Faster than I would have liked, the brief respite from exams has passed, and the second round draws inescapably close. I am sure I wouldn't be so apprehensive if it didn't seem as though my professors conspired to make this coming Tuesday as trying as possible—two seventy-five minute exams and a skit performance in the span of five hours seems rather harsh, especially with the ordinary demands of school unyielding.

But, for better or for worse, by four o'clock on Tuesday, I will have but one true exam [French exams are more "quests," as my high-school Algebra teacher Mr. Nelson used to say (a meeting halfway between a quiz and a test)]* before the hell of finals. This gap, as I calculated yesterday in an impressively long streak of procrastination, comes to be roughly fifty-five class hours—seventy-five, if I suddenly feel compelled to attend my Economics discussion. And now that I return to the figure, a handful of cancelled classes will reduce this number to around fifty. The end is almost close enough to taste.

* This doubly nested parenthetical inspired by one lovely peanut.