Final(s) Week

We brandish our notebooks and pens and laptops and IPads as the seats in the classroom suck in our gluteals, plastering themselves along the length of our latissimus dorsi’s. Like sponges, we sit there: trapped, but indifferent, alive but motionless. Our teacher returns our dead-eyed stares while mountains of words spew out of her barely parted lips. We document every single word that comes out of her mouth. In fact, the words practically jump from her mouth straight to the cleanly lined sheets of our notebooks. Easy shortcut, I think. It takes too much time for the words to go from her mouth, to our brains, and then back down to our notes. And we’re all paying interest here, so time is utmost value. 

Getting to the Pontchartrain Center is really easy: just get on I-10, take Exit 223 A, turn onto Williams Blvd and drive towards what looks like the end of earth as we know it. The building is just a few feet away from the levees which makes it great for watching fireworks whenever people decide to set them off. It is also a great venue for used-books sales, jewelry shows, toy drives, holiday parties, arts shows, funerals and the occasional high school commencement ceremony. I had the honor of delivering one of the commencement addresses on the night of May 14th, 2012. As the high school "valedictorian", or the graduating senior with the "highest grade point average," I took care to proclaim that every single matriculant sitting in those chairs was "more than just a number."  

"For years I obsessed over numbers," I told them. "I grew up wanting to become a Bollywood actress, but then I stopped growing." At 4'11" it's hard enough getting around campus without someone directing me to Lusher Middle School, I confessed to that crowd of expectant, slightly confused faces. So one can imagine the trouble I'd have convincing the avant garde Bollywood filmmakers that my emotional maturity made up for my premature epiphyseal fusion. 

Later that night my friends and I went bowling to celebrate having completed four years of memorizing hordes of facts for subsequent regurgitation on poorly designed tests and kissing up to teachers and having imaginary dogs eat our homework. I grumbled after unleashing yet another gutter ball, and my friends snickered at how terrible I was at this sport. "It's okay Shreya," one of them said. "Numbers aren't everything!" And the entire crowd devolved into a guffawing mess. All five of them. 

The whole point of my valedictorian address was that we define ourselves by our heights, weights, SAT scores, ACT scores, how many likes our selfies get on Facebook, and how many Facebook friends and Twitter followers we have. We count everything, from the pairs of shoes in our closets to the number of hours we spend at work to the number of days of school that must be endured before Christmas break rolls around.  

"I can't wait to be done," is the anthem heard around coffee shops, libraries and university lounges all across the country in the weeks leading up to Christmas vacation. We are told that our college years will be the best, most formative years of our lives, and that we should cherish every moment, stop and smell the roses, breathe deeply, think outside all of the boxes that society tries to cram our souls into. But alas, we're all paying interest here, so time is of utmost value.