I need a break from summer. The three-month period of time in which I am supposedly allowed to be completely worthless turned into the most stressful time of my life. Being idle is a bit difficult when I can barely afford to drive my car, full-fledged civil war is breaking out in the Middle East and Al Gore is telling me that the world is increasingly closer to becoming a puddle.

All of this makes me want to embrace homework, term papers and anything else that this semester might bring. Unless my major suddenly gets taken away, I think the next nine weeks will be relatively calm.

I suppose a nice, long lull in chaos post-Katrina was too much to ask for. Probably as the one-year anniversary of the storm approached, the universe decided that some misery was past due. And just like the mail us New Orleanians had been missing out on suddenly came pouring in, so did the stress. I really didn’t need all 17 issues of Entertainment Weekly the postal service never got around to sending me, and I certainly don’t need everything in the world to go wrong at once.

A vacation would have been the perfect remedy for an unexpectedly hectic summer. But since traveling is now as enjoyable as waiting in line at the DMV while getting a root canal, that was pretty much impossible. Apparently, God rids the world of a terrorist every time the good people at airport security confiscate a Dasani or your $90 bottle of shampoo. There’s simply no room for hydration or quality hair care in this post-9/11 world we live in.

And now I hear that someone with entirely too much time on his hands has developed a bomb that can be detonated by cell phones and MP3 players. I think eventually it’s going to get to a point where we’ll have to board planes wearing nothing but our underwear, traveling with only a paper bag containing a toothbrush and government-approved reading material. Your next vacation will turn into something George Orwell could have written.

There’s also the problem of venom-wielding snakes and the threat they pose to potential travelers. And unfortunately, there’s only one Samuel L. Jackson and many airplanes. Vacationing was simply not an option in this time of heightened terror and deadly reptiles.

So I willingly return to Loyola this semester hoping to escape this harsh reality. Because really, Loyola is so far-fetched from reality. It exists in some alternate universe where priests are cool and sidewalk chalk art is an acceptable advertising medium. Plus, here it’s easy to live in complete oblivion to the outside world. I can hide in my dorm room or watch the silent music videos in the O.R. in favor of CNN. The fact that my cell phone never works here also allows me to disengage from reality. Provided that some huge natural disaster doesn’t send us on a mass exodus to Jesuit institutions across the country, Loyola might be the break I’ve been looking for.