But this year I won’t just be doing the regular kind of spring cleaning, I’ll be spring cleaning my entire college life.  I’m not really a pack rat but I do like to be prepared, so I haven’t thrown much away over the past four years. And no, I’m not talking old magazines and candy wrappers that would make me the perfect candidate for Hoarders, I’m talking hard copies of papers, and notes from my freshman year classes. But as binder after binder and book after book take up more space than I’d like, I’ve found it’s time to finally clean it all out.

So I did. I went through four years worth of college classes in one day, getting rid of the stuff I will never use again, like the notes from my microbiology class last semester, and hanging onto the stuff I may actually want to peruse again, like a book of Carson McCullers short stories, feminist fairy tales, and obscure post colonial novels that I just can’t get enough of. I tossed the astronomy notes, and the ancient philosophy and the anthropology, but I did keep the literary theory book if only because I’m still using it this semester and because I do plan on burning it once this course is over. Parts of it were cathartic, parts of it were said, but mostly, it was nostalgic.

I found the notes that my friends and I wrote to one another when we should have been paying attention, the song lyrics I jotted down when I should have been brainstorming, the drafts of different classes I’d sign up for during registration. I found old papers that make me cringe and some that actually impressed me (i.e. made me remember I wasn’t always a such second semester slacker). It was interesting to think back on the classes I’ve taken; to remember the days when that first 10-page paper in my freshman writing class seemed like too much to bear; when I considered for the briefest of moments during a meltdown in my first literary theory class, switching my major to something that required less reading. And it was interesting to see how much has changed over the past four years, inside the classroom, and out.

And now, with graduation looming and all the packing I’ll have to do after it, it’s time to let it all go. To downsize my life. To get rid of the past and prepare for the future. To put it all on Amazon.com and make some extra cash ASAP.

The Peter Walsh in me is excited, but the college-senior-who’s-not-quite-ready-for-real-life in me is putting it off as long as I can.

Fall is in full swing. The pumpkin spice lattes are a part of your daily ritual. You’ve broken in your new fall boots. You’ve given up that whole turning over a new leaf idea – you know, the one that involved getting your homework done on time. And hey, just in time for midterms too.

Mid semester exams are inevitable. And annoying. Just when you’ve started to think you could get away with not doing any of the reading for your classes and getting all of your notes online (from the comfort of your futon), midterms rear their ugly heads.

Essays?
Quotation identifications?

You are not prepared for this. Time for some serious studying, right? Not just yet, there are a few things you really need to do first….

10. Clean up. Wow your keyboard is really filthy. And your screen? How could you even see? This needs to be done now. Or you’ll never clean it. No time like the present, right? Where’s that Windex?

9. Did your phone just ring? Your BlackBerry just buzzed. That could be important. An e-mail from a professor? A question from a friend? You’re still waiting to hear back about that internship.  Just check… really quickly.

8. Check your Facebook. That text Sarah sent you said that McHottie hooked up with that girl from your bio class this weekend. But you’re not sure how reliable of a source she is. There have to be pictures if it happened right? Just scroll through the newsfeed. You won’t be able to concentrate until you know.

7. Make yourself a snack. You’re starving. You should probably eat something. Brain food. Like fish. No. But there’s a vending machine right down the hall. There’s bound to be something full of dark chocolate there. That’s good for you, isn’t it? And while we’re on the topic, wine’s a brain food these days too, right?

6. Visit your favorite websites. You just want to check your daily websites. College Candy. College Fashion. Texts From Last Night. The usual. It’s not your fault there’s so many awesome new articles up. It’s better you read them now before you really get into your work. Plus, you’ve been busy. You could use a break, really.

5. Oops! Forgot to check Twitter!

4. Watch your favorite show. Okay. So you can hear your roommate watching TV from the other room. You look at the clock. Yep. There’s a Kardashian marathon on. And, wait, is that the KHLOE AND LAMAR WEDDING?! What’s another hour (or 3)? It’s the wedding…and you’ve been PMSing…you could use a good cry. Let it all out, girlfriend.

