You know, it’s probably too soon in the year for me to be writing about this, but I’ve got to get it off my chest.

Last week I received a very tempting offer from a few of my fraternity brothers to go to Panama City, Fla., with them for Spring Break. I considered the proposition carefully: A good group of friends, a break from the gray skies and a final college road trip to provide me with warm, fuzzy memories for years to come. “What could be better than that?” I asked myself.

Then it hit me – to use the words of the immortal David Lee Roth – like a thunderbolt in my Cheerios. What could be better than going on spring break? The answer: NOT going on Spring Break.

You save up all year, hoarding birthday checks from your grandma and fishing for change in your car seats so you’ll have enough loot for your little week in paradise. You hog the treadmill at the Student Wellness and Recreation Center for a week, thinking that a few last-minute workouts will improve your sex appeal and make your stretch marks disappear, then you act surprised when you don’t lose a pound.

You try to put a group of friends together, but no matter how hard you try, there’s always at least one person nobody likes who weasels his or her way in just so the already overpriced hotel rate will go down a couple of bucks.

You blow all kinds of money on bathing suits, sunglasses and “beach clothes” before you leave, then pile into an overcrowded car and hit the road. You stop at a gas station and spend half of your money filling up the tank and the other half buying junk food that totally nullifies what little progress you made at the rec center.

After that, you spend the rest of the trip quoting lines from Wedding Crashers and talking about how you can’t wait to hook up with some sexy stranger – which you won’t. And even if you do, all you’ll get is an STD and a guilty conscience.

You get to your crappy hotel and start drinking, then it all goes downhill from there. You spend the next week in a haze, getting sunburned and dealing with creepy townies at all of the overpriced restaurants, with nothing but the promise of another day at the beach, which is full of drunk idiots and fat girls to keep you happy.

By the time you’re ready to leave, you’ll have to decide who is going to drive home – a discussion that will probably result in a fistfight. The ride will be eerily quiet because you’ll be so sick of your friends you’ll want to kill yourself, but when you arrive home you’ll pretend like you had the time of your life and post all your pictures on Facebook. Then you’ll spend the next six months trying to convince yourself that all the money you spent was worth it, because you “can’t put a price on memories.”

But you and I know the truth, the awful truth. Spring Break blows.

Call me cynical, call me a pessimist, call me what you will. But a couple months from now, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Tony Cox is a senior philosophy major and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact him at [email protected].