I went to India this summer for vacation. At least, it was supposed to be. Instead, it did not turn out that I had a vacation. DUDE! It’s called V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N! Time to chill! But, sadly enough, the world and the people who run it in general don’t agree with me. I ended up doing my bio summer reading, my English summer reading, my history summer reading and a good portion of my cousin’s homework. But that’s how life is these days. Work, work, and work. You adults say that we are just chillin’ out, having fun. But, for God’s sake, have you seen the stuff we do? My schedule this week is, for example:

5 a.m. Get up to finish homework that I haven’t quite gotten around to. Then, I get ready for school.
7:15 a.m. Run out, attempting to catch the bus.
7:45 p.m. School starts. Ugh ! What a nightmare. Not only do I have to learn all the stuff that those dudes (teachers) lecture about; I have to balance a social life with it. People skills. No life later on without it; you gotta make these connections early on. I mean, who knows who’ll be the next Bill Gates? Nepotism works, and why not establish that warm relationship that’ll help you secure that good job in high school? No offense to the people that do it on their merit, but a boost does help.
2:25 p.m. You’d think that after school would get out I could chill, right? No such luck. Chances are I’ll have to stay to do some project, research some material, have practice for some activity, participate in any one of the various clubs I’m involved in or do some more catching up on my (almost non-existent) social life.
5:00 p.m. I start my homework, going with the stuff that’s due the next day and then going to the long-term projects which I won’t ever have time for and therefore will procrastinate till the day before it’s due and then pull an all-nighter. I get easily distracted, especially when doing homework. My attention span while doing homework is that of a paramecium; staring at linoleum could hold my attention longer.

6:00 p.m. Dinner. Thank God for food. I get to relax and chill with my family for a half-hour before I run away to complete my work.
6:30 – 11:30 p.m. “Dude, It’s called Homework!” (Apologies to a dear friend of mine for stealing her line.) I used to sit on my laptop and work away while occasionally talking to my friends via instant messenger, but then my parents decided that I spend too much time on it and therefore I must get rid of it in order to keep myself from getting distracted. My only question is- Will that really work? Life today has become full of distractions, and instant messenger is only one of them. I rarely watch TV, but unlike many children today, I’m a proud bookworm. I read. And read. And read. And read some more. The weirdest thing is, I read decent books too. Like classics and established authors and enjoy them as well. Ok, so I may not be the greatest fan of Victorian novels, but there’s still a lot of stuff I enjoy. Anyway, what I was trying to say before I went off on this tangent is that no matter what you do, there’s always going to be some form of distraction out there, and unless you’re a really focused person, (I’m not) you’re not going to be able to get your work done as efficiently as possible. This space of about five hours is also when I play my violin, practice dance, and do any work that my mom wants me to do.
11:30 p.m. I go to bed, usually whining about how tired I am.

Ok, so perhaps I don’t have as much work as I whine about having, but I still do go to school for about seven hours a day and get about five hours of homework a night. Without procrastinating, it’s still twelve hours of my waking day and, personally, I think that it is quite a lot of time for a fourteen-year-old girl to be exercising her mind. Of course, people have always had to work in order to be able to survive. We’ve gone from being nomadic hunter-gatherers to farmers to…well…whatever it is we are now. And in all of these stages, people have had to work very hard in order to be able to live their lives. Of course, survival at the present time is very different from the meaning of survival in the days of early humans; today’s people of our society usually have their basic needs taken care of, and can look for things that are at higher elevations of Abraham Maslow’s pyramid. And for this reason, isn’t a person justified in wanting to have a little fun, for the exact reason that they are capable of doing so? It is this time of my life that I will be able to have the most fun, the fifteen or so years from now. After that I will have a job and, most likely, a family and have to work hard in order to have a stable life. And, (this is my personal opinion) after I am finally retired, it is highly unlikely that I will be able to have the kind of fun that I could have had in youth, though there are many kinds of entertainment. Oh well. My random pseudo-philosophical ramblings are over and you can now read whatever else you want. As for me, I must run, homework calls.

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