Why College has been easier than High School

Growing up, Sundays used to be the most hostile of days.

After church, my sisters and I would take full license of our weekends-only TV allowance rule.

So while dad would hog the living room for 5+ hours of non-Tivo'd football (I'm sorry to report he still lives in the dark ages), we'd sit drooling on the couches upstairs to a Lizzie McGuire rerun we'd already seen AT LEAST 7 times...
(Halloween episode? Camping episode? Better yet, the Aaron Carter episode!),

until 7 pm would hit and we'd be in a panicked frenzy along the lines of:

"OH SHOOT! I have a math test tomorrow....

CRAP, I can no longer put off this chemistry worksheet that will take me no less than 4 hours to complete (and one that UCSD chem major student tutors have trouble with: true story)!

NOOOO! I cannot bear to spend another 2 hours getting through a chapter of The Odyssey followed with pages of graduate school-level analysis!"

(Just so you know, simulating these panic-stricken moments, though while just memories now, send chills and waves of hot flashes through my body)


And then, as the cherry on top, there was early. morning. seminary.

I'm convinced all of you pansy Arizona, Idaho and Utah "released time" people are seriously ill-equipped for anything of discipline in this life.

The combination of early morning seminary and high school was the hardest, I repeat, THE HARDEST, thing I've had to do in my entire life.

Like, I'm pretty sure childbirth will pale in comparison.


I thought life after high school would get harder, that "college classes" would build on high school.

For example, to build on identifying the symbolic motifs of the Russian Revolution in Crime and Punishment, we'd have to do the aforementioned

in Mandarin Chinese...

while doing a handstand...

counting to a thousand by sevens.


(I really think I had a jaw-dropping sigh of relief moment when, after attending my first college class, the myth was confirmed that I would indeed be taught in the English language.)

Not to say that BYU has been a complete cake-walk, but I'm just so glad my 5AM-11PM (later had I not been a good time manager) jam-packed days are behind me.

I want to go back to my high school teachers and tell them to relax their hyper 'must-be-ready -for-college' attitudes, but there is something sadly satisfying knowing people at my high school are being tortured just as I used to be.

And so, I suppose, the pattern continues.