Rachel Tookey – Week 5

It’s Week 5. We’ve reached our one week for proscribed melancholy. I hope you’ve all really been saving up all your stress this term for it to be vented in a controlled and contained fashion over these seven days. If you happen to have found yourself feeling fine at the beginning of this week, I trust you’ve now rectified the situation, or at the very least have taken up pretence of a mourning culture and look a little solemn.

Since it’s Week 5, you’re also all probably in need of a lot of advice: please see every other Tab article written this week then. In fact, you’ve been given far too much advice. You’re thinking too much about your feelings. Stop it. I don’t care how you’ve been feeling or what you think about it. In fact, I don’t care how I’ve been feeling. And I’m almost certain I haven’t been thinking for a while.

I used to set a time each day to have a healthy period of not overthinking. It was right after the time I set to work on my opinionated Cambridge voice. I ended up enjoying it so much I’ve never stopped. It comes with a slight hazard warning: it can lead to such mishaps as putting the milk in the cupboard instead of the fridge, and finding yourself eating without even realising it. But it also makes life a lot simpler when you stop overthinking everything and just do. There is no scenario that is not improved by it.

Scenario One: You can’t think of what to write in your essay or column

The Old You: excessive reading from the UL coupled with long discussions on what post-modernism is.

The New You: You go onto Amazon and take one of their reviews. This provides you with a free opinion. When I’m done with my essays, I even like to repost them on Amazon under the name ‘The Insensitive Scholar’. And while you’re on Amazon, you can pick up a few impulse buys from the Marketplace to massage your self-esteem with material goods.  Today, my £7 mug tree arrived. I’ve saved time not overthinking, I have a mug tree, and I don’t care what post-modernism is.

Scenario Two: Your opinionated friends are talking and you don’t know what to say

Your friends are talking about health care reform. You want to articulate the strife of the middle class. The old you would sit on the side of the conversation chiming in with examples from Nazi Germany.

The new you cuts your old friends off. You don’t need friends. You then go do something about what’s bothers you in the world.

Scenario Three: Your supervisor is gratuitously rude to you about the above essay

We’ve all had the supervisor who doesn’t know the difference between harsh criticism and just being a dick. Because being a Cambridge fellow does give them an instant justification to treat others like crap. In my second week in fresher’s term, I had an essay compared to a print out from Wikipedia. Your normal reaction would be to go home and break down (but only in Week 5 as that is the approved week for emotional reaction).

Now you can just be rude right back at them. You’ll build the sort of belligerent tough love relationship that sees them one day declare that they see a lot of themselves in you.

Scenario Four: You’re worried you’re gaining weight

You are. Start carrying around heavy UL books. The weight of learning will make you thin.

Scenario Five: You want a relationship

Go ask.

Scenario Six: World Peace

You’re now spending less time talking in Cambridge and more time doing. Your work efficiency has now drastically increased so the problems of the world will quickly clear themselves up. Go out and join a protest (one of the Middle Class London ones – you want to stay safe), or do a sponsored bus ride to East London so you can really see the world’s problems. Don’t forget to mention you’re from Cambridge. People will take you far more seriously.

To summarise: stop thinking. Do you think you’re thinking too much? Shut up. Go do something impulsive. Stop reading advice. Use Facebook polls to make all your decisions for a week. I do not care if that technically counts as advice. If you have any questions, fuck off.