Wants Cookies
Justine Alexis Nierras
Only half the semester is over, and everyone is drained of blood and sweat in my department. We’d very much like to sleep through the week ahead, but that won’t get us anything other than a bunch of crappy midterm exam scores, so I guess it’s best to toil on. My analytic thinking seems to be on hiatus, so today must be a Saturday – the day for a cup of coffee and some relaxing music. Tomorrow will be a totally different scenario, but I prefer not to focus on that now. Today, we have a breather from all the stress we face at school, and it’s every higherlevel PT student’s obligation to cherish this once-in-a-blue-moon breather. It doesn’t matter if we don’t know what to do during our free time anymore; what matters is that we are given free time, and we are thankful for that. Breathers are here one moment, and gone the next. These are the stress-less days of our lives that never really end up in our long-term memory. I mean, I salute people who tell me “Hey, I remember the time when we weren’t doing anything or thinking about anything at all.” Not exciting news at all, true, yet these are what keep us sane. Not that we’re not all insane in one way or another, but you get the picture.
These small breaks, no matter how short they are, are always welcome to people with busy schedules. I can nod (with feelings) to anyone who can offer me a short rest from every academic reminder or exam alarm. I am not complaining though, no. In fact I am thankful that I am encouraged to read (and learn) a lot, this is what I came to Silliman for after all. But I also am thankful for static in the schedule (yes, even for just a day), because they are scarce, and when I take in that breath, it’s nothing more than a memory. It’s a memory of a break that once was, and when I open my books, I would always wish to have had more of those breathers, because the last one was most likely spent on my bed, with me snoozing away to prepare for a long night of reading. This is how I choose to spend most of my breathers, and I don’t think I’m the only one in the department who does this, because honestly, sometimes we don’t really know where to go during breaks. It’s a typical scenario of “Hala wala tay klase? Asa ta muadto?”, and everyone else shrugs so it’s either we end up in a café to read for the next exam, eat late breakfast/lunch, or simply retreat into our homes to bond with our beds while we can. No matter how we choose to spend these small cracks of time, the fact that we are given them keeps us glued to ourselves somehow, and that’s a good thing.
