The “I Miss School” Disease

If you thought COVID-19 and monkeypox were all you needed to avoid this summer, you are woefully misinformed. Another disease has begun spreading, particularly targeting Stuy students who are trying to enjoy their well-deserved time away from stress and pop quizzes. With so many fun ideas on our summer bucket lists, this is the last thing we need to interrupt our blissful months of freedom.

The “I Miss School” disease always hits in the middle of the summer. By that point, time has effectively blurred our memories of the painful hours we spent cramming for exams during the school year. It is a result of a virus that basically tricks our brains into thinking we miss school over the summer. Here are the most common ways people catch this disease:

Doing your summer homework. First of all, the words “summer” and “homework” should never have been put together. Anyway, your stress-free time is temporary, but that Deltamath homework will always be there. Many summer assignments are chosen by our lovely teachers to bore you out of your mind. The virus then takes advantage of your half-awake stupor to attack your body. Due to the virus, you’ll never stop doing your summer homework and once you finish, you’ll find yourself a reformed non-procrastinator eagerly looking forward to going back to school, so be sure to carefully avoid doing your homework if you want this disease to stay away.

E-mailing your teachers during the summer (by the way, that’s awfully clingy). I’m sorry to disappoint you, but if you have a really important question you need them to respond to, it’s too late for that. Either way, you’re only going to get rejected because our teachers are definitely enjoying ghosting us during the summer. The lack of response will leave you not only broken-hearted but also vulnerable to a virus that will happily feed off your pain. It’s a vicious cycle—you may miss school so much that you end up constantly sending more questions and e-mails to your teachers until you realize you’re just going straight into their spam folder and are just hopelessly school-sick.

Sleeping for more than five hours. After getting used to being so sleep deprived during the school year, having a healthy sleep schedule again completely disorients your body. Ironically, the sudden lack of everyday nightmares and stressful naps really confuses your immune system, so it’ll end up failing you when the virus attacks. Once the virus is in your system, you’ll find yourself dreaming at night about a romanticized version of Stuyvesant (including a sparkling, rat-free cafeteria and a clean Hudson staircase.) You’ll crave going back until you see its crude reality on the first day of school. So stay up to stay safe—pull those all-nighters for the sake of it while you can!

Other than an inexplicable yet burning passion to return to school, there are a few common side effects to help you recognize if you have the disease. For example, you could contract an intense urge to go to Muji to buy all their cute stationery. Maybe you’ll find yourself yearning for black coffee, which you used to drink every school morning for the strong caffeine. Or you might even find yourself wanting to constantly check your e-mail out of bad habits formed during the school year. You should definitely feel suspicious if you have any of these cravings.

The “I Miss School” disease is also pretty contagious, so please stay away from your friends (if you have them) if you suspect you have the disease. You don’t want to be spreading that negativity around. Also, there’s a very high mortality rate: most students end up returning to school! Unfortunately, once you do, it’s too late to turn back, and then you’ll be stuck in an endless loop of anxiety until next summer.

Variants of the “I Miss School” disease include: the “The End Of Summer Signifies The End Of My Happiness” disease, the “I’m Gonna Make Sure Everyone Knows I Went On Vacation This Summer” disease, and the “I Actually Do Like School (But I’m Still In Denial Because I Don’t Want To Be A Social Pariah)” disease. Thankfully, they’re all pretty self-explanatory. Unfortunately, there are no available vaccines for prevention of any of these because the FDA hasn’t batted an eye in this direction.

While the bad news is that there is no cure, the good news is that there are still a few treatments that you can turn to. If you do catch the disease, it’s recommended to play video games, binge popular TV shows, or scroll on social media for a minimum of 12 hours a day. Honestly, any form of procrastination will do. This will effectively distract you (albeit temporarily) from the school-shaped hole in your heart.

Maybe it’s true that absence does make the heart grow fonder, but the disease should still be acknowledged. Luckily, the “I Miss School” disease usually completely disappears by the end of September (when students remember how much they loathe Stuy’s jail-cell-like barred windows and broken escalators), so it looks like we’ll all be safe from it soon. Unfortunately, it also signifies the beginning of the “I’m So Stressed Because I Have Five Tests Next Week” disease, which is usually much more serious… but that’s a problem for another day!