The expectation to have successful time management during college is truly a remarkable thing.

For some reason, people expect you to be able to take on a ridiculous amount of things and be able to pull it all off. A challenging course load, extracurricular activities that demand at least five times the time they would have taken you in high school, paying your bills, doing your laundry (and the dishes!), doing homework, keeping fit, eating healthy, having a job (or five), having a relationship, and not going nuts.

Well, people really do not require you to not go nuts. That’s just a personal preference.

But, really. Procrastination is something that is getting more serious by the second. I try to figure out what I did in Madrid to make it work, because something was definitely working: During my second and last year there, I had a course load equivalent to around 35 Cornell credits, a job that gave me enough for rent and food, a jazz band, a choir, an electro-rock album recording and a social life alive enough to keep me awake and truthfully entertained from midnight, when Metro closed, to 6:00 a.m. when I could go home again.

Why can’t I do that anymore? A week into school, my brain-death is so serious that I’m having a hard time following the character’s names on Chopped. I had to rediscover caffeine, after over three months without drinking a single cup of coffee, to take me through Friday (coffee-high included, mind you). I have retorted to making literary theory out of commercials because my neuropharmacology book has stopped making sense and chemistry is still not coming back to me. My legs hurt from walking from Uris, to Mudd, to the Vet School and then to Plant Science on back-to-back courses ...

I just had a flashback from EARS counseling and how much I complained about stress being the one thing people would always talk about as their issues. I thought it was both funny and a little pathetic (yes, I am swallowing my words now, quit it with the “I told you so!”) to feel that the actual problem for everyone was just a lot of courses and stress over not getting everything done. But, when you think of it again … stress is usually THE problem. Because, whatever else is going on, it’s just piling up with everything else, and that’s what freaks you out.

I am still not sure if I shouldn’t consider myself a sissy for complaining my life is stressful, though. I do think that we might be complaining too much and not doing enough. Then again, if we are actually getting everything done, does it really matter whether we complain every step of the way? Maybe not.

We can take a relatively behaviorist-like approach to it: all that matters is the behavior. Who cares where it comes from … or why? That approach works well almost everywhere else! Ask the professors that think kids have ADHD because they’re not obedient enough, parents being OK with their kids as long as their grades are decent, governments that are happy to announce statistics that they made because they simply do not include the nasty data in their reports ... The world kind of moves that way. So, as long as I get things done, my going nuts doesn’t really matter, right?

Right.

The problem with that, though, is that I’m still going a little nuts and have problems believing it doesn’t matter. At least to me, anyway.

Maybe all we need is to stop thinking about our potential for nutness and that’s it. You know, when people didn’t think stress was something that was real, it wasn’t that it didn’t happen, but not worrying about it saved a big chunk of time that you can, you know, actually use to get your stuff done. But we keep on being bombarded with this stupid idea that we are doing something so different from other people living their lives that we actually deserve some sort of special treatment (Oh, poor children, their first time away from home! Poor little things, never having been away from home before, they should be stressed and scared and blah, blah, blah). Yes, college may be a little harder than …

Than what? Than working full shifts as people that don’t go to college do? Than being unemployed and having a hard time with it? Than being parents or taxpayers? Why do we deserve the preference, the special treatment, the justification for our frailty? Being smarter does not make you better (yes, repeat after me: being smarter does not make you better) enough to be worth more than the guy next to you.

So, and this goes for me as well: yes, life is hard. Grow up or grow a pair.

Florencia Ulloa is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She may be reached at fulloa@cornellsun.com. Innocent Bystander appears alternate Tuesdays this semester.