I made an hour-and-a-half-long drive home on a Friday morning with a simple list of things to do over Spring Break. There were a few shopping-related items on that list, like a birthday present for each of my twin brothers, but most of it was dominated by homework and class projects. Over a week of break time? Perfect for writing that full-length play for Drama, and that craft paper for Fiction.

Cue me spending most of Spring Break playing video games with my brothers. We take our gaming pretty seriously, and even with the existence of online capabilities, nothing quite compares to being in the same vicinity the people you’re playing with.

And here I am, two days before I have to return to my apartment in Grandville and struggle once again to catch up on homework. I decided at the beginning of this semester that I was going to do my best to not procrastinate on any work, that I was going to try to get it all done early—but for me, scrambling to finish work a couple days ahead of time doesn’t count as “getting it done early.” That counts as “being on-time.” At least, with this semester’s workload, that’s how I’ve come to view it.

I whined about it too; every morning I’d grab my laptop and say “I need to get some work done,” only to stare at my assignments for about twenty minutes—maybe tap out a few sentences—and then get bored and head back to the PlayStation. I’m beating myself about it too. Something’s got to be wrong with me. My priorities are misaligned or something, right?

Nah. Now that I write about it? It’s Spring Break, for crying out loud. The last thing I want to do is more schoolwork during the week I actually don’t have to worry about turning in schoolwork. It makes sense that I keep finding easy excuses to X out of Word and log out of Blackboard. Plus, I really miss my brothers, I miss my family, I miss my dog, and this week has just been great spending time with them all. Thinking about work just… I can’t say it depresses me because I don’t like working even when I’m supposed to be working, but it just doesn’t make much sense for this past week.

That’s got to be one of my favorite things about life in general: making sense of things. Looking at situations or reactions, breaking them down into their most simple components in my head, prioritizing dates and deadlines. To me, life gets tangled as easily as cords in pockets, and the untangling process sometimes makes me want to bite the cords in half even if I get zapped. Untangling cords takes time that I don’t always have.

I like to refer back to The Sims when it comes to life issues—again, this makes sense because The Sims is a “life simulator.” Sims have a meter labeled “Fun” and when that meter gets emptied out due to a lack of fun in their lives, their mood drops and they don’t want to do anything productive. So initially I was thinking “stop wasting time playing games and get back to work!” but now I’m thinking that it wasn’t time wasted at all—it was me taking care of my own “Fun Meter.”

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