Earlier today, I was wallowing in despair over my upcoming week. It's Ivies Weekend, with all its celebratory buffoonery; the one week of the school year where students can feel rightfully justified in throwing their homework up in the air, their feet up on the table, and their beer up on the Quad.

Festivities started early this week—many Bears put on their party hats as early as Tuesday evening, preparing for a marathon of jubilee that should theoretically last until the early hours of Sunday morning.

And while I wish them Godspeed and heavy hydration in their journey toward what's bound to be an unfortunate Sunday brunch, I can't help but feel pangs of jealousy about their week of adventures. Like many other Bears, I've had the severe misfortune to have been assigned two lengthy papers this week, one due Friday and the other Monday.

Okay, okay, fine: I wasn't assigned them "this week" per se. When I say they were "assigned," I mean, clearly, that I noticed their presence on the syllabi I was handed the first day of classes back in January. Happy, faculty?

Regardless of my poor foresight, other students certainly relate to this feeling of having a very precious experience fall out of reach, like missing "American Idol" for a mandatory review session. Whether the deterrent be academic, extracurricular, gastrointestinal, familial, or any other fun-obstructing nuisance, there's no feeling of abhorrent injustice like having to rain check on Wednesday afternoon margaritas.

But what's a girl to do? On both Friday and Monday, I have to turn in several full pages of what's going to need to resemble grammatically correct English. And having disastrous "printer problems" on the Monday morning after Ivies looks somewhat suspicious. ("It went up in flames, professor! And then it lit the wiring in the computer lab on fire so I lost everything! And then a big, black dog came in the tower and ate my laptop which had my thoroughly polished draft on it!")

But to mitigate the anger against my studies in what is, after all, my third-to-last week of academic life as I know it, I've been devising ways to bring the Ivies experience to H-L.

I assembled a shuffled playlist of all my favorite Sean Kingston beats, bopping to the three-song rotation while studying Japanese poetry. I braved 45-degree, rainy mornings in flip-flops and a sundress. I brought a Nalgene of fruit juice into the library. (Judging by pictures of the festivities on the Student Gateway, it looks like that's the thing to do during Ivies weekend).

I'm living vicariously through friends with lives, probing them for the kind of gossip that makes Ivies so memorably foggy and humiliating.

"Didja go to Joshua's last night? Was it fun? Crowded?"

"Yeah, kinda."

"Was anyone embarrassingly ridiculous?"

"I mean...not really, no."

"Nobody peed on Maine Street?"

"What? No."

"Anyone make out in the bathroom? Puke someplace public?"

"I think this is your floor, Annie."

Of course, it wouldn't kill me to try and get some of this work out of the way earlier in the week. Truthfully, if I were extremely diligent in the next 48 hours, I could probably swindle a couple days of fun out of my week.

But it's easier said than done, of course. Freezing, with about 368 grams of cranberry-tinted liquid sugar pumping through my arteries, my head filled with licentious ideas and corruptive hip-hop blaring in my headphones, the incentive to be studious disappears.

And again, it's not like most Bowdoin students don't have other obligations to deter their Ivies experience. The number of us that are actually capable of participating in five straight days of excess is remarkably slim.

My dad has a saying regarding fun: "At my age, I can't; at your age, you shouldn't."

In the end, it's probably not a bad skill for me to learn how to put aside temptations for diligence, and to learn to appreciate the fun I can have.

After all, there's nothing like a round of "Me Love" to brighten a night in the library.