It's the same every year. Finals come around and we all start gearing up for the most stressful and exhausting ten days of the semester. Typically, I use the day between the last day of classes and the start of exams, called reading day, in one of two ways. I'll either use the time to get a head start on everything I have to finish before I can pack up to go home, or I'll use it to attempt catching up on some sleep and inevitably wind up laying in bed, going over the to-do list that never seems to end, stressing myself out even more in the long run. One year I can even recall doing this and my dad snapped me out of it saying "you're creating stress that doesn't even need to exist, just calm down." 

This year I took a different approach. I did what the school always encourages us to do when exams roll around and Charleston is suddenly filled with a couple thousand low-functioning zombies carrying around stacks of books and Starbucks venti cups. I took a day to have some fun. Lord knows we all need it sometimes.  As is standard when I decide to procrastinate, I wanted to go try something new. The reasoning for that being that if I'm not going to do anything actually productive, I should at least do something that gives me a new experience, maybe even a new story to tell. At first, I thought I'd drag my boyfriend on what I was calling an adventure around downtown. There are plenty of little restaurants and bakeries when you go north on St Philip and Coming St that I had never tried and neither had he, but he had a counter idea. 

I wound up going to Sparians Bowling Alley with him over in Mt Pleasant. Now, let me just preface this by saying that I am not what you would generally call a fan of bowling. I know anyone related to me who reads this will be laughing to themselves remembering bowling trips past. I can admit, bowling still isn't really my thing, and I definitely got my butt kicked in every game. I'll say this though, if I was looking for a chance to just relax and have some fun before I actually had to hit the books tomorrow morning, then this was a great place for it. The games were pretty cheap, $4 for the first game per person, and then $2.50 for each game after that until 10pm. It was the arcade games that got me. I used to spend hours when I was younger playing Guitar Hero so when I saw the machine set up I knew I was going to have some fun, and would definitely win my pride back in the process. Sparians had a cool, laid-back atmosphere and was a great place to just chill out for a bit. What can I say, finals suck. We all get stressed out and grumpy and we really need to make some time to unwind, or even to stay relaxed, and I'm definitely glad I did that tonight.