By KYLE JOSEPH
[email protected]

Break could not have come soon enough last semester. I had been pretty dedicated and dealt with a lot of class-related nonsense and finally broke free of that hell at the end of December.

I was proud of myself for keeping my nose to the grindstone despite a lot of stress toward the end, and some time to myself was exactly what was needed. No setting my alarm, no Blackboard notifications, nothing.

After three weeks of watching what seemed like two to three movies a day, finishing off an enormous surplus of Christmas cookies and trying to fight off bedsores, I had realized what I wanted to do with my life: Not work. Coming back from break wasn’t exactly on my mind and I wasn’t in any rush to do so.

Unfortunately, not working isn’t going to pay off student loans, so that dream was going to have to be put back on the shelf for another 45 years or so. I made the 2 1/2 hour drive back to school with plans to pick up where I left off.

That didn’t happen. And now I’m in a funk.

Maybe missing my first class of the semester set the precedent for the rest of the spring. In my defense, it was a scheduling mix-up and I hadn’t even been registered for the class, but apparently not everyone else saw it that way and was sympathetic. Surprisingly, this wasn’t enough to wake me out of my winter vacation daze, and the funk continued.

There have been plenty of insignificant things that have snuck their way up to the top of my to-do list since break that shouldn’t have been there. My phone is without a doubt the worst distraction.

Probably a good 40 percent of me wants to get one of those construction worker flip phones that you could throw into a wood chipper and still make a call on. I definitely wouldn’t be as tempted to check it.

Everyone says getting started is the hardest part, which is mostly true, but to me, getting out of bed usually counts as “getting started.” I always say to myself that I’ll catch up on work on the weekend so I don’t have to have too much weighing on my mind.

Then I sit down and drop my notebooks on the table and think, “Well, I’ve made it this far, so it wouldn’t hurt to check Snapchat to see what everyone’s doing before getting to work.” Since it’s Saturday morning, I’ll see that everyone is either enjoying breakfast, some early-morning exercise or that they were still up at 4:30 a.m.

So then I’ll let out a sigh. A really long Saturday-morning-and-I’m-doing-differential-equations 12-second sigh. I know, world’s saddest song on the world’s smallest violin.

I deserve that. Don’t feel bad for me. I did this to myself after all by not doing it when I should have. But there’s always something else a thousand times more interesting than whatever homework I pushed off and have to do on a Saturday.

“Husky puppy sounds like Chewbacca??”

“Will it Blend??”

Twenty minutes later and I’m still sitting at the table with a pile of closed books in front of me. I even stopped writing this column so I could read an article about Justin Bieber taking up a handicapped-accessible parking space during his recent lunch outing at Wendy’s. Why did I do that?

Don’t be like me. Yes, it will probably blend. Now get out of your winter break funk.