As we venture into May, the student body begins its semiannual collective meltdown. I love it.

Dead Week brings with it many moods, most of which can be explained through classic collegiate clichés, e.g.: contemplating snorting a caffeine pill, staining keyboards with your thickly caked Doritos-fingers and hooking up for one-night stands with term papers that we should’ve invested months’ worth of time into. Sorry, eight-page essay, I have commitment issues.

To pop culturally personify, we’re on the Titanic and are uncertain if Rose will let us on her floating door.

It’s sink or swim time at North Dakota State, so, naturally, I choose to jog.

A self-professed sane person may say I’m running from my problems. Those who claim to have their lives together might fight this notion as counterintuitive.

Prithee, I disagree. I’m not jogging away from anything; like a good student, I load up my problems — and go.

Cool air clears my mental motherboard. Thesis sentences and lesson plan outlines bounce around my brain as I run around north Fargo. I think about homework until I think about how much my legs hurt from jogging around Fargo at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday.

I go a little farther, and my classroom worries fade further. A rush of calm finds me by the time I open my laptop up again, both of us recharged.

Jogging, like my many other beloved activities, is insane enough to keep me sane.

Academically, I have no reason to sign up for MUSC 111 again this fall. The class, known as “marching band” to Muggles, is the most rigorously earned single credit at NDSU. The class meets three times during the workweek for about two hours. Add those six hours to the all-day fiesta (starting at 6 a.m. for the saxophone section) of a Bison game day at the Fargodome.

All for one credit. (I filled my free electives freshman year.)

I do it because marching band is stupid fun. Students need more of that in their lives.

This here newspaper writing business is more of the same. I’m writing this article at 2 a.m. Tuesday in the bowels of the library instead of writing a six-pager due at 11:59 p.m. Wednesday. I’ll get paid $10 — maybe — for this written masterpiece. My neglected class will affect my GPA forever.

I don’t care. I write, play my saxophone and jog because I love it and because I can. Some spontaneous insanity is good for the soul.

I shudder at the thought of a Dead Week less hectic.