Hurricanes are not holidays.
Holidays consist of planned vacations, hotels and maybe a flight. People plan to leave home during holidays.
Hurricanes, on the contrary, force people out of their homes — or perhaps even worse, trap them inside.
The main difference between hurricanes and holidays is that one reduces stress and the other creates it. With stress comes anxiety, depression and in extreme cases, suicide.
The recent cancellation of Fall Break and addition of Saturday school has, quite frankly, pissed a lot of people off.
According to a study by American Medical News, 11 percent of medical students reported considering suicide in the past year due to burnout and stress from their studies.
Undergraduates at LSU are not under the same stress as medical students, but it would naive to assume undergraduates are stress-free.
According to a study by the Education Resource Information Center, breaks are essential to healthy cognitive development and can reduce or eliminate stress which can lead to depression, obesity, suicide and overall poor mental health.
Hurricanes are not planned ahead of time, like holidays. They thrust themselves onto the stage and demand we play ball.
On holidays, we treat ourselves by eating a little bit better than normal. Going out to eat for most meals.
During hurricanes, everything is closed and curfews are imposed, making an evening out impossible. Meals consist of cold Vienna Sausage and vodka, and life begins to feel a bit gray and Soviet.
In fact, the only thing hurricanes and holidays have in common is excessive substance abuse.
Apparently, it only takes one similarity to make two things identical.
Why? Because hurricanes are not vacations. Nowhere in the South is there a vacation without air conditioning.
According to CBS, more than 600,000 Louisiana homes and businesses lost power for some duration of the storm.
That’s more than 600,000 people who were not on vacation. The 90-degree heat and 100 percent humidity sounds a lot like Haiti post-earthquake.
Hurricanes are hard work. Without power, everything takes for-goddamn-ever. Heating up a can of ravioli over a charcoal fire pit is a task.
Hurricanes make men feel like men. All beards grow a little thicker and our voices drop an octave until power is restored. Then we all go back to watching “How I Met Your Mother.”
Regular breaks are necessary to the mental health of college students, and should not be taken lightly.
Think about the timing of Fall Break. Is it a coincidence that it’s immediately following midterms?
Of course not, because midterms week creates significant amounts of stress among the student body. Fall Break alleviates that stress.
We need Fall Break. Stress is a killer, and planned drunken beach vacations are our weapon.
Without it, we’ll all become fat, depressed and suicidal. And what did we do to deserve this?
We sat in dark, powerless apartments and lived off beer and Cheetos for three days.
Hell of a vacation.
