AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N GT H
Does the Grind Ever Stop? Affirmative.
BY DANIEL SEIZER
T
he grind stops. It screeches to a halt.
Well, to be more specific, my grind stops. My grind screeches to a halt. While I’ve always been known to give up on any sort of professional commitment or academic goal, Zoom school has presented a few more ways in which the grind must clock out. For one, I almost always have a Bravo show (most recently, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills) streaming on split screen because, let’s face it, the “Zoom Class Sessions” tab on CourseWorks doesn’t have the same auto-start trailer algorithm that Netflix has, and my monkey brain knows which is more appealing. Thus, my grind stops for at least one hour each day so I don’t fall behind on Survivor. Then, there are the four hours each week I have to catch up on The Bachelorette. I know you may be thinking, “Isn’t The Bachelorette a two-hour show?” And while you would be correct, you would also have failed to remember that everyone needs at least two hours post-show to discuss which contestants are there for the right reasons. Oh, and then there’s the TikTok of it all. My screen time tells me that my daily average time on TikTok is one hour and 25 minutes. This, of course, isn’t counting all the TikToks I watch on my friends’ phones—but we don’t have to worry about that now. My grind also stops for good, mental health (ish) reasons, too—like naps! Is eight hours of sleep really enough? No. Never. And it’s not like I get eight hours anyway. (Most nights recently, I have fallen asleep with phone in hand, TikTok on, and woken up with fright a couple of hours later). So it’s not like I’m staying up late to continue grinding. To cope with my lack of sleep, I used to drink (read: completely and utterly depend upon) coffee. I used to be able to drink two or three cups of black coffee a day. Over winter break, I went cold turkey on the magic beans. Now, whenever I try to drink coffee, I
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can’t even have half a cup without developing three different types of facial tics. So my grind stops yet again. Well, my grind slows. Everything is slower without coffee. My grind stops for basically any offer that sounds more appealing. When I have a choice between studying for an Organic Chemistry midterm and watching a movie, the movie always wins. Hell, when I have a choice between studying for an Organic Chemistry midterm or cleaning the stove, even the stove will win. In all honesty, I’ve come to dislike the grind. And who among us hasn’t felt this way? If you say you haven’t, you’re a stupid idiot liarface! A mere four years ago, I could spend more than 12 hours at school every day. I had class starting at 7:12 a.m. Now, I’m lucky if I make it through one Zoom lecture at two times speed. Even though I lived near Columbia last semester, I went to Butler a grand total of once. Now that you know I don’t care for the grind one bit, let me be blunt: The grind stops with me. My children, should I sire any (adopt any?), shall not grind. This I swear to you. It’s not that grinding is bad. It isn’t, I assure you! But the idea that the grind never stops is one that I simply cannot abide. So I will probably allow my children a couple of hours of grind time per week. Maybe half as much time as their allotted screen time, because I’m not trying to be unreasonable.
Negative. BY GABE GARON
I
n short: No, it never does.
Allow me to elaborate. When I was young, my
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