This piece also appeared in Grapeshot Volume 13, Issue 3: Freudian Slip (see page 38), with some cool formatting.

Fourth Year Blues

Lachlan Marnoch, 2018 - 2021

Schedule: Fourth Year, Semester 2

Week 0

Monday

This is it, this is your last semester. Make it a good one. Make the most of every single chance, study hard, have fun while doing it.

Week 1

Monday

Start the semester full of enthusiasm, with study plans, with daily exercise, with a reasonable sleep schedule. Remind yourself: set out as you mean to go on.

Friday

Love your classes. You can’t wait to learn more.

Week 2

Thursday

Take a shortcut through a butcher bird’s territory on the way to uni, and don’t notice the clack of its beak. Get swooped.

Friday

Ask your friends, the ones who mostly graduated last year, if they want to hang out. Hear that they’re too busy. Wonder if you’re being too clingy.

Saturday

Recognise the same old cycle repeating itself again, the same cycle that’s been turning since you moved primary schools in year 2: make friends, fall out of touch, lose friends. Try again.
Wonder what’s wrong with you.

Week 3

Monday

Produce a spreadsheet of your grades for the semester to calculate a running mark. Fiddle with the pending assignment marks to determine the minimum required for a distinction. Reason that Excel is an important workplace skill and that this is not a waste of time. Suppress the anxiety of looming assignments.

Week 4

Tuesday

Wonder if it was a mistake to break up with Rhea, and if it was your last chance at love.

Week 5

Monday

Census date. Last chance to drop a unit without financial penalty.
Make a second spreadsheet, this one for your entire university career. You need an above-distinction average to get into Masters. You think you can do it, but you want to make sure.

Tuesday

Go for a swim at the gym. The water is warm, warmer than the air. They must heat it up during winter to compensate.
Feel great afterwards. Be more productive than usual as a result. Resolve to swim a kilometre every day.

Wednesday

Stay in bed and scroll through Twitter instead of swimming.

Week 6

Monday

Slip back into old habits. Stay up too late. Procrastinate.

Saturday

Trudge home at midnight from your job at Grill’d, knees black with grit and face wet with grease, wishing for the millionth time that you hadn’t needed to work fifteen hours a week all through uni. Think wistfully about what you could have done with all that extra time, wonder how much better your marks could have been, how much more writing you could have done. Conclude that you would have wasted it.

Week 7

Thursday

Spend three hours on hold with Centrelink.

Friday

The break starts tomorrow. You’re going to have so much time to finish all those assignments and study for your mid-sems. You can’t wait.

Mid-semester break

Friday

Have your 23rd birthday. Surprise yourself with the realisation that another year has passed. The passage of time is the most predictable thing possible, and yet somehow it shocks you the most.
Note that what used to be a flood of “Happy birthday”s on Facebook has shrunk to a withered trickle.

Saturday

Last date to drop classes without academic penalty. Consider dropping your quantum physics unit, the one you thought would be awesome thought experiments and strange paradoxes but is actually just complicated linear algebra that you can barely follow. Decide to stick with it; you’ll have to stay an extra semester otherwise.

Sunday

Stay up late doing assignments due tomorrow even though you had two whole weeks to get ahead of them.

Week 8

Monday

Get swooped by that butcher bird again on the way home, only this time it makes contact with your forehead. Name it Boris.

Tuesday

Feel the highest hopes for humanity. Things are bad, but we’ll work it out. It’s what we do.

Week 9

Monday

Wonder why people can’t recognise that everyone is human; that there are seven billion dramas playing out at all times, seven billion lives, all full of love and loss and ambition and will to live.

Tuesday

Detest humanity. There’s no hope for any of us.

Thursday

Read a narrative told as a series of tweets. Think that you’ll never be as pithy or as clever.

Friday

Remind yourself that you need to save money.

Week 10

Monday

The Thai kiosk in the uni food court is shutting down because there’s no room for it in the new building. Feel sad. It’s your favourite food here, and the man who serves you is always so friendly. It’s very popular, there’s always a queue. Wonder how they didn’t make the cut. Hope that the staff land on their feet.

Tuesday

Want desperately to talk to someone about everything you’re going through, the teeming emotions at constant war inside.

Wednesday

Want to be alone.

Thursday

Wonder if you’ll ever fall in love again.

Friday

You don’t deserve to be loved.

Saturday

Try to express everything you feel in writing, but have the words come out clumsy. Think: you’re not expressing anything new, you’re not expressing it in a new way. Maybe if you practiced more, you could get there, but it’s so much easier to put on Stranger Things and zone out.

Week 11

Monday

You’re not smart enough.

Tuesday

You are smart enough, just not motivated enough. You can do it, you just have to push a bit harder.

Wednesday

Get drunk. Go to a party. Make a fool of yourself.

Friday

Run into one of those friends you made back in your first semester, the ones you were convinced would be your mates all through uni but who you barely saw after first year. Smile through a quick chat, then go on your separate ways. Wonder if you’ll ever see them again.

Saturday

You’ve always wanted to be a scientist. You’ve always wanted to be an author. What if you can’t do either? What if you end up in a tedious job that you hate, all that potential you once felt swelling inside you wasted away. You want to do more than that. You want to contribute something.

Sunday

Procrastinate literally all day.

Week 12

Monday

There are millions of writers just like you, hundreds of thousands of whom are better, want it more, are willing to work harder. The same goes for astrophysicists. What’s the point?

Tuesday

Feel like you should have done more, tried more, seized every opportunity. You’re near the end now, and have you grown, have you changed? It doesn’t feel like it. Everything you’ve ever learned has faded as though it leaked out your ears.

Wednesday

Leave your COMP lecture with a sad weight in your chest and behind your eyes. Find that empty theatre where you had that first Physics lecture, when the future seemed so bright - where you were filled with nerves and optimism and there were new relationships and new classes and you felt like you could learn anything if you tried. It seemed like you would be at uni forever, four years is such a long time, and you couldn’t think of anything you’d love more than to extend this novel challenge ad infinitum. But second year comes right after first year, then third comes right after second, followed promptly by fourth; and somehow, in that time, four years have slipped by, and you can’t think of one thing you’ve really achieved. Sit in the back row to the left, like you did with your new friends four years ago, and cry.

Thursday

Try to imagine life after university. Fail.
Begin the paperwork to apply for Masters.

Friday

Remember the expression, but not where you heard it: ‘bite off more than you can chew, and chew like fuck’. You bit off more than you could chew, but your jaw muscles have worn out.

Week 13

Monday

Your exams are coming. Spend more time planning your study schedule than actually studying.

Wednesday

Think that you want to be single forever.

Thursday

Long to be with someone who understands you.

Friday

Watch ten hours of Bojack Horseman instead of doing your final assignment.

Sunday

Finish your final assignment at 4am in a caffeinated haze.

Week 14

Wednesday

Study some more. Get some done, but not enough.
Open your maths notes to Week 8, and find nothing but an unintelligible scribble, accompanied by the caption ‘planets are people too.’ Become very annoyed at your past self.

Week 15

Monday

Complete the final exam of your degree. That’s it, it’s over, it’s done.
Expect to feel proud and accomplished at what you’ve achieved. Instead, feel strangely hollow. Feel like you should be partying; fail to think of anyone to party with. Go home and play games instead.

Tuesday

Sit at your desk. Stare out your window at the path below. Worry that you’re not going to find your way, that you’re going to end up lost and sad and alone.
A breath of air blows in the open window, cooling your cheeks. For a moment, it all seems like it might be okay.