Arte Mechante is a character satire by Dylan Sealy.
Being a student, I understand what it means to work hard – and how awful it is to do so. I also know that the least painful way of dealing with life is sleeping through it. Given my innate powers of perception, I can tell that these two come into conflict.
Friend(s), sleep is my favourite aspect of life. I dream about wonderful worlds where I have motorcycles for arms, or others where I’m in STU’s journalism program. Asleep is also the state in which I escape the horrendous oblivion that is my waking life. Don’t tell me it’s not that bad – you don’t understand me.
The necessity of work, however, keeps both myself and humanity from sweet slumber. Even if you can scrape by without working, there is a soul-crushing guilt produced by being an unproductive member of society. When you’re a student, school is a full-time job, and like any full-time job, continued attendance and the completion of your tasks can interrupt your all-day sleeping patterns (and make you feel like a poor person). Just because you have responsibilities doesn’t mean you should feel bad about being unconscious instead of meeting them head-on.
How or why you resist your responsibilities is not important. Neither is how you manage to skirt through life avoiding all forms of work. I personally don’t care – and neither should you. What’s important is that you don’t feel bad.
There are many ways to escape the self-loathing such a life, without sacrificing your sleep. Here are a few:
1. Realize that whatever you do is inconsequential anyway. I don’t mean to be rude, but I can’t name a single thing anyone has ever done that is quantifiable worthwhile. Nothing good, and nothing bad, to be honest. Everything you’ll do is useless in the scope of the frighteningly massive world. In fact, you can’t have a shred of impact on anyone or anything. So why bother?
2. Stop thinking. The difficult part of guilt-fuelled depression is that your mind is against you. One way of fixing this is to stare deeply into fluorescent light until you’re only aware of blinding pain. If that doesn’t work, try bashing your head against hard objects – it’ll shake the negativity out.
3. If you wake up feeling guilty, go back to sleep. One of the best ways to escape guilt is to simply smother yourself under a sweet oblivion. If you find it difficult to rest your weary head when assaulted by guilt, I recommend drinking (heavily).
(Bonus tip: Crying always mutes awful thoughts. Just ask me. Or my mother. Or my father, when he’s alone in his study and he thinks I can’t hear him.)
Just remember: when you’ve slept away your semester and all your assignments are due, your parents can just pay for you to go back next year. Problem solved.
