You can picture it, I’m sure: It is 2 a.m. My body is a tightly coiled slinky of stresserosity, ready to go springing out of my house, roll down the hill and into Beebe Lake. My hair is a frizzy mess, my eyeballs are bugging out at all sides and I have a Jason Segel-sized bowl of soymilk and entire box of Life cereal (think: Forgetting Sarah Marshall), two cooling cups of coffee, a beer and a pack of cigarettes in front of me. I am a crazed person. I qualify for a straightjacket.

I have a paper due.

Bouncing off the walls in my little stress-mess tomb (a.k.a. my bedroom, the floor of which I haven’t seen in weeks) I remark insanely to myself: “The day I graduate college this will all be over! I will be a healthy person! I will do yoga EV-ER-Y-DAY. I will start going to sleep before 5 a.m. I won’t be addicted to multiple vices. I won’t eat shitty junk food or unwind by binge drinking.”

This makes me feel better for less than three seconds. Because I realize, “Oh, wait, ha! No! Because whatever work I do post-college will involve some sort of deadline, and since I have learned at Cornell that I work best at the 11th hour, I am going to keep doing this to myself. Which means that I am going to get fat, get heart disease and find myself alone, in my messy room, talking to myself at other stressful moments for the rest of my life. Woo!”

OK, phew. Calm down. While my anxiety (“disorder”) could probably beat up your anxiety (disorder), I’m sure you go through the same thing. Cornell, my dear readers, teaches us many things. One of those many things is “time management,” or rather, how to work under insane amounts of pressure. It also teaches us many devices in order to support our horrifying down-to-the-wire habits and ways to vent our frustration and be masochists.

Essentially, Cornell teaches us pooey masochism. In some ways, this is terrific — not everyone can do 16 things at once with any sort of aplomb or finesse. But by terrific, I actually mean terrible, since it teaches us these bad habits, we hold onto them for life and, I am personally afraid, the vices that come with them.

While I dabbled with these things before Cornell, it wasn’t until I got here that they became real issues: Drinking, drugs, watching frightening amounts of television, internet forums, Gawker, Overheard, unhealthy amounts of whining, heart attack-inducing foodstuffs, overextending myself and smoking. While our degrees range, we’ve all picked up a degree in binging — binge partying, binge working and binge stressing. It’s really, really wonderful when you think about it: We can probably drink most everyone under a table, actually manage to pull off studying for two midterms and writing a paper all in one 2 .a.m. – 9 a.m. period — even while ripping out our own hair. What an awesome skill!

The question is: Which is the chicken and which is the egg? Did we come to Cornell because we’re all Type A masochists? Or has Cornell made us all into crazy, binge-working, coffee-sucking, coke-snorting, illegal-Adderall-nabbing freakazoids?

And while we don’t always exist at this stress peak, the opposite isn’t much better. I’m convinced that we’re always at either one extreme or the other — running from class to meetings to class to the library with a short pit-stop at CTB and then back to the library again, all within the space of 10 hours and no sleep. And then, in that one day when we have nothing to do, all we can manage is to crash and burn on the couch for hours on end — in a drunken stupor, nonetheless.

While groups on campus exist like Cornell Minds Matter, CAPS and EARS, I’m still not convinced that Cornell is a healthy, supportive community. At a talk the other day, the speaker referred to depression as something “you [might] come down with.” I’m sorry, came down with?! Like I came down with the cold? In such a stressful environment, the lack of awareness about mental ailments — many of which are aggravated by Cornell itself — is staggering.

What worries me is that these habits are going to be hard to break. We like to think that our lives will calm down, but once you are habituated to the stress, it becomes a pseudo-addiction. What’s to say that we won’t all end up in careers with the same inordinate pressures? What’s to say that we won’t continue with the same destructive behavior?

Cornell supposedly prepares us for the world, but I worry that what it really does is condition us to seek out stressful situations and live with them as if that were the real world.

Julie Block, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a former Sun Arts and Entertainment Editor. She may be reached at jblock@cornellsun.com. WTF, Mate?! appears alternate Wednesdays this semester.