Happy hangover, everyone!

Now that everyone is back from Spring Break, some tanner than others, it is time to rejoin society. This may prove a challenge for many of my college colleagues, who spent the majority of their break flashing massive hordes in Malibu or quoting Charlie Sheen’s latest rants about “Two and a Half Men” getting nixed. While taking your top off to (paradoxically) receive a free t-shirt, or refusing to ingest “Charlie Sheen: the drug,” is a fun vacation, it still doesn’t change the fact that today is a Monday.

And it’s the Monday after Spring Break.

Margaritas aren’t as free as they were last week. Also, no one is going to recommend parasailing off the coast of Lake Michigan for the next few months. Therefore, here are some tips that will make for an easy transition back into boring civilian life after a week of making more mistakes than a bottle of authentic Mexican tequila will allow you to forget:

*Pick up a couple extra jobs on the side. That trip you took likely wasn’t cheap, so with the spare time you have — in between catching up on a week’s-worth of homework and posting a never-ending stream of pictures of the Floridian sunset on Facebook — you may want to consider snagging a couple of additional shifts. In case you were unaware, tattoo removal can put you back a pretty penny.

*Start looking for a good lawyer. Somewhere in that “Girls Gone Wild” contract you drunkenly signed is a loophole that will ensure that your parents will never see a video of you they can never un-see. Your new attorneys are trained to find those clauses that circumvent embarrassing footage making its way to households all over the country for a monthly $19.95 subscription.

*Stash your beads somewhere secure. For those of you who went to Mardi Gras this year, there is absolutely no reason to keep the evidence of your vacation, unless you really want someone to find them and say, “Geez, how many times did you flash the crowd in one week?”

Spring Break is, in a way, much more destructive to a student’s productivity than any other school vacation. Whereas the Winter and Summer Breaks exist between two unrelated blocks of academia, Spring Break finds itself smack-dab in the middle of a semester. Why so many professors think that it’s cool to assign lengthy readings for the week is beyond me. We’re too busy burning under the natural Cancun sun and skinny dipping at the beaches of California to skim through hundreds of pages of textbooks, Professor Buzzkill!

If anything, Spring Break should be followed with a debriefing week of easy curriculum so anyone who has nagging remnants of the previous week to sweep under the rug has the opportunity to do so. Everyone deserves a mulligan, especially those of us who didn’t spend an entire week at their parents’ house, rewatching movies with the audio commentary on, fantasizing about warmer climates.

“Winning,” indeed…

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