It’s the season of mid-semester meltdowns: the time when a rogue comma can cause a breakdown, and when working on assessments feels more crucial to your ongoing existence than breathing. Oh, and you stop caring about lots of things, like…
Clothes
Even if your clothing habits are usually clean, neat and tidy, crisis point is where the only thing relevant about your clothes is that you are wearing some. The now favoured ‘sniff’ test is a step down from ‘is it clean?’ and ‘can I get away with wearing that at home?’ Never before seen combinations of clothing items appear as you start mixing semi-clean items with clean clothes that stopped fitting you in your early teens.
Diet
Ha ha ha! What diet? As long as you can eat it or drink it, it will pass the test. For those of us who live out of home, this period of the semester results in such culinary delights as the ‘pasta rice couscous’ from the bottom of the packets cooked in the one pot. Washing anything down with a Red Bull helps the taste and supplements the ‘nutritional’ value.
A Clean House
House cleanliness can be seen as a barometer of stress levels. When some of us are stressed cleaning the tiles in the bathroom with a toothpick seems like a reasonable thing to do at four in the morning. I guess there’s a silver lining to it.
But for others, the state of the house has been in decline (read: free fall) for weeks. Everything you own is on the floor, in need of a wash, or both. But who cares about dirt when you’re so stressed that you can’t even remember your student number?
Personal Relationships
If they have been on this rollercoaster with you before, friends and family will (rightly) be handling you with kid gloves. If they haven’t, the tear stained constitutional cases and post-it notes lodged in your hair are a great give away. If people are treating you like a wild animal, cautiously bringing you meals and trying not to upset you, it’s likely that you will have to make it up to them when this is over.
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