Julian started freaking out. It was 8:19 pm, and he had a group paper to finish by midnight. 2,000 words on a current political issue was his contribution to the group, and it was the last day of classes, so people were vomiting left, right, and directly behind him. Julian knew it was partially his fault. He had all day to finish the assignment, and there he sat, pulling his hair and clawing at his eyes and cheeks. He put into a fair amount of thought into it during the day, though! He read a newspaper that morning to get ideas, attempted to engage in some political discourse with a guy on the bus – he ended up being asleep, and homeless. He spent the rest of the day trying to keep other things off his mind – his girlfriend was getting clingy, his parents weren’t talking to him, and he got two failing papers back.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t finish this. I know I made a promise to all of you a couple weeks ago that I would finish this, but I just can’t. People are getting drunk all around me, having a good time, and I want to be one of them badly. Unfortunately, even if I don’t complete these 2,000 words, I still won’t have the chance to get drunk with them. I also made a promise to the big men in suits that I would be sober tonight, and ‘facilitate community formation’. People are disappointed, I’m disappointed; the world is a big disappointment right now. Boo. Hoo.” Julian decided to quit. The decision relieved Julian, but it also upset him a little bit. He was a man of values, and quitting like this made him feel like a failure…
“There must be some way around this. I know I can have my cake and eat it too!” Julian became more determined. He knew that, even if it wasn’t his best work, he would get this assignment done, it would meet all the requirements, and his group mates wouldn’t completely hate him. He sat down, and chose a newspaper. He opened it to a random page, closed his eyes, and pointed at an article. He opened his eyes. His finger had landed on an article about koalas escaping from the Calgary Zoo. After checking to see if anyone was watching, Julian slid his finger down the page to an article about deforestation, and the conflict individual lumberjacks faced.
“We really do appreciate the nature we’re abusing. It’s a tough mental dilemma, and it’s caused me and my friends a great deal of stress.” The lumberjack sounded surprisingly intelligent to Julian, and he had to fight the stereotypes he held about lumberjack folk to accept such a vernacular.
“Even the god damned lumberjacks can think of something to talk about!” Julian didn’t feel particularly passionate about the environment, or mental dilemmas faced by union workers doing work counter to their personal environmental beliefs. However, it was 8:45, and Julian was not a fast writer. He knew he had to make a decision quickly, so he ripped out the page from the remainder of his newspaper, grabbed a pair of yellow, lefty scissors with fingo-grips attached for increased aesthetics and ergonomics. He brought his hand over to the newspaper, and cut the article out as delicately as his frantic left hand would allow. Once the 300-word article was freed from its neighbour articles that were constraining it, Julian slapped the article next to his mouse pad. He discarded the rest of the paper, letting it fall with an undignified flump next to the legs of his chair just as his roommate, Allan, flumped onto his bed with a girl Julian had met once at a party. She seemed nice enough, but dumb as a post, and willing to go down on anything that bought her a drink and called her pretty. Allan had apparently done both of those, and as Julian let out a groan of distaste, the girl let out a different kind of groan. Julian groaned in response to that groin, and Allan offered a groan of his own to add to the escalating groans in the room. Rather than raising the volume even more, Julian grabbed a pair of headphones from Allan’s desk.
Julian started pumping R&B tunes into his ears, and started thinking about his history with R&B. “Older rap and R&B was so much more substantial in terms of lyrics. Now it’s just about the production value and the melodies thrown in. Or is it the other way around? I really should listen to more black music. I don’t think I’m too much of a white boy, but I wish I could relate with ethnic minorities more.” Julian shook his head to clear his mind and start thinking about environmentalism. He saw the article sitting neatly next to his mouse pad, and wished he could make friends with it. He was starting to sympathize more with the lumberjacks.
“If they can do something that directly goes against their personal beliefs to pay their bills, then I have to be able to write this paper on a topic I don’t care about for the sake of my group. It’s not just my grade at stake here; I need to-“ Julian was cut off from his increasingly motivated train of thought by a yelp from the petite form buried into his roommate’s mattress.
“I’m sorry, am I bothering you?” Julian called, not as loudly as he wanted, but loud enough to get his message across.
“Dude, seriously? You can’t just shut up and be happy for me? I haven’t been laid in a long time.” Allan then tried to negotiate a time schedule with Julian, at which point the girl interrupted, quite rudely:
“Excuse me? Are we going to finish?” Both roommates looked at the girl, looked at each other, and carried on with their conversation.
“If you want, the girls’ bathroom is upstairs. I would take a shower to wash off the gonorrhea before it takes hold, but that’s just me.” Julian was tired of trying to schedule 20-minute blocks of remaining time, and figured he wouldn’t have to run into the girl again. It was 9:18, and Julian was no closer to finishing his assignment than he was almost an hour ago.
