Your average procrastinating college student will agree that there is a big difference between the ideal weekday night and the typical weekday night. This playlist isn’t your typical “power-studying jams” playlist; instead, it is an ode to the actual experience of doing homework late into the night (and morning).
It’s 7pm. You just got back from discussion on the other side of campus (why on earth did you choose the 5pm section?) and grabbed dinner to-go from the Asian Ghetto. Back at your place, you feel a little lethargic and oddly at ease, even though a little voice in the back of your head peeps, “hey, don’t you have a paper due tomorrow morning?” Reluctantly, you plop yourself in front of your laptop, open up the empty Word document you made last week, and stare at it blankly while Dean’s “what2do” plays on your YouTube tab. The snowy music video seems to reflect your empty mind, uncomprehending and swirling with blankness like an unexciting snow globe. Dean sweetly sings your thoughts: “Tell me what to do, I don’t know what to do.”
An hour passes. You’re feeling a little loopy with all the stress, so you decide it’s time for an impromptu dance break. The wacky electronic sounds and crazy music video of Yelle’s “Complètement Fou” (French for “completely bonkers”) seem to reflect your mind in a highly distracted state at the moment.
The clock reads 10pm. The appearance of the extra digit sets you in a panic: The paper is due is less than 12 hours!? Still feeling uninspired on what to write, you panic, wondering how you’ll come up with so much to say in the next few hours, how you’ll face your professor in the morning empty-handed, how your GPA will react. Hayley Williams belts out your dark thoughts: “Can you feel the pressure? It’s getting closer now.” So you drink some shitty drip coffee and pray it will do some good.
The pressure is just too much. Your brain feels like an idiotic lump of clay in your head even though you are fully aware of the impending deadline. You just want to smash things and scream in frustration at this endless internal struggle. Grimes’ blood-curdling screeches are probably what you would sound like if your roommates weren’t asleep and if you didn’t have neighbors and if you lived in seclusion in the woods like the man-eating monster in a horror flick. You settle for listening to someone else scream.
Another hour passes. Thankfully, the panic simmers down a little, and a bit of hope bubbles up in your tormented soul. Five pages in 10 hours, that’s half a page per hour. Totally doable…right? Mercedes Arn-Horn brightly urges you to “say goodbye to giving up,” so you suck it up and seriously start to write.
It’s 3am now. The senseless panic relents, and your expert BS mode switches on. Now the complex sentences and AP vocabulary flow effortlessly from your hyperactive brain and nimble fingers as if by some previously latent muscle memory. The caffeine has finally kicked in: you’re a little shaky, but you’re an essay-producing fury on that keyboard. You are powered by drip coffee and the adrenaline of seeing the light at the end of the five-page tunnel. The bright and eccentric sound glitches of Porter Robinson’s “Flicker” mirrors your robotic, caffeine-high state.
You stare at the blinking cursor on the screen, unbelieving. You check the page count: page 5 of 5. Done, finally. You skim through the document a few times, barely comprehending. You click “Print” and pray to the printer gods. Thankfully, they answer your prayer today with the benevolent screeeeeee, chug-chug-chug-chug-chug and you exhale with relief. Your roommate groans in sleep and turns over in their bed, but you don’t even care if the printer woke them up because friends are temporary, and GPA is permanent. The A4 paper makes it way slowly and unsteadily through your printer, and your sanity has been worn thinner than the pages of your essay, all while your headphones play Dangerkids’ “Paper Thin.” The screamo part seems to echo the irony of your battle-stained victory: “Until you’re lost in the dark, you don’t look for the way.”
All of a sudden, the room seems a little too bright for comfort, after you have been cloaked in near-darkness for 12 hours now. You hear your roommate roll over again in their bed (oh, how you miss your bed!) and you realize it’s almost time for your 8am. Alex Trimble serenades you ironically (“Tell me you feel better when you’re sleeping through the day”), and the guitars are a little too perky for your corpse-like condition. Thankfully, it’s enough to get you off your bum to get ready for another long day ahead, but least you know you’ll be accompanied by your trusty white earbuds and Spotify account.
The full playlist can be found here.
Image: David A Ellis, all photos under Creative Commons Licensing
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