3. Take up a new hobby. What’s that? Your boyfriend is watching baseball? Well, you’ve never really been a fan before, but these are the important games aren’t they? And it’s important to take an interest in things he enjoys. Maybe he could explain to you what’ going on as you watch…

2. Change your scenery. You know, with all these distractions, you really need to get out of the house. You’ll really get more done if you’re at the library. Just pack up your things and go…

1. Talk to a friend. Is that Melissa sitting over there by the computer? You haven’t seen her in days. It won’t hurt to say a quick hello. I mean, you don’t wanna be rude. It’s common courtesy, people. Just a little holler and then you’re on your way…

If you can find an empty table, that is.

What are your favorite ways to put off studying for midterms? Are you a professional procrastinator or do you get things done quickly?

….I think my preferred method is pretty obvious.

Got a special place in your heart for top 10 lists? We do and we’ve got some doozies.  Get ‘em all out right here.

It’s the start of a new school year and to honor that, we at CollegeCandy are bringing back the fan-favorite series, “We’ve All Been There.”  (We tried to get another national holiday/long weekend for you guys but it’s way harder than we thought so this will have to do.) Every week, Lauren – University of Michigan will comment on the common experiences all college women share – like trying to figure out if that boy is crushin’ too or stupid group projects. Read, relate, cringe and enjoy.

Your 10 page paper on the complete works of Shakespeare is due in less than a week. You vowed to spend all of Sunday at the library working on it, but an impromptu beer pong tournament broke out at your house on Saturday night and you were so busy eating Oreo Cakesters and chugging Vitaminwater that the entire day passed you by. Now it’s crunch time and you have no choice but to bang it out.

You decide not to waste any time, so you skip the long walk to the library and work at home. You tell your roommates not to bother you, lock the door to your room and settle in for some serious paper writing.

Only your desk is really messy. You can’t focus when you don’t even have space to spread out your books. So you clean it. Twenty minutes and a garbage can full of papers later, you decide to take out the trash. But before you do that, you might as well make sure there isn’t anything else that needs to be thrown away. You begin to clean your room. Once it is clean, you tell yourself, you will be able to focus.

As you pick up the pile of clothes next to your bed, though, you find your camera and are soon sitting on the bed flipping through photos from Saturday night. There are some real doozies on there and you have to share them. It won’t take long to post them on Facebook, right? You’ll just do that quickly and then get to the paper.

You load the photos online. Then you tag them. Then you caption them. Then you scroll through your newsfeed to see what everyone else is doing as you sit here on this Tiki Tuesday writing a stupid paper. You look through a few friends’ photo albums, you peruse the profile of the cute guy in one of the pictures, you message your friend asking her if he’s single.

“Sh*t,” you think to yourself. “I really have to get started on this paper.” You log off Facebook and prepare yourself to start writing.

But now you are hungry. You really didn’t eat much today, so you run downstairs to grab a bowl of cereal. As you are pouring your Frosted Mini Wheats into the bowl, your roommate walks in. You haven’t seen her all day, so you decide to eat the cereal with her quickly and then get moving on the paper.

Only it isn’t quick. You end up talking about Saturday night, the cute guy you just found on Facebook and what she should wear to the Tiki Tuesday party. Before you know it, you are up in her room rifling through her closet for the perfect “cute but not trying too hard” outfit.

Then you are on her computer looking at all the pictures you just posted.
Then you are helping her clean her room.
Then you are back in the kitchen doing all the dishes in the sink.
Then you are making coffee so you can stay up all night working on this paper.
Then you are looking for any excuse left not to sit down and write the damn thing.

By the time you actually make it back to your room, it is far too late to start writing. So you start rationalizing. “I would only get, like, a paragraph done tonight. And I work better under pressure, anyway. I’ll just skip lecture tomorrow and work on it then.”

