It's showtime

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Brad Wallace

The binge and purge method of studying that works so well for quizzes begins to show its downside, namely that almost no information actually finds a permanent home. The urge to leave school and follow Phish becomes nearly unendurable.

This time in the semester it gets so easy to focus on the immediate.

It's getting damn hard to see past the next few days, the next paper, and beyond that, the next semester. The whole point of this college thing starts to be lost, and a feeling of overwhelming dread envelops. Did I mention how badly I long to crawl into a battered VW bus and make tracks to San Francisco?

If you're like me, actual days and weeks have lost any meaning, other than what's due when, and how long exactly do I have left to get all this done?

Gone indeed are the fun Decembers of elementary school, when Christmastime meant cookies and making stocking stuffers in class. In college, December is anticipated in the same trembling manner of a global thermonuclear apocalypse.

So, it's showtime. Time to burn the candle at both ends, and in the middle for good measure. I've got to find those syllabi somewhere, and make sure I don't sleep through a final. Again.

Doubtlessly, cup after cup of coffee will be poured down our throats, until bleary-eyed zombies shuffling around in front of the library are all that remain of our once-proud student body. Nerves are going to be on edge, so that the slightest inconvenience will result in a bloody knife-fight in Sam's Place. Shouted profanity will mingle with jolly Christmas carols all over campus. Yes, it's a great time of year.

I have no real advice to make any of this easier, but here's a little something that has helped me avoid spontaneous crying fits during the last 24 hours.

Over the holiday, I found myself at the Grand Canyon, along with several thousand other folks, staring off into the distance of the remarkably large hole. If you haven't seen it yet, let me warn you: It's big. Huge. Grand, even.

I long to spew out poetic lines about the grandeur of the thing, about how countless eons have delicately carved the earth into a enormous billboard that says, "Mankind, you are nothing."

It certainly puts life in perspective, namely that my entire life, with all of the ups and downs, victories and defeats will amount to approximately jack squat compared to a hole several miles deep. Even the rise and fall of the Spice Girls pale compared to the deep geologic time of the Canyon.

An entire civilization, the Anasazi, prospered in the depths of that big hole, people falling in love, killing each other, and all the rest, without ever leaving the place. There was probably more than a handful of Anasazi youth stressing out over their Elk killing final at some point.

Now, there's nothing. Only a handful of ruins survive, to taunt anthropologists for an eternity to come. Nowhere are any academic transcripts.

It's a shallow comfort, I suppose, to realize that no matter how intense the moment is, ultimately our entire epoch will be just another thin red line in the rock strata in that Canyon, whether or not you make the 10-page minimum for your class.

Those finals aren't looking so bad, now.

Brad Wallace is a molecular and cellular biology senior. His column, Handful of Dust, appears every Tuesday and he can be reached via e-mail at Brad.Wallace@wildcat.arizona.edu.