The Frustrated Finalist: Bored Is For Boring People

After being wrestled to the ground by the St. Edmund Hall peer support team after my last misanthropic column (they were apparently terrified that their nemesis, Fifth Week Blues, had spread its insidious grip into fourth week) I thought it was time I helped you all to lighten up.

“Waa waa waa, my finals are stressful and the library’s boring and I hate life.”

Hands up if you’ve heard that this term.

The first step to avoid becoming one of these ‘people’ is to take a humanities degree. Want to get a 2.1? Want time to indulge in other activities? Don’t mind getting abuse from pasty-faced scientists who live life in the lab? Yes, my friend, the humanities student really is living the dream.

Marxian class relations can be found everywhere if you look hard enough

Deep into Trinity Term this might be a touch impractical, so let’s think of some other ways to mix it up a bit.

One of my revelations has been a little thing I like to call ‘Al Fresco Revision’. The Union is a cracking place to start; it combines both sun and booze whilst incorporating whatever desire remains to try and get the most out of your membership fee. Really though you just need to go and read outdoors, it’s like being in the library but you might even get a tan (or rained on).

Better to have a bad day in the Sun than a good day in the library

Alternatively, if indulging in gin and cigarettes isn’t what your tutor recommended and it’s too late to get a new one then kick back with some schadenfreude. Deep down we all know that the best way to make your life seem good is to make somebody else’s worse.

Irritating people who are (results pending) about to become Big City Lawyers combines humanity’s most visceral desire to irritate the hell out of each other with a nice little twist of irony and you don’t even have to move.

In this instance I’ve chosen to pull Ian’s headphone out of his laptop so Uptown Girl (nearly) blares through the library.

It’s not big and it’s not particularly clever but it should be enough fun to keep you going until lunch.

The list of library pranks is so long it practically needs its own library although it’s probably wise to issue a brief warning here: do this for more than a day and you really won’t have many friends left. Having said that, you’re probably never going to see them again anyway and do you really want the sort of friend who can’t write for three hours without going on and on and on and on about it for weeks on end?

Go on, treat yourself to a cheeky session on somebody else’s facebook, you’ve earned it and they probably deserve it.

It’s a classic for a reason