It took me several months to accept my condition, but I’m finally ready to admit: I have stage two senioritis.

Earlier this year stage one of the seasonal epidemic swept through the senior class, leaving my peers devoid of ambition as they reveled in their liberation from the college admissions process. But my disease progressed to stage two, plunging me into an existentialist crisis in which school attendance became not only an inconvenience, but a grave injustice.

Now I struggle to dredge up scraps of motivation to tackle the simplest of tasks, from chewing breakfast to pretending to take notes in class. And I’m challenging the accepted conventions of my everyday routine with a novel question: why?

Why should I be required to be cooped up in classes that don’t pertain to my future interests when the view out the window is beautiful? Why did I ever put up with junior year? And why is Mr. Easton still allowed more than 15 seconds on the PA system?

In this phase of self-indulgent cynicism, I even find myself challenging the staid journalistic traditions of the Black & White. Why must I labor to mold my thoughts into the rigid confines of active voice, crisp punctuation and overall coherence?

So in lieu of a final formal Black & White op-ed, I present the following pretentious ramblings, all scribbled in the back of Ms. Del Savio’s 3rd period psych class:

1) My days are so regimented, so repetitive that I often feel like I’m choking on the stale fumes of déjà vu. The school environment assumes the authoritarian undertones of a surreal dream — students sitting in class like dull-eyed bovine, then taking to the halls with the smooth regularity of a meat factory. There’s no perception of continuity; each new day fails to build on the previous. It feels like the checkerboard of my school-year could be cut up into individual days, shuffled up, and then patched back together — nothing would change. And all the while time slips onwards deceitfully.

2) To live life fully, we need to constantly maintain perspective. So: I am only one of the billions of humans to have walked upon the earth. My life is an ephemeral spark that will fade out all too soon into death. With these two thoughts kept firmly in mind, much of my everyday life sheds all vestiges of assumed importance and dissolves into thin air, too banal to maintain integrity in the face of oblivion.

3) With school ending, my routine assumes a tinge of surreality. My peers ebb and flow through the school’s hallways, shuffling with heads down like laboratory mice. The walls are dripping, slowly melting away onto the operating-room-blue floor tiles like wax in the sun. The ceiling bulges downward, straining under the weight of the future months, swollen pregnant with expectations and anxiety. Classes coagulate into a thick sludge of monotony; battling through the day becomes like running under water, with the tantalizing exoticisms of summer peeking through the murky waves. I’m plunging into summer, fleeing the stale routine of the school year — but every step approaches the terrifying adult world of reality, with cubicles and 9 to 5 workdays. So drink deep the cup of life before it sours (and if the cup is fermented, all the better).

To all those underclassmen (yes, this includes juniors) who wasted the past 5 minutes of their life indulging my logorrhea: I apologize. You’ll soon understand exactly where I’m coming from.

Before I bid adieu, I want to share the meaning of life, which I’ve gradually gleaned as a grizzled senior after four grueling years in the high school trenches: ____[redacted at the request of the administration]_________________, __________________! Now get back to studying — AP’s are next week. If you need me, I’ll be asleep.