So, you pull on a pair of PJs and head to the living room to watch some TV with the girls. You still have a few days left until the paper is due. You’ll work on it tomorrow. Promise.

Yeah, we’ve all been there. In college, there is nothing quite like the last minute.

I, on the other hand, find myself lacking in every aspect of domestic maturity. I dread doing laundry, I get extra excited on the rare occasion that my pasta comes off the stovetop instead of out of the microwave, and I gotta be honest, kids kind of piss me off.

For a long time, I’ve embraced this about myself. I was convinced I could just get by on take-out and who really needs children anyway? But as I approach my senior year of college, it’s beginning to hit me just how close I am to living life in the real world. In a very short while, it’ll be frowned upon to live like I do – laundry piling up, cabinets stocked with Easy Mac, dishes (read: shot glasses) sitting in the sink.

If this is truly some sort of natural instinct in women, when will it kick in for me? And why hasn’t it already?

After a lot of thought, I think I know what’s holding me back. It’s not that I just suck at these household duties – I am so afraid of what it actually means to perform them: growing up.

I love college and I love my adolescence; I’m not quite sure if I’ll be ready for the cold dose of reality that awaits me in just a few years. Don’t get me wrong, I’m capable of surviving on my own; I’ve done it for three years now. What worries me is whether or not I’ll be able to actually accept the idea of being an adult without the safety net of college to fall back on.

Some of my friends have got it all figured out, and I wonder if I’m behind in a sort of race to the finish. Maybe it’s just a matter of time until my biological clock starts ticking and everything falls into place. But I know the first step is to come to terms with the fact that, ready or not, it’s time to grow up… and use a stove.

I know that all of you out there wash your faces every morning and every night, but do you ever think about the germs and dirt you’re sweeping across those freshly exfoliated cheeks every time you apply your makeup?

It’s disgusting.

Our makeup brushes get really dirty with use, and cleaning them is perhaps the most important yet overlooked step in beauty these days. Think about it: when was the last time you cleaned your brushes?

Well it’s time to start, ladies! And it’s a lot easier than you think. You don’t have to be fancy and buy the most expensive brush cleanser you can find. In this vid, I’ll show you the cheaper way to clean your brushes (which you really should be doing!).

As I’ve learned more about Chinese culture (my family is pretty non-traditional), I’ve learned about the traditions other people practice for the most important holiday in the Chinese calender.  A lot of what Chinese New Year’s is about is setting precedence for the new year.  If you start the year with money, surrounded by friends and in a clean setting, you will be lucky, happy and have prosperity throughout the next year.

If you’re interested in other cultures or just looking for a reason to party, Here are some ways to celebrate the Year of the Tiger:

Clean House: What better way to start off the new year then with a clean house? It is said to rid your house of bad luck that you accumulated in the past year, so go through that closet and those piles around your room and get rid of all that bad luck. But wait a until the weekend to do so; tradition says that if you want to keep good luck in your house for the year you must refrain from cleaning for the first few days.

Decorate. While people often paint their doorways red, the lucky color, this probably isn’t an option for most college students. Instead, I like to get paper scrolls with inspirational sayings on them.  Gung Hay Fat Choy is probably a saying you’ve heard before; it wishes for wealth and prosperity in the new year. You can pick these up at any Chinese Market, in addition to paper lanterns and other fun decorations.

New Clothes. When I learned about this tradition I was ecstatic! People often buy new outfits to start the new year off fresh. Wearing red and/or gold is also considered lucky. Avoid wearing a lot of black throughout the new year, thought, as it is a symbol of bad luck.

Party! If you have a Chinatown near you, or there is a Chinese New Year’s celebration, check it out.  It’s a cultural experience and a lot of fun.  In my hometown, they have parades, presentations, vendors and so much more to do throughout the New Year, which is 15 days long. Lion Dances are a major part of the parade and setting off firecrackers, or even using noisemakers on Chinese New Year’s Eve (Feb. 14) will scare off bad spirits.

