"Dead" Week

It's Dead Week again, that period of time between coursework and finals when everything seems to fall apart at once: computers, papers, bodies. Perhaps renaming the week would prevent this, as well as prevent the constant zombie jokes.
Then again, we all love zombies, almost as much as we love pirates.
The insomnia from hell has returned. Some of you may think, "Well, that's good! You can get a lot of your work done!" Fools. You obviuosly have not had such insomnia before.
The thing about insomnia, as is said in Fight Club is that you're never actually asleep, and you're never really awake. It's this theta-alpha wave crest you ride as you watch the sun rise and set around you. The television glows an electronic, sterile blue, and even my cat seems to be annoyed that I won't just stay still in one position and sleep. Work? Yeah, right. Zombies have eaten my brain. Everything looks like it was shot using a soft lens.
The kids over at the Libertarian Socialists are on their third week without food, and some are in the hospital. Dead Week, indeed. The eternal semester collapses on us, like time dilation gone wrong, everything necessary squeezed into a few days, hyper-concentrated. Who says that 16 weeks is the perfect amount of time to ingest, digest, and assimilate content? What if some of us need 17 weeks? Or less? The artificial barriers are created by holidays that none of us understand anymore. No one really wants to go home for the holidays, not here in the grad lab.
There's a reason we went to grad school. And it had only a little to do with intellectual curiosity.
Of course, you say, "You could have been working on these papers all semester!" True. I could also organize my clothing by color, and give exact change to the cashier at Starbucks. Possible, but not probable. It's not in our natures.
Alas, we find the edge of time again. And it is December 12th. X-files lied.