Someone please help me escape from this hell which has befallen my life. Everything I once knew is now gone. My life is changing before my eyes, but my brain cannot process all the information quickly enough. I have become forgetful, confused, and overwhelmed with a sense of not belonging.

Two weeks ago I moved into this place I am supposed to call home, but I no longer think that this will become possible. The bed is warm and the people are friendly, just like back home, but something is missing from my life now that I seem to have left back in my hometown. Yes, college is a fun place, but the classes, the rushing, and the relationships you must maintain, it is all so much. The weight of the world is bearing down upon my little, insignificant, pathetic life. It is like being stuck in a hail storm with nothing to protect your head.

“And when the sky is falling, Don’t look outside the window” (The All-American Rejects). I can think of this lyric as advice. When the world as you know it is coming to an end, you might as well not know about it. This seems like adequate advice until you try to put into practice. You cannot run from something that is the equivalent of a speeding freight train. Eventually the train will catch up and run your sorry little butt over. Your parents, when you were younger, taught you to run away if something was harmful to you. The problem is that: 1) you can’t run forever, and 2) sometimes you make a wrong turn and you find yourself in a dark, damp ally awaiting the impending doom that you were once running from.

Some people use the soothing sounds of water to relax, and others will beat the living hell out of something to calm down. College is a place where there is no escape, no exit plan; there is no relaxing or calming down. The workload is so great that you have not a second to think, not a minute to lose, and not an hour to spare. Sunday is no longer sacred once you enter college. Weekends are a thing of the past. College is a point of no return.

I have become insane. I have lost all sense of time and direction. Nothing makes sense anymore. All I have time for is class, homework and sleep, somehow that doesn’t seem right. I barely have time to eat!

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has the words “Don’t Panic” written in big friendly letters on its cover. What I’ve been given is a hitchhiker’s guide to college with the word “Panic” written on its cover. The guide I have been given has 42 pages in it, they are all blank. Basically, I haven’t been given a damn thing. All I have to work with are the stories I have been told by my friends and family, and all of their stories have to deal with parties and all the stuff I really can’t, don’t, or won’t do.

I have been asked to empty a lake using a spoon with a hole in it. I try to do the task that been given to me, but I soon realize my attempts are feeble and start sobbing. As I am sobbing I am spooning the water from the lake as fast as I can and my tears are just making more work for myself because they are replacing the few drops of water I have just removed. At the end of the day I get up and go home. I return every day to repeat the process until my torture is over.

Dante’s version of hell does not compare with the torture of living through the freshman year of college. Dante only describes a physical torture. College is a torture of a much greater magnitude. College has your mind wrapped around five or six subjects at once, creating a world where you actually have to try to separate ideas from one subject to another. Therefore, the college version of hell has you sleep deprived, hungry, mentally, and physically exhausted.

Like Mark Twain, I too have a view on education. The way it is now sucks. My life has turned itself inside out, but there is no silver lining. There is a light at the end of the tunnel; the train’s headlight. “Hey look a rainbow!” But as soon as you get there you realize that the leprechauns went and booby-trapped it.

My life went from pure gold to something as worthless as lead. Home: a place where something began and flourished. This place doesn’t feel like a beginning nor does it feel like I’m flourishing here. Life is moving at such a great pace that if I were to stand still the world would turn over and the sun would supernova. Basically my life is moving at light speed and I am not aging, but the world around me is aging at a rate which is inconceivable. The hell which has taken over my life will eventually over power me and I will succumb to the robot everyone wants me to be.