My definition of "week" is basically the duration of time that I theoretically should be productive. A typical weekday consists of a possible nap, a few hours of an extracurricular, and then hours of homework interrupted by my constant distractions. Because I'm in colorguard, I don't go home on Fridays. I stay after school and get home anytime from 10:30 to past midnight. The next morning, I wake up and go to dance, eat a short lunch, and then go to SAT tutoring. By the time all of this is over, it's around 4 pm on my Saturday. Then, instead of relaxing at home for the first time in the week, somehow every week some plans or the other fall into place on my Saturday evenings. So I'm still not really home. Ideally, my Sundays are my free day - but lately I've had things come up on those days too. Plus, I tend to leave all of my non-pressing weekday homework for the weekends...so I do homework for the majority of the day. Yet I procrastinate just enough so that I'm still up late on Sunday evenings. And aha, the schedule repeats.
I guess the busyness keeps me from getting sad or melodramatic. I just don't have time for that. It keeps me from indulging in stupid TV shows; I've sat on the couch and watched TV a total of two or three times this entire school year. And this isn't because I don't like TV, trust me. The busyness also keeps me content in a way. It feels good to be productive and to be accomplishing things. Every night when I finish all my work I feel like a new weight is lifted off of my shoulders, and getting into bed is so so satisfying. Dancing and guard also make me happy. They provide me much more long-term happiness than a TV show will.
The biggest advantage to this whole full plate schedule is the appreciation it forces me to have of the actual breaks I have. For example, because I see friends outside of school at most once or twice a week, I value that time with them that much more. Because I have a significant quantity of homework almost every night, the days that I don't are heavenly. And because I have things going on almost every day, the days I don't have stuff feel like paradise. The first time I honestly felt free this school year was this past Monday night and Tuesday. I didn't have practice for one of the few sacred times of the year, and there was no school the next day. I hung out with friends two days in a row. For most kids, that's completely normal and I sound crazy. But for me, it was a rarity. I didn't have an absurd amount of homework, and my day was relatively free until the evening (I still had dance though, of course). The novelty of this type of day was so refreshing and enjoyable only because I'm not used to it. If I weren't busy, then real breaks wouldn't even be special.
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