Oh crap! You just woke up to the screaming of your alarm clock and it’s late. Really late. You shoot out of bed slam the alarm clock into “shut-the-hell-up” mode and devise your plan to make it to your early morning class in ten minutes.

Well, you’ve got the t-shirt you slept in on. That’s good. Just throw on a sweat shirt and some sweat pants. No socks. That takes time. No brushing your teeth. It takes too long plus you kill two birds with one stone. The fuzz on your teeth can provide a hearty breakfast of champions. Hey, if you can live on teeth fuzz alone, then my friend, you are a true champion.

Two minutes until class. That leaves you one minute to get to the commuter parking lot and another minute for the bus driver to do his job — that is get you to class and fast. I don’t care if there’s a red light, man, run it for the good of late Iowa State students everywhere.

Yes. You can admit it. You’re a habitually late person and today is not a new experience for you. It’s okay if you relate to early morning incidents like these. Join the club because I’m the president.

And the bad habits don’t just stop with my punctuality problems. It starts there and then becomes a vicious cycle of bad habits turning into other bad habits.

This is a problem plaguing our campus as we speak. Forget that Adam Gold doesn’t have the ability to run the stapler in the GSB office, let alone the GSB. Forget that you can’t register for any of the classes you need to get in to graduate. We’ve got a bigger problem on campus. It’s the problem of one bad habit leading to another.

I have a problem — being tardy and that’s become a bad habit. That bad habit leads me to have other problems and bad habits. Let me explain.

To continue our illustrious story, we left off on Cy-Ride’s wonderful bus service. You’re late to class. You’re stressed. The bus driver is going really, really slow so you start biting your nails.

Ah-ha! The cycle is beginning to rear its ugly head into your life. Before you know it, your nails are down to the nubs. There’s nothing left to scratch the itch you may get in the future. There’s nothing left but some sad-looking nails.

You finish your hard day of classes. To recuperate from the day, you take a seat on your sofa and switch channels with the trusty old remote. Of course, according to the article in the Daily on Wednesday, a study done by the National Center for Health Statistics is blaming the remote for Americans obesity problems.

So the bottom line is that the reason I was late is because I stayed up too late the night before and it’s all the fault of that pesky little invention — the remote control. I just stay on the couch and get fatter and lazier. In turn, it’s harder for me to get up in the morning. Therefore, I’m always late. And since I’m always late, I’m stressed out a lot. When I’m stressed, I bite my nails and it’s all the fault of the people at Sony who made my remote control.

So if I fail out of school, I can blame the maker of my remote control and so can you. Everybody else is doing it.

For example, the Black Student Alliance is getting their funding cut not because $5,000, half of the Senate’s budget for the semester, is too much to spend on non-Iowa State students, but because GSB senators are racist.

What I’m trying to say is the kind of thinking used in the “vicious cycle” anecdote about the remote control being responsible for all of my woes as a student is faulty. It’s faulty because it just moves the blame around and around, but never gets placed and if it does, it’s usually on the wrong place or person.

Sadly, it’s the kind of thinking most people use today to place blame and ultimately deal with their problems.

“I’m on welfare because I can’t get a job. I can’t get a job because I don’t have any education. I don’t have any education because I got pregnant when I was 16 and dropped out of school.” The words reel round and round.

That’s the same “vicious cycle” that plagues me everyday and it starts with my not being able to be anywhere on time. It’s probably my parents’ fault for not emphasizing that I show up on time. Right?

Or it must be that I was born with the late gene. No matter what I do, I’m going to be late because I was bred that way.

No. I don’t think so. It might be that I was late because I was too lazy to get out of bed. Or maybe I just didn’t hear the alarm. I got fat because I didn’t take the initiative to eat right or exercise. I have stubby nails because I bit them off.

Take responsibility. The theory of cycles is not the answer for everything. If something bad happens to you, if you have some bad habit, don’t blame it on something else, take direct action to solve the problem.

If you do think Adam Gold is out of control, run for a position in student government and make a difference. Write a letter to the editor.

Don’t sit idly by. And don’t forget to set your alarm clock. I’m going to try to be on time tomorrow. Are you?

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April Samp is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Eldora.