My dreams are interrupted by a startling but welcome sight: the Bottom. With a primal scream, my heart leaps as the end of my torture emerges. I wait out a subjective eternity as the sea floor rises to greet me, and finally, mercifully, end my descent.

The horror of this final wait for the Bottom is what really drains me. As the ratio of time spent studying to time until the Bottom increases without limit, my interest in things unrelated to schoolwork increases proportionally. The smallest curiosity, the dullest barb can hook my attention for hours. As the opportunity cost of stealing away time from studies increases, my irrational desire for shenanigans becomes unbearable. An hour and a half on amihotornot.com playing God of aesthetics. Forty-five minutes re-reading an utterly boring Times story on the profit margins of foreign car manufacturers. An hour faux-drumming to Led Zeppelin. The only procrastination that I have found to be acceptable to the efficiency-monitoring system of my mind is physical exercise. The other jaunts into extreme inefficiency don't even recharge my batteries, they just remind me I should be doing other more dreary things.

The descent continues, for me, until Monday. Then, having hit bottom, I will transform into a human bubble, light as air I will shoot up through the Harvard Trench of finals period, and undergo explosive decompression. I will float right to the top of the mythical mountain, and draw my first pure breath of freedom in more than a month. I can't wait.

B.J. Greenleaf '01 is a physics concentrator in Mather House.