By: Paige Riding, Humour Editor
When this pandemic started, I really didn’t go out and move around as much as I used to. With half the population deciding to take up running or biking for the first time in their lives during this ample opportunity to spread their little spitties everywhere (why did so many people do that? Imagine voluntarily running at all, not to mention now?), I didn’t love the thought of going out. Now here I am, eight months later, and I’m absolutely shredded. Want to know how I did it?
By sitting on my ass.
Desperately trying to get through a single sentence in my assigned article readings.
I should clarify; when I say shredded, I mean it. My eyes are destroyed from all this blue light I’m glaring at. Thanks to my professors opting for four times the amount of readings now that we’re online (makes sense to me), I can’t focus three feet in front of me. I don’t need to, though. All I need are the articles to keep me in tip-top shape.
The process is simple. I open yet another photo-only PDF, sigh as my warm-up because that means no hunting for the answers to this assignment, then prepare to get lost. Totally lost. Wholly lost. Why-the-shit-are-the-sentences-so-long-and-complex lost. Then the blood really gets pumping. Or boiling. Or both.
Nothing hits like a sentence with more commas than my grade 10 papers when I just discovered what FANBOYS are and absolutely ran with them. Like a relay, the sentences will continue trudging along, heading in one way and then the next, so utterly and wholly bewildering you will find yourself hunting for the end of the sentence in preparation, then losing your spot because you didn’t put your fingertip on the right word or you swore you would remember but then got lost somewhere on line 14 and had to blink your sore eyeballs, and—
You get it.
It’s a foolproof way to exhaust any motivation you had to do well in the course — possibly even your life! The jargon forces you to leave the PDF to look up various definitions, adding a bit of spice in the mix. By the end of it, you’ll reach your fullest form. Having 23 articles to get through may be a temporary problem, but the knowledge you absolutely will not pick up from wasting your time trying to decipher these things lasts forever.
Why risk heading to a gym or the outside world when that one oddly specific multiple choice question from that one article you swear you read that one time makes you sweat enough? Are these sentences dizzying enough for you, yet? And this piece isn’t even peer-reviewed! Trust the scholars dedicating their lives to having their abstracts alone sourced by students because they saw the first main sentence and dipped. They know what they’re talking about. At least, I think they are?
