Congratulations students, you are now officially halfway through the fall semester. Go ahead, check your syllabuses. Check your calendars. Like it or not, this much is true.

Occasionally this week I’ve felt as though I’m going to wake up in the morning to see barren trees, cloudy skies, frost on my car’s windshield and a foot of snow at my doorstep. Lengths of time get increasingly shorter when you’re getting old. This must be one of the universe’s cruel jokes on mortals. If only it was the other way around.

The last seven weeks might as well have literally flown right by, and with a high degree of certainty, so will the next seven.

I hear people often say there “aren’t enough hours in the day.” I certainly agree with this proposition. In fact, to broaden that concept, I’d like to just stop time altogether and catch up on whatever it is I’m trying to do. Right now, for example, it would be amazing if I could just stop the Earth’s rotation, bake a cake, eat it and write this column tomorrow. But in the meantime I’ll keep typing away until the wee hours of the morning and brew up some coffee when it’s all over. Then I can teach myself all there is to know for an exam that I know nothing about because I’m usually too tired to stay awake in that particular class.

Last week I even forgot to take a shower for about five straight days. It’s not that I don’t care much for personal hygiene; I just never got around to it. The first thing I think about every morning is usually, “How much more time can I stay lying here without being late for class?” That thought never goes anything like, “I wonder who can smell me under all these blankets?” My deodorant even ran out for about a week. I bought some this morning.

Perhaps I’m digging way too deep into my personal life at this point. So let’s forget about exams, research presentations, part-time jobs and personal hygiene for now and discuss some of the finer things about the autumn season we’ve recently stumbled upon.

Foliage is awesome. We live in a unique part of the world where this actually happens, so when the maple tree leaves turn yellow in your neck of the woods and start dropping like flies, take some time out of your busy day to check it out.

Even though everyone gets sick of chilly weather after about two weeks, at least for now it’s a nice change of pace to wear a few of these sweatshirts left over from last year. Suddenly I have five new shirts I wasn’t able to wear a month ago. That’s cool.

And who doesn’t love apple cider? I can buy a gallon of that stuff and drink the whole thing in just a few days.

I suppose my least favorite part of October is the end of daylight-saving time when dusk arrives at 5 p.m. Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” This might be true for old Benny, but no matter how much sleep I get and no matter how early I wake up, I feel no better at all than the day before unless I rise up from a deep slumber sometime in the afternoon.

So while prepping for this soon-to-be nocturnal existence called winter, it’s important to also get ready for even fewer daylight hours to accomplish tasks. It’ll only feel worse. But we’re halfway there, people. Pretty soon you can look forward to the “spring” semester.

Garrison Ebie is a senior electronic media production major and columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact him at [email protected].