It’s finally here. I can’t believe we all made it. I feel like we’ve been waiting in a seven-week-long roller coaster line and now we’re strapped in and ready, looking up at a steel track that’s headed straight into a no-holds-barred orgy of irresponsibility and gross excess. Now everyone go and enjoy the ride! Me? Oh, I’ll be working pretty much all week and I’ve got that paper to write so I’ll probably be at home.

Spring break is almost upon us, and I for one could care less. With sand, sun and suds, this week of neglected accountability is an American college tradition that’s as faded as an old photo. Every year I hear people announce to the world their planned adventures to exotic Cancun, Cabo and Tijuana, and this year has been no different.

I shiver with disgust as preppy sorority girls wearing enormous sunglasses and sheepskin waders talk incoherently about how much fun Brad’s timeshare is going to be. I wonder how a half-semester of falling behind on reading and assignments warrants a week of lying on the beach, and on Brad. And every year I’m further convinced that every single person on this campus has a “buddy” living in San Diego because around this time every year he turns into a very popular topic of conversation.

Maybe the only consolation about the present state of affairs is getting to answer “the question” the week before. “What are you doing for spring break?” I just love having to explain my bad habit of working and I love even more the reaction that it gets from the silver spoon who has got their bags packed. I can imagine it’s the look Jehovah’s Witnesses often get after explaining why they don’t celebrate their birthday. Receiving that deer-in-the-headlights look is priceless, but creating it is more satisfying.

Who are these people with their lavish vacation plans who can easily escape the clutches of financial responsibility? Is this what they work for during the rest of the year? Is this their Christmas? No, they’re just born with a superior and dominant fiscal gene that the rest of us don’t have. They flock from El Dorado Hills and Granite Bay to mingle among us monetary mortals and hatch their plans to migrate south for the spring only to return with the tans and hangovers to prove it. The following week, we assemble before the start of class to casually inquire about paradise as we pass around fuzzy pictures of dark nightclub floors and shirtless nobodies in the sand.

Now that I’ve found myself bitterly left out of the most socially significant spectacle of the semester, I have slowly slipped into reality. I can no longer afford to neglect my relationships with SMUD, SBC and Comcast. Unfortunately this means no more vomiting in the backseat of friends’ cars, no more writing obscenities on the forehead of my passed out comrades and no more posing as a cameraman for Girls Gone Wild. Good times, good times.

For most of us spring break has become just another week to work more and party less. We all lead pretty routine lives and don’t get the opportunity to participate in the premier planned party of the year. And if I sound a little bitter about it, it’s because maybe I am. It’s just hard to accept the fact that I’m squandering my fleeting youth knowing that someday there’ll be no more spring break. Someday I’ll have to justify taking that week’s vacation with the fact that I never took one when it was actually part of my schedule.