Oftentimes, I’d be laying on my bed doing homework when suddenly my stomach starts to growl. It would be about half an hour after dinner, but somehow I’ve convinced my body that it was hungry again. At this point, I’m usually too lazy to make myself another meal, so I look for snacks in the cupboards. Living in an apartment with 3 other guys means that there are several bags of chips, sticks of beef jerky, half-broken bars of chocolate, and much, much more laying around to be munched on. I’d literally stand in front of my cupboard for an hour, not knowing what my stomach wants to eat. By the time I get my snack and finish it, it’s already 10pm, the time I like to shut everything off and lay in bed. To me, food is a huge distraction because the feeling of an empty stomach is really hard to ignore. When you try to ignore it, it keeps calling out to you by growling. This is when I had a really deep moment of distraction.

I kept thinking, I can’t ignore hunger… because it’s important… and it keeps calling out for me to meet my basic needs of nutrients. Then my brain wandered to school work, and I somehow made a connection between these two things. School and hunger have many things in common: They’re both important, there’s a constant reminder for us to get something done/eat something(syllabus, friends, professor, stomach growls, etc.), and you’re dead if you don’t do it (figuratively for school, and literally for hunger).

What my point is, if schooling and hunger are important to us, then why can we ignore an assignment until the last possible minute, and not ignore hunger for about half an hour. There are many arguments for this, but this is what I thought of: Food is necessary, but you won’t die from not having a meal a little later in the day. Eating is important to us, that’s why we eat; School is important to us, that’s why we attend a university. We have professors and friends constantly reminding us about our assignments and midterms( like our stomachs remind us to eat), yet we put them off to the side via distractions and shenanigans like eating junk food. We know we’re dead if we don’t do it (like eating), so why don’t we? It’s a viable argument to say “I’m too hungry to do this assignment”, but it’s also viable to say “this assignment is too important, I’ll eat later”. It’s just a little flip of logic.

From this adventure from my cupboards back into my bed, I really thought twice about procrastinating this upcoming finals week, and so I’m trying to get everything done ASAP to the best of my ability. I let myself get distracted from my work by hunger, I guess i’ll just let myself get distracted from my hunger by doing my assignments this final’s week.