the gall to show us that there is, in fact, a light on the other side of the Joy-Devouring Assignment Forest. A beautiful world where classes are over, jollity and song abound and Minnesota’s weather-gremlins haven’t quite received the -40° memo yet.

Of course I’m talking about Christmas break; Winter break, if your preferred frozen holiday doesn’t fall under the first banner. If only because that punishing schedule has finally been alleviated, there’s no reason not to look forward to it.

But, there’s the problem. November is the problem. November is heavy and tedious and full of unpleasant surprises; pop quizzes and extra reading and triple-test days, to name a few. And it’s the biggest blockade between a Gustie and two weeks of freedom. November makes life difficult, and so we all must find our own ways of coping with the drudgery.

So what is a Post-Midterm Six-Week Fight to the Finish runner to do? I hear that some runners do best when they break the stretch up into little, bite-size pieces of achievement. If that works for you, just take things a week at a time and it’ll be over before you know it! Of course, so will your deadlines, but let’s not make things more stressful than they need to be. It’ll be fine! Totally.

Anyway, the whole divide-and-conquer tactic doesn’t work for everyone. Some of us need to focus on the long-term goal. The just reward for rubbing our noses raw on the grindstone. And sometimes, though the race just started and the end is nowhere in sight, we need to be reminded of what awaits us at the finish.

So, all of you that bemoan the consistently early start to the “holiday” season, I say to you: begrudge not your fellow students their Christmas music. Some of us need that carrot dangled in front of us.

So there.