Free to slack

Like many other young, hip, literate college students, I tried reading Jonathan Franzen’s 562-page novel over winter break. “Freedom” is a sizable book, and if we are to believe Time magazine, it’s already the next Great American Novel. I’m not one to trust such claims (especially from Time), but I wanted to see what all the hype was about.

This column, though, is not about capital-F “Freedom”; I am not an English major, and as Lit Hum so painfully taught me, nor could I have ever been one. No, this is about little-f freedom—that little gift-wrapped curse given to college students every holiday season.

With three weeks off for winter break, it seems we have all the free time in the world to do what we want. Those first few days of break are so full of possibility as we map out in our minds all the things we could get done. As ambitious Columbia students, we naturally set some ad hoc goals for ourselves to accomplish before we go back to school. We’ll finally get around to organizing the clutter in our room. Or we promise to work out every day. Or maybe we tell ourselves we’ll read that book everyone’s been talking about.

But then Jan. 18 rolls around, and we’ve only made it to page 300, our winter break dreams deferred again. At the end of every break I feel the tiniest tinge of failure for not being as productive as I possibly could have been. Maybe that’s just the way my psyche is built; maybe others feel perfectly fine doing absolutely nothing with all that free time. Or maybe others have theses to finish, God bless them. But I don’t think I’m alone among Columbia students when I ask: what is the point of winter break?

Don’t get me wrong, I love the time off. I’m just not exactly sure what I’m supposed to do with it. The purpose of that other, much larger block of free time—summer—seems quite clear. For the careerist, land an internship and pad the resume. For the cash-strapped, find a summer job. For the adventure-seeking (and much less cash-strapped), vacation. The productive possibility of three months of freedom is exponentially greater than that of three weeks—there just simply isn’t enough time during winter break to truly accomplish anything.

I found myself first asking that question—“What the hell am I going to do with all this time?”—on New Year’s Day, sitting in bed while nursing a hangover and watching a second-rate Peanuts special (“Happy New Year, Charlie Brown”) I had found on Hulu. See, by New Year’s, all the important holidays have past, all the holiday parties have been attended, and all the relevant family members seen. In that one week between Christmas and New Year’s, I had­—in the words of George Costanza—“decompressed” and felt rested enough to start another semester.

But what I had in front of me was two straight weeks of absolute freedom, and it was driving me stark-raving mad.

Being forced to choose among seemingly unlimited options—that’s the dilemma of freedom. With all the choices I had, I was paralyzed. All I ended up doing over break was seeing a few friends, applying to even fewer jobs, and watching a lot of “Law & Order” on TNT.

So I have a suggestion. Columbia, it’s time to shorten winter break. Those one or two shaved-off weeks could be added to the summer. That might be what’s best for students as a whole, but I think if I were free to choose, I wouldn’t give up the extra time off during winter. I would just promise myself to accomplish something substantive the next time around and fail at it all over again.

On a deeper level, I might have just been homesick for Columbia. Having been here for four years, it’s more of a home to me now than my own home. I’m eager to start my last semester—even if it’s the beginning of the end. The real world, to say the least, is scary and demands to know what I want to do with the rest of my life. In fact, that’s when the real dilemma of freedom begins—but that’s another column altogether.

Dino Grandoni is a Columbia College senior majoring in economics-political science. He is a former Spectator head copy editor. The Lowest Common Dino-minator runs alternate Fridays.