So you’re sitting in front of your computer, eyes glazed by the sight of the all-too-familiar screen … a blank Word document waiting to be filled by your words of wisdom. The music from your iPod really isn’t helping your work flow, nor is the ever-present AIM window hanging out on the monitor.

You’re frustrated with the blank slate and looking for a little distraction. You scroll down your buddy list and check people’s away messages. (Don’t lie and say you’ve never done it, you know you have).

There’s a popular quotation, spilled from Tom Petty’s lips sometime in the ’70s or ’80s, recreated in thousands of college students’ away messages every night:

“You have four years to be irresponsible here. Relax. Work is for people with jobs. You’ll never remember class time, but you’ll remember time you wasted hanging out with your friends. So, stay out late. Go out on a Tuesday with your friends when you have a paper due Wednesday. Spend money you don’t have. Drink ’til sunrise. The work never ends, but college does … “

God bless you, Tom Petty, for giving us a mantra to live by, for giving us an excuse to neglect the schoolwork, shirk all responsibility, throw assignments out the window and run crazy screaming to The Boot, leaving blank Word documents to be dealt with in the morning.

I have to wonder what kind of college Tom Petty attended that he could make such bold claims. I wonder how his GPA turned out, and what internships and jobs he held. I suppose it doesn’t matter much, since he went on to make millions of dollars in the music industry and probably didn’t think back much on any financial accounting course. (After extensive research, I found out that Petty didn’t even attend college.)

So we load ourselves down with 18 credit hours every semester amounting to approximately seven hours in a classroom per week, not to mention the two hours per hour of classroom time that our professors recommend for at-home study time. Then there’s the 15 hours at our part-time job, taking orders or pouring shots behind a bar until 2 a.m. Not to mention the 20 hours we should be spending at an internship, if we listen to the nagging suspicion that we need real world experience in our major areas, because, as one student tells me: “Being a DJ at Friar Tuck’s is not something I can put on my resume.”

That would bring the grand total to 56 hours of backbreaking, mind-bending, time-consuming … you see where I’m going with this.

But thank God for Tom Petty and his words of wisdom. Because after days of dutifully attending that 8 a.m. class, downing coffee instead of beer, carrying plates of food to customers for that $2 tip and staying up until 4 a.m. reading Plato, I think we all deserve to throw our responsibilities to the wind and forget our loans and GPAs in exchange for at least one night of copious amounts of beer at Quill’s, because “the work never ends, but college does.”