Down the Vacation Vortex

I have approximately forty hours before I have to go back to school. And as I always do at the end of periods away from school, I am panicking. Why should I panic after three restful weeks? Well, I am suddenly remembering all the things I thought I would do during those weeks—my gigantic “to-do” list that remains woefully un-checked-off. Now, I didn’t procrastinate. I plain and simple forgot the existence of the to-do list. I have come to the end of yet another vacation saying to myself, “What the hell did I do for the past three weeks?”
Time off from work or school is a kind of Catch-22. During the workweek we constantly say, “I can’t wait for some time off. I have so much to do and no time to do it.” Then when we get a couple of weeks off, we end up getting bored. Somehow we still have not found a balance between work/school time and other time. If only we could convince America to switch to a shorter work week—it works for Sweden, right?
Normally I have a lot of self-motivation and self-discipline when it comes to doing my work (that is to say, school). But I lose all of that when I go into break mode. I fall into a vicious cycle of sleeping more and doing less. All the sleeping and non-doing just makes me sleep more and do even less. I go into hibernation mode and somehow my brain actually convinces me of the non-existence of school, grades, emails, and books. Instead, I find perfect contentment in re-runs of the Real Housewives of Orange County, sleeping 10 hours a night, and scrounging random food from the refrigerator. And although I said last October, “I should clean out my closet over Christmas break,” my closet has actually become more crammed with clothes bought at the after-Christmas sales.
So why do I feel bad about this laziness? Does my own personal internal drive object? Does my upbringing in a household of extreme busy-ness exert a subtle pressure on me to always stay active? Does the lingering influence of the Puritan work ethic on American culture make me feel guilty about my relaxation? If I lived in say, Spain, I probably would not feel any pangs of guilt or panic after three weeks of lounging around.
I seem to be capable of operating at only two speeds—supersonic and ‘slow crawl.’ And I know many people similar to myself who exhaust themselves during the week looking forward to the weekend, and find that the weekend exhausts them just as much as the week. We all look for that elusive balance that could let us move at a smooth 50 mph most of the time instead of sliding into a pattern of alternating overwhelming frazzle-ment and boredom.
I really don’t like the fact that I’ve been lazy the last few weeks, but I can’t do much about it. I honestly feel like I just woke up yesterday from hibernation. And I did do a few useful things—I started this blog, I got a part in a play and memorized all my lines, and I exercised almost every day. And I do believe that we all need some time to simply do nothing. We need time to relax and rest our brains and bodies to prepare for the next assault. We have to recharge the batteries. And I’ll clean out those closets on Martin Luther King Jr. day.