DOES THE GRIND EVER STOP?

Affirmative.

BY DANIEL SEIZER

The 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 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

In short: No, it never does.

Allow me to elaborate. When I was young, my

mother and I vacationed in Italy. While meandering through an open-air market in a small Tuscan town, we got lost and wandered down a dark, dusty alley. Sometime between entering the alley and emerging from its shadows, I bumped into an elderly woman. She was old and wizened, with fingernails like talons peeking out from the ancient shawl she’d wrapped around herself. She locked her piercing blue eyes on mine and muttered a curse in Italian before hissing at me and hobbling away. Suddenly, I felt a wind pass through me, causing my juvenile bladder to release and my heart to skip a beat. When my mother noticed that I’d pissed myself and admonished me, I tried to explain to her that I’d been cursed by an evil witch in the alley, but she didn’t believe me. She brushed me off and told me not to judge old ladies—“They’re very nice and a wonderful source of wisdom,” she informed me. “Plus, one day, your tits will be that saggy too, so you should count your blessings.” And we went on our way. But something inside me had changed.

I didn’t quite understand what this change was, at first. I felt drawn to certain things: the viola, convention centers, multi-level marketing schemes.

In lieu of playdates, I would ask my mom to take me to Macy’s so I could wander up and down the aisles admiring the sport jackets and business casual attire. When we walked back to the car, I would linger in front of the JoS. A. Bank and gaze longingly at the Talbots. When the NASDAQ was down,

I was down. When it was up? Oh, boy, was I up. While the other children dreamt of sugar plums and Barney and “playing outside” and diapers and whatever else, I fantasized about Bill Gates and Cheryl Sandberg. The long conversations we might have!”

In middle school, my obsessions expanded and grew. I became a virtuoso violist and pianist, I made about $15,000 in the stock market thanks to a few key investments, and I was reading at an 11th-grade level. I was on the top of my game. I befriended Dan Bilzerian, I gave DJ Khaled the seed money to record his first single, and I went to Nutrilite conventions on the weekends. By high school, I was serving as the finance manager to the CFO of a company that provided companies with CFOs.

I started to develop all sorts of medical problems—my eyes faded to a pale blue from constant exposure to my laptop and the screen in my Tesla XS. My hands became blistered from typing and accepting LinkedIn connection requests. My spine twisted under the weight of my enormous pecs. My hair turned gray and my fried nervous system, shorted out on Redbull and espresso, left me with constant chills, the only solution to which was an old shawl I found in the attic.

One night, on my way out of my double-sized walk-in closet (complete with its own guest room, bathroom, and kitchenette), I glanced in the mirror and gasped. I had become that old, wizened woman that had cursed me in that Italian alley. The realization struck me to the ground, and, once again, I soiled myself in fear and awe. I passed out. When I finally came to, one thought rang through my head:

Luce a gas. Capo ragazza. Mantieni il cancello.

It was the Italian witch’s hex. I knew, somewhere deep inside me, that I had to place it upon someone else’s head in order to free myself from the Sisyphean grind to which I’d dedicated my life. That night, I snuck out of my mansion in the Hollywood Hills and headed to Abbot Kinney in search of prey. Eventually, I found a victim–a blonde girl in line for Salt and Straw, clutching an iPhone XR covered in Parade stickers. I hobbled over to her and whispered my curse:

Luce a gas. Capo ragazza. Mantieni il cancello.

“Oh my god, you weirdo. Was that Italian? Did you just say ‘Gaslight, Girlboss, Gatekeep’? This is why I don’t come anywhere near fucking Venice Beach anymore.”