I am preparing to be squashed like a chihuahua under 700 pounds of ample buttocks.
Dead week is the buttocks of the semester.
It stinks. It’s disgusting. It is no Fall Holiday.
Yours truly has three projects and two finals due this week.
And they call it dead. Ha. I scoff at the suggestion.
The only thing coming out of this week dead is your dear ol’ Cuffist.
Ok, maybe I’m being melodramatic. (What, me, melodramatic? Never.)
I just hate dead week. I hate it because it’s a lie — and a bad lie at that.
Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, the quarter-behind-the-ear — those are good lies.
Dead week doesn’t even try to be an illusion.
Every professor and every student knows this is the time when we cram everything we couldn’t cover or finish in the regular semester into the last few days so it still can be on the final.
Or, if you’re like me and have almost all lab classes, most of your finals are this week — when you still have work, classes to attend, projects to complete and finals next week.
“How was the genius idea to put lab finals in dead week born?” you ask.
Allow me to enlighten you.
Once upon a time, a crotchety old professor scratched his head and said, “Grades are just too high, and students are just too happy. No matter how much we increase ye olde tuition and load on thy horribly dry and expensive reading materials, the wenches still frequent Tigerland.”
He pondered and pondered, until he finally had the perfect solution: Put half the finals in a real week of school!
Then, Faculty Senate called a double-secret meeting with administration to hear the evil plot.
Over cigars lighted with tuition hike money, they sat in their hooded robes giggling and glugging mead, as the prof presented a ye olde Power Point presentation about how one week per semester of inactivity in Tigerland would ruin the student hangout in 18.9 fiscal years.
“Ha, ha,” they said. “If we can put the taverns out of business, we can annex Tigerland and turn it into a state-of-the-art, overpriced, ugly building with plenty of faculty horse parking that students must walk to from thy dorms. Thou art brilliant!”
They placed their white marbles in the double-secret voting cauldron, and the plot was set in motion.
But, the students would not succumb. Driven by a need for cheap beer and booty music in their time of great stress, they continued to frequent Ye Olde Frederick’s and Sir Reginald’s Tavern.
And the professors were enraged. So, they left the policy in hopes one day Tigerland would be destroyed.
And, to this day, students near and far continue to frequent Tigerland in defiance of their longtime nemeses.
Thus, it is your charge, dear students, that no matter what stress befalls you this week, you must revel and be merry during dead week.
Remember: They may take our grades, but they never will take our bars!