MIT student blogger Emad T. '14

Lazy Day by Emad T. '14

Today is one of them

It’s Sunday, and the beginning of the second full week of June. Bleary-eyed, I wake up a good half hour before my alarm and maintain enough consciousness to turn it off, knowing that I won’t need it after getting up so early. I turn a little bit in my bed before…contemplating going back to sleep. (I nearly slept again after that, but hey, it was also 1 in the afternoon.)

You might have thought that, as an MIT student, I could find plenty of things to keep me occupied today, and all of these urgent reasons to get started with them. Sure, I could do stuff, but today I don’t feel like doing anything. I just wanna lay in my bed.

Yes, I’m practically living the Bruno Mars life right now, only I’m working toward a college degree (whenever I’m not lazy) instead of making millions of dollars by already having musical talent.


Oh look, an embedded music video!
I had many, many, many lazy days as a rising freshman about to enter college. I even gave them names out of affection: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. The only reason Saturday and Sunday weren’t included was because I worked a combined 15 hours each weekend. The only exception I make to unbridled laziness is making enough money to make me happy.

But hey, don’t get me wrong – you can do a lot of other things in the summer before you matriculate to MIT, like…

    • Take an actual vacation, be it out of state or somewhere else that’s in or out of town.

 

    • Head to the beach.

 

    • Get tan! (Or get a sunburn, whatever happens to apply to you.)

 

    • Catch up with your friends and just hang out.

 

    • Eat some ice cream. If you can, take on the Vermonster.

 

    • Watch a dozen or so movies. Hint: they re-releasing the Lord of the Rings movies.

 

    • Eat Chipotle (instead of Anna’s) (on the daily, if at all possible).

 

    • Play Frisbee! (And avoid Frisbee-related injuries).

 

    • Hit up some graduation parties and enjoy time with your fellow graduates.

 

    • Jam out with some musical friends.

 

    • Relax in a Jacuzzi and pretend to be incredibly rich (or, alternatively, be incredibly rich, if that describes you).

 

    • Go swimming! (Or pretend that you know how, if you were me last summer).

 

    • Play manhunt in the dead of night in an area of your neighborhood filled with trees.

 

    • Subsequently wonder how it is that you never managed to get lost in the dark.

 

    • Credit your innate sense of direction before realizing that you opened up Google Maps on your cell phone.

 

    • Sleep in late…

 

    • …for more than 10 hours…

 

    • …or for more than 12.

 

Yep, no need to do anything serious.

I did a bunch of these things in the summer before matriculating (especially the sleeping part!), and it was one of the better decisions that I made. I figured I had already worked hard in the last four years, so why should I put in more time to do more crazy things? To put it another way: what was three months of not doing anything going to do to my admission to MIT?

Turns out the answer to that last question sounded pretty good to me: three months of nothing wasn’t going to change things in the slightest. You might as well just play it by ear and do whatever you like for a while.

So, to the incoming freshmen: enjoy your downtime. If you’ve already managed to book yourself silly with commitments, well, whoops. If not, then just kick back and relax! You deserved it.

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