A Dismal Preoccupation

I have found that it is possible to be wrapped up in the ideological closure of academia in a thoroughly unproductive manner. "Break will be over before you know it!" is a saying that has worn itself into a miserable clique. This fall break, I wanted to best the clique. I slapped it with my glove challenged it to a duel. Unfortunately, I lost. I am K.O., out of the ring, upside-down in a dumpster three blocks away covered in rotting fruit and fermenting in the stench of my own failure. Instead of getting all my homework and studying done and having time to relax, I worried my time away and consequently didn't accomplish the super-human "To-Do" list that is presently shut away in the depths of my student planner, lest the glaring pages mock me into insanity.

I need a vacation. How many students say that on their last day of break? I need a long, tropical vacation where I won't have assignments or projects to think about--where I can crack open a coconut and spend three hours figuring out how to turn it into an awesome bra. I need to travel to Costa Rica and learn belly dancing from the native women.

But most of all, I need to float on a raft constructed from bamboo shoots and balsa wood in the middle of the ocean on a warm, breezy summer night, where I can lie on my back and connect the diamond constellations in the velvet sky, while the silver peal of the moon pours its shining liquid light upon my raft and stirs ghostly ripples in the water around me. Then, like the monks in the Middle Ages, I can contemplate the harmony of the celestial orbs and the way I spontaneously add to the music...Me--a mere human, ontologically wounded and flawed by nature, who is more insignificant to the material world than the poems of Emerson. In nature, maybe I can be on par with genius...
What good are dreams and ambitions if the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak?