Thanksgiving break is over. Now the fun begins.

After spending the last nine days doing nothing of any academic value whatsoever, it’s hard to fathom the fact that we are just 14 days away from finals week.

This schedule is nothing new. Thanksgiving break. Back in class. Dead week. And bam, finals week.

It gets kind of tense from here on out. Thanksgiving break was a much-needed pause in the semester. But whether it relieves any stress from our lives is open to debate.

One thing about college life is that it keeps you pretty busy. You don’t get much time to ponder the finer details of life in the middle of a stressful semester. But every fall, near the end of the semester, we break stride for nine days.

After riding a tidal wave of assignments and stressful job deadlines this fall, all of the sudden last week I found myself washed ashore. There I was at home with my family. No classes. No job. No stress.

Although I had finally found the time I needed to relax, I was feeling a slightly different emotion — boredom. I wasn’t just bored, I was bored on a grand scale. Take away the turkey and all the other good holiday food. Remove the annoying relatives. Get rid of the tired Sega Genesis games. And what was left of my holiday at home? Not very much.

Visiting with the parents was nice. And finding out that my 15-year-old brother is now two inches taller than me was interesting. But all this took about two hours out of my week off. So I quickly began to make a mental note of good hometown vacation activities, which past experience has taught me is a huge exercise in futility.

Pleasantville, Iowa, is not the hub of very much entertaining activity. In fact, it’s not the hub of any activity. So after re-evaluating my options for fun, I came up with nothing but bad memories from high school.

About that time was when the brutal self evaluation set in.

With nothing to do and nowhere to go, I started meditating on my life. First, I thought about my past. Like most people, I have plenty of demons, skeletons and mistakes to monopolize my time there. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered how I had made it to this point in my life.

Believe it or not, the road from Pleasantville to Ames is a lot longer than it may appear. With all the times I stumbled along that road, I found it amazing and frightening that I was still here and not jobless and friendless in Pleasantville. My self doubt was growing on a geometric scale.

And with my self doubts in hand, I started thinking about that other all-encompassing aspect of my life — the future. And with that came the usual insecurities. When will I graduate? Will I find a job? How will I pay my bills?

I was becoming a nervous wreck. With too much time on my hands to think about life’s more metaphysical side, I found little reassurance and even less relaxation.

By Saturday morning, I couldn’t take it any longer. I had almost convinced myself that if I stayed home for one more hour I would become permanently stuck there to drown in my miserable thoughts.

So, facing bewildering looks from my parents, I left. To my pleasant surprise, it felt good to be back in Ames. Another scary thought crept into my mind — it was kind of like coming home.

And now classes have resumed, and the Daily is publishing again, and I am too busy to worry about life’s abstract little quirks.

The only things on my mind are deadlines and finals. But it’s good to be back.

After all, we need a break from those stressful vacations from time to time. Nothing like a good three weeks of college to take care of that.

---

Troy McCullough is a senior in journalism mass communication from Pleasantville. He is editor in chief of the Daily.