As we enter the three-day weekend, I feel the need to break it to all the grownups out there what we’re really doing with our extra time.

As we finish up our last classes of the week, our professors say to us: use this time to catch up on your reading. Or they tell us that they have assigned twice as much reading as normal because of “all our extra time.”

Our parents say to us “use this time to catch up on sleep. Go to the gym. Call home. Write your grandma. Apply for internships. Or better yet, come home for the weekend.”

Our friends tell us “come party, come have a movie night, come join our intramural basketball game.”

We tell ourselves “let’s do all of this, we have an extra 24 hours, we can totally cram it all in.”

But let me tell you how we truly spend our three-day weekends.

First, we turn off all alarms. Then, we stay up until 3 a.m. watching “Stranger Things” or old “Saturday Night Live” skits. Then, we finally get to sleep, waking up around noon Friday. We lay in bed, thinking of what we should do. We may get up, shower, make some coffee.

We may even go out and about, hanging out with friends, doing some shopping. But there’s a pretty good chance we’ll all just stay inside. In our beds. Doing something that falls into the category of procrastination.

Friday evening rolls around, and we think to ourselves “how could an entire day go by and we’ve made no progress?”

But we give ourselves a break, knowing we still have all day Saturday and Sunday to get caught up.

Saturday comes around, it’s late morning, and we stayed up until the wee hours watching some other form of TV entertainment. We lounge about, eating leftover pizza and avoiding the inevitable cold weather.

Then Sunday afternoon comes to a close, and we finally open our planner. And there it is: that extra-long list of assignments, papers and projects that are all due by 9 a.m. Monday. We start panicking, and then dive into the fray. We start with the easy stuff, then we find ourselves staring red-eyed at our computer screens at 4 a.m., trying to muster up another two and a half pages of bullshit for that five-page paper you were assigned two months ago.

The next day, classmates ask what you did with your three-day weekend. You tell them you slaved away, that all that work was way too much. Everyone agrees, or says they were too busy driving from the west side to get the work done, giving one of their top-five excuses to the professor.

To all of you claiming you’re nothing like this, I am happy that you are so on top of your shit. But I prefer to laze my weekend away and cram 10 hours of homework into five hours of pain to produce mediocre work, thank you very much.

Jennifer Ladwig is a senior multimedia journalism major from Washougal. She can be contacted at [email protected].