Most days, I talk about how wonderful it is that so many students are bringing their own music to the stage in Oberlin. But I have come across an unsettling circumstance: a good number of these student musicians are singing and playing tunes that weren’t penned here at the College, but were written elsewhere during breaks. Maybe this isn’t a problem. Or maybe I’m just cranky and tired.

I have come to think that Oberlin is the campus that never sleeps. About a week ago, I overhead someone at Decafé saying that she had only slept four hours between the last two nights. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I usually can hear a keyboard clicking or a toilet flushing down the hall.

And while we’re awake, we stress. In the science center, which I pass through regularly, I have noticed people who seem never to leave that glass atrium — piles of books and energy bars as their only companions. I won’t even mention A-level.

I recently moved to a different dorm; I have since become aware that such moves are possible when someone else has left campus, often because they, to put it simply, just needed a break. And plenty of people deal with the stress in other ways, drinking coffee until their bones must be brittle and dry, taking drugs or spending their CDS salary on chocolate-covered espresso beans.

To a certain extent, I subscribe to this constantly busy lifestyle. I do, however, set the limit at sleep. Eight hours a night, please.

I used to be one of the chocolate bean buyers. Freshman year, I would guiltily sidle into Gibson’s, leaving a few minutes later with an ambiguous brown paper bag, a bag whose contents promised me hours of jittery studying.

It’s hard not to think about deadlines. They’re everywhere. They ornament your syllabi. It’s the way college works.

These days, older and supposedly wiser by one year, I sleep. But I still tend to let college, activities and classes, consume my waking hours. And it makes me uneasy. What about creative endeavors of my own? What about songwriting? It’s a plain and rather predictable fact that I wrote more lyrics than ever before during Winter Term, a time at which I had to focus on only one other project.

At Oberlin, I’ve made so many commitments that it’s hard to keep the obvious ones — those which I make to myself. Some students are keeping their personal commitments to write; most of these people are those who see themselves making music their career. But the rest of us should do it, too. I think I’ll stop making redundant lists on my sticky notes and start working on some of those phrases that float around in my head. Then I can put my sticky note lines together and make songs.

That would be nice. Then, I can take a nap.