Hey. You. Stop sucking the life out of college students everywhere. Halloween’s on Friday, and your victims need some breathing space to prepare for a night of debauchery. And good, clean, scary fun, of course. Corn candy, anyone?

Fall semester is almost halfway over, storefront holiday decorations are over-zealously jumping the gun on fuzzy, cross-eyed, dancing snowmen sales, and for many, the Turkey Drop is just around the corner (If you just said huh?, check back for a future post on this.).

And even though the next full moon is nowhere in sight, college classes are hell-bent on infusing campuses with the eerie, cultish chant of impending doom, reverberating the halls with “Midterm… Miiidterms… MIIIDTERMS!” I suggest wearing earplugs.

Buy your Scantrons now, and don’t let the paper industry fulfill their evil ploy of plucking your last breathing nickel and dime when you really should be stocking up on candy. And by candy, I mean… candy?

So however you decide to prepare for the bi-monthly slap of now-show-me-what-you’ve-actually-learned-in-this-class, it’s not the amount of studying and cheat-sheeting and Red Bull that matters. It’s not the weeks of color-coded, doodley note-taking that’s gonna pull you through. It’s how well you can decipher a Roman numeral clock during that blocked out test-taking time you have to perform. And who really uses Roman numerals anyway? Damn textbook indexes.

A piece of advice:

Don’t pull an all-nighter and stumble into class with mismatched shoes, gum in your hair, rubbing sleep out of your eyes and pen-marked notes transferred onto your face from falling asleep on your hand. All that cramming will have gone to waste as you sit in that cramped desk made for a 4-year old, dreaming of a sausage, egg and cheese breakfast sandwich and a Venti vanilla latte with four extra shots when you could be drudging up those answers you crammed into that spongy brain of yours and writing beautiful analyses on grade-deciding essay questions. Warning: Lack of sleep causes run-on sentences, and adjectives and prepositional phrases don’t come easily as you’re losing brain cells from an underabundance of REM cycles. And then you start making up words.

Get some sleep. Breathe. Eat some breakfast. Breathe Again. Pass your midterm with flying colors and then sleep until dinnertime. Or until Halloween. Nothing exciting happens until the trick-or-treaters are in their bed getting high on processed sugar anyway.

All in all, don’t worry! The end is near and it’ll all be over soon.

Can you see the light in the distance? Frolicking into the wee hours of the night with half your costume left behind in a gas station bathroom, keeping tabs on how many people went the distance with “The Slutty Halloween Costume Conglomerate” (see below), cavorting with inebriated partygoers until the cows come home… Those damn cows.

Thank the Greek gods Halloween falls on a Friday this year. You can wear your costume all weekend.