Eat. Dumplings, fish, noodles and oranges are some of the foods traditionally eaten in the new year.  Get together with your friends and go out for food, or make your own. (Fried Rice is super easy and feeds a lot of people.) Since New Year’s Eve falls on Valentine’s Day this year, it is the perfect excuse to get your single friends together and celebrate.

Watch and Learn. The Last Train Home is a documentary by Lixin Fan about the largest internal migration, which occurs just before the Chinese New Year.  Migrant factory workers only go home for the New Year, they travel primarily by train, making it a chaotic time of year.  This documentary won Best Feature at the IDFA International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam and is definitely a must-see.

It’s Parent Weekend, or your birthday, or just a Thursday night and you’re craving a free meal a la parentals. Either way, your parents are coming to campus and that means one thing and one thing only: it’s time to clean.

It’s not like your place is dirty – at least by your standards – but something about having mom and dad sit on that couch (where your roommate hooked up last night and – oh! – her bra is stuffed between the cushions) is just not right.
You don’t need your parents seeing the cans from last night’s impromptu party, or the empty Doritos bags littering your
bedroom floor.

You run home from class/work and get moving on the deep clean. You start with your bedroom. You fold all of the clothes that have been piled on your floor for three weeks and put them away.  After you make your bed, you decide some vacuuming is in order. Good idea, too, as you find some less than parent-friendly goodies (your bowl or some empty condom wrappers, perhaps?) under the bed. You remove the dirty dishes (AKA the cereal bowl from last week filled with congealed milk) from your desk and replace them with books and binders.

You take a moment to survey the room. It just screams, “I’m studious!”

You light a candle to cover up the smell of dirty sheets and move onto the kitchen. You begin sweating as you quickly clean all the dishes in the sink and stacked on top of the microwave.  Most of them are shot glasses. Once they are all glistening in the drying rack, you make your way around your place picking up bottles and beer cans. You pause at the bookshelves and contemplate removing your collection of Smirnoff bottles that have been on display for months. On the one hand, you don’t need your parents to see how much you and your friends drink/pride yourselves on it, but on the other hand, you’ve been working on that collection forever! You can’t just throw it away now.

You decide to leave the bottles and hope your parents don’t comment on them.

With only 30 minutes until their arrival, you do a quick Swiffer/vacuum job, organize the Us Weekly’s on the coffee table and throw your roommates’ stuff into their rooms. When you are done you take a moment to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Your place is spotless. Like, really spotless. Like, it hasn’t been this clean since the last time the parents were in town.

But, wait! There is one more thing. You run to the kitchen and take an inventory of the photos on the fridge. You yank down the one of you bonging the beer, dressed up as a slutty Nun for Halloween and the one of you using your Psych text book as a flip cup “table.” On second thought, you yank them all down. Your parents don’t need to see that.

As you are putting them into a drawer in the kitchen, there is a knock on the door. Proud of your accomplishments, you open it up and let your parents in.

“This place smells like stale beer,” your mother says, a look of disgust on her face.

Yeah, we’ve all been there. At least she didn’t see what it looked like before…

Packing at the end of the semester is a bitch. But, on the bright side, it’s still better than the cleaning that comes after packing. Make your life easier by getting a head start on moving out for the summer, by following these simple suggestions!

1. Clean up after yourself.

I am guilty of letting things slide when I’m stressed. I procrastinate on everything from vacuuming to bringing the 57 empties from last night’s dorm party to the recycling bin. However, if you take five seconds (okay, five minutes, tops) out of your day to clean up the little things, you won’t have so much clutter-slash-junk-slash-trash to wade through when you’re trying to round up the stuff you actually want to keep.

2. Start with the shizz you don’t need.

Um, winter’s just about over. Pack up your thick sweaters, and save just one for a fluke springtime cold. Throw in half of your towels and pajamas, and vow to do laundry more often