I'm not a big fan of Freddie Mercury. I respect him quite a bit, gay or not, but I don't listen to his music. Now David Bowie is another story. Except for his crappy bout with techno (which I can overlook), he is great at everything he does. Anyway, in 1980, Mercury and Bowie did a duet called "Under Pressure."
A funny thing happens to me sometimes (and I'm sure I'm not alone in this). Songs just pop into my head during a particular situation. A song comes out of nowhere and the words just fit perfectly. I can't think of any funny examples right now, because my funny bone is being gnawed on at all angles by school, work, life. (I can hear the violins playing now.)
"Under Pressure" came up a few weeks ago and has been in my head since. This song has given way to another song of the same flavor called "Pressure Drop" by The Clash. I can be seen wandering aimlessly around campus humming these.
Once a year (at the least) I have a particular down time I refer to as the "cave-in period." It's when just about any slightly stressful situation that can come up, does. Now, one at a time under normal circumstances, these things can be handled with a middle finger and a smile, but the "cave in" comes when a barrage of these pesky critters in life try to drop your pants in public, so to speak.
I know other people go through this, too. It's when you start screaming at inanimate objects (or, for some of us, scream at them more often) and a semi-depression sets in about the never ending flood of school and career crap.
This can become overwhelming at times. Drinking one's self into oblivion and playing on 610 are not options. This pressure is unwanted and unnecessary. I see the fear and loathing on students' faces as each semester comes to a constipated climax. Why the hell does life have to be so ridiculously stressful? We can blame it on procrastination and lack of studying but even the best of us, who fall prey to neither of these, are still going prematurely gray and bald.
Why in bloody hell are we forced to live from one stress to another, waxing and waning to the invisible puppeteers that dangle us by strings? Oooh. That was poetic. How, pray tell, are we to deal with this throttling of the soul?
As I sit here typing this in the office of the Cougar the rest of the staff makes a mad rush to the library where there has been a bomb scare. This is one way to handle stress: blow it up. My choice would not have been the library.
Other, more tame measures of stress reduction is not to allow stress to accumulate at all. When people act crappy to you, let it go in one ear and out the other. When instructors act crappy to you, pee on their windshields.
Seriously, stress is what you make of it. This is life, and believe it or not, life does not depend on school or your job. Money is, in my opinion, the root of all evils (well, most of them anyway). Once you disassociate yourself from greedy wants, you remove the majority of strife.
Just try to be cool. Above all, be nice to your pets. They don't care if you make an A in physics. They love you anyway.
Gilmore is a senior who, contrary to the mood of this column, does not smoke dope.