Ah it's that time of year and we are all staring down the barrel of finals, the part of the semester where all of your procrastination and "I'll do it later's" culminate in a panic of epic proportions. All of the papers, presentations and exams are rapidly approaching and there's nowhere to run. Every semester we tell ourselves never again and yet here we are, ready to rip our hair out, drop out of school, and become strippers because who needs a degree anyway, right? I give to you my open letter to finals.

You are LITERALLY the only thing standing between me and Christmas. I understand that you are a necessary evil but do you HAVE to take my will to live with you as well? I sit down with my computer and I want to scream just staring at my list of to-dos. There is more ahead of me than behind me despite being 99.99999999% done with the semester and it's all quickly leading to a meltdown. I have more work to get done in a little over a week than I have done all semester long. Something is wrong here.

In your wake, you have left my social life in shambles. I am holed up either in the library or on the couch laptop at the ready furiously typing away, trying very hard to chip away at all of the papers and presentations and everything else in between and when my fingers are not turning numb from all the typing and have a millisecond to breathe, I find myself with nothing to do but go back to work because my friends are holed up doing exactly the same thing.

You have taken my sanity. I find myself at all hours of the day thinking about the looming pressure of deadlines and making myself quite literally insane. There is no such thing as a moment of peace while you are still hanging over my head making me feel like the coyote waiting for the anvil to come raining down to crush me.

And possibly the worst thing about you is the fact that even after you have come and gone, the pit in my stomach is a constant reminder that my frantic and manic efforts to meet all the deadlines it still may not have been enough. So in your aftermath I sit and wait in anxious anticipation to see my final grades for the semester. And of course the professors' take their sweet ass time but I'll leave that for another open letter.

All in all finals, you really suck royally. However, you are also a light at the end of the tunnel signaling the end of yet another semester and the holidays are just around the corner. So if you would just hurry the hell up and get out of the way I've got Christmas to get to and a break to enjoy.