“Uhh…” Allan was not quick to respond to comments like that, and Julian promised that he would only exploit this when he really needed to. This was one of those times. The girl screamed in terror, pushed Allan off of her, and grabbed her outfit as she left the room. Julian almost chased after her to let her know she was still quite naked, but as she left, he noticed she was already wearing her underwear.
“Really,” Julian didn’t know whether to be impressed to disgusted, “you couldn’t even wait for her to take off her bra and panties.” Before Allan responded, Julian had returned to his music. Allan’s headphones blocked outside noise marvelously, and Julian felt better about things. He got through a full reading of the article, and decided that he wanted to take a stance; he sided with the lumberjacks, and began figuring out his argument for the mental stress their work places on them. Employers had become too powerful, and were clearly abusing their powers. Then again, Julian felt it would be interesting to play the Devil’s advocate and see what the employers had to say about this mental lumberjack conflict. So, as Allan got dressed and left to find another evening companion, Julian started researching union conflicts between lumberjacks and lumber company CEOs. This search quickly led him to conflicts between unions and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, Israelis and Palestinians, Conservative and Liberals, and Garfield and Foxtrot comic fanatics. His digital clock caught his eye as it changed numbers, and seeing the :49 turn to a :50 scared Julian almost as much as when he realized that in ten minutes, the 9: would become a 10:.
Frantic yet again, Julian needed a breather. He had his position – he was going to side with the lumberjacks after all; they made the most compelling argument – and he was ready to start writing. Julian walked into the hall, and was temporarily blinded by the light. “How dark do I keep my room?” Julian mumbled, and staggered to the bathroom. The combination of his arm lazily shielding his eyes from the light and his stumbling speech alerted Julian’s floor mates to his unusual presence. Without last-minute projects of their own, the fellow gentlemen assumed Julian was also enjoying his night, and dragged him into their room to continue the festivities. Julian fought back, trying to explain that he wasn’t drunk, and didn’t care to be for another two hours, and managed to escape the room with a drink in his hand, and a girls’ phone number on the other.
“Dude, art is the sex of the imagination!” A cry shot out in Julian’s direction from the end of the hall, and Julian’s face fell even further. One of his acquaintances from a party a few weeks ago entered the hallway with a big, fat, rolled tube of temptation, and Julian thought for a moment.
“Well, some of my best inspiration comes when I’m relaxed…” Then Julian remembered that he was writing a research paper, not a stoned poem, and turned on his heel, opting for the bathroom on the other end of the hallway. He splashed some cold water on his face, and then had a brief fantasy in which he reenacted the scene from Liar, Liar where Jim Carrey beats himself up in the bathroom. He caught his hands centimetres away from his face, coated in liquid soap, and decided against the fantasy. The water felt hotter than usual as Julian washed the soap off, and he walked back to his room with much less interruption than the walk out.
Allan had returned during Julian’s hallway and bathroom escapade, but rather than resuming his former activity with a new body, he decided to finish the job solo. Without a second glance or a hello, Julian strode past Allan, who instantly withdrew under his covers. Julian didn’t have the time to freak out over seeing his roommate in flagrante desingle, and sat down at the computer. He put his new best friends on – the headphones – but kept the music off. Rather than filling his head with a different distraction, Julian decided to block everything out. It was 10:17, and whether or not he finished, Julian wanted to make a valiant effort. He created a title page with a catchy title: “Cognitive disarmament and ethical deforestation: an examination of the controversy lumberjacks feel on an individual level, and with their capitalistically piggish employers.” It was a mouthful and a half, but Julian was proud he could write a sentence that long that was also grammatically correct. If nothing else, his professor would find the piece memorable for its title. Next, he cited all his sources, and compiled a reference section. This part was especially difficult, as Julian only had two sources, and was expected to draw from five to eight. So, he did something he would recommend no student ever do, and turned each of his sources into three parts.
“This won’t get me kicked out of school. This won’t get me kicked out of school. This won’t get me kicked out of school…” Julian repeated his mantra, praying it would come true.
“Dude, usually when someone says something that desperately, they end up getting kicked out of school.” Allan piped in unhelpfully, lifting up an ear of the headphones, and letting it snap back down on Julian’s temple. The cushioned earpiece didn’t hurt, but Julian shot a glare in protest anyway, and shoved Allan away. It was 10:28, and Julian knew that if he didn’t have at least an opening paragraph complete by 10:45, there was no finishing. He stared at the document on his screen, bookended neatly with a title page and references, pages numbered, margins set, and font chosen, and sobbed silently as his fingers started pushing keys.
Word count: 2,029
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