Last updated on February 8, 2016
By Blake Bouza, Assistant Editor
It’s February. Your speech teacher informs you that you have a group project due at the beginning of April, aka an eternity away, aka put it off for the last week.
In the meantime, you have the rest of the work to do in that class and your four other classes. Commitments you made months ago suddenly rear their ugly head.
By the way, your aunt just got diagnosed with breast cancer, your dog just died, and you just broke up with your girlfriend. By the way, be sure to eat right and exercise to maintain healthy weight but all you want to do is drown yourself in melted peanut butter and nacho cheese. By the way, you’ve gotta be sure to show up for your part time job and keep up with other schoolwork of course.
BY THE WAY. That GROUP PROJECT is due NEXT WEEK. So you and your group mates get together after class to talk about delegating what research to do. And your group mates, two people so unmotivated you’re certain they can halt the earth’s rotation with their collective negative force of backward movement, come up with – in a project that is supposed to denote the cultural differences between two diverse cultures – creating a Minecraft civilization showing as much.
Your features fall and you ask, doubtfully, “Well, how long would that take?” As if you’re actually entertaining this absolutely insane idea that you want no part of because A) the project must be delivered in PowerPoint format and B) what the hell is Minecraft, but you must be polite because dear God, what are you if not polite.
Your group mate looks at you pointedly with his hawkish features and shrugs, muttering, “Could take me a couple of months.” And you ask him to please repeat himself and he returns with, “It would take me a couple of months to do that.”
And suddenly the lights are flickering – but no, they aren’t, you are just blinking so quickly because your brain has frantically instructed your eyelids to try and make the rest of your body take flight and escape.
“But the project is due next Thursday,” you tell your group mate in a profound state of shock, and a little bit of awe.
And your group mate shrugs and goes back to looking at his phone, satisfied in the knowledge that he has helped the group in all ways in which he is capable and it is up to the rest of us to come up with something.
You nearly get whiplash with how quickly your head swivels on your neck as you meet your other group mate’s eye, desperate for a mirror that will reflect your thoughts on that idea. But your other group mate, who looks vaguely like a lion with his mane of red hair and red whiskers, widens his eyes at you and tells you, “That sounds like a good idea.”
And suddenly you find yourself trapped before the Lion as the Hawk circles overhead, and you are nothing more than a meerkat trying to find his hole to crawl into.
“We could all log onto a server,” the Hawk begins, brightening as his idea is suddenly taken up and you’re fractionally in the minority of those who oppose it.
“The project has to be on PowerPoint,” you reply firmly before the Lion and Hawk can pounce on you and drag your from your hole into some twisted Mexican-esque Minecraft civilization.
“We can take screencaps,” the Hawk squawks.
“Maybe if we had thought of this at the beginning of the semester,” you reason with him, because your other responsibilities are tapping you on the shoulder reminding you that you have no time to play computer games for your final project.
While an assignment that is due three months from now can seem like an eternity away, please never forget that life will happily help you fill that waiting period. Nibble at the problem.
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