I’m sitting in my brothers’ apartment in New York, and to tell you the truth, I don’t want to be writing this article. Not at all. I want to sit on the fire escape and overload my senses with city. I want to finish reading “Catcher in the Rye.” I want to do what I want to do, not what I have to do. Too bad October break is over.

Every day is filled with obligations. Some people ignore them, and the rest of us only wish we could. We want to ignore our obligations so badly that for a while we pretend we actually can. We become procrastinators and stay up until 4 a.m. writing a paper due the next day even though it was assigned two weeks ago. We make excuses, like not going to the gym because all of our shorts are in the laundry bag. We knowingly defy our principles and standards and live with the false comfort that tomorrow we can simply call our actions mistakes and they no longer count.

Nevertheless, however good we are at pretending, we can’t fool ourselves. We eventually write the paper, and we’re sick and sleep deprived the rest of the week. We feel gross from not going to the gym, and someone always finds out about our mistakes and refuses to forgive them as simple blunders. When are we going to learn that our shorts do not need to be clean if we’re going to sweat in them?

Our excuses don’t make sense.

Most of the time, we eventually do what we have to, but what motivates us to get our work done? We think we’d rather ignore our responsibilities, but giving our work the cold shoulder does not make it go away.

We can’t help but wonder, “Why couldn’t I when I said, ‘I can’t’?” We’re afraid of hearing our own answers – our reasons fabricated out of laziness and apathy repeated back to us. Our self-respect cringes at the ludicrous excuses we devise only to deceive ourselves. It’s not worth pretending we can ignore our responsibilities when ultimately at some obscene hour of the morning we realize we can’t and wish we would have simply done what we knew we were supposed to.

I don’t want to write this article, not this week. I want to e-mail Meredith Davisson and tell her not to expect a submission because I don’t have anything for her. But I can’t do that. I seriously considered it, but then I thought that I bet there are days – cold, dark, rainy days – when my dad doesn’t necessarily feel like getting out of bed.

I bet there are days when he’d rather just fling the alarm clock to the floor and snuggle up next to his wife of 33 years. I imagine there are gorgeous days when he’d rather dress in Carharts, clear brush and burn bonfires in the backyard without a permit than wear a shirt, tie, pants, nylon dress socks that make his feet sweat and tasseled loafers and sit in an office chair, staring at a computer screen.

I normally enjoy writing articles, but right now, there are other things I’d rather do. I was close to not writing any article at all, but then I thought that on any given day, my dad would rather deal with dirt than digits. But he goes to work.

We can’t ignore our obligations, and it only hurts to pretend. There are no special privileges, only imagined and unfounded extensions of our excuses.

October break is over. Get back to work – sooner rather than later!

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Georgie Hunt is a junior English major from Pomfret, Conn. She can be reached at [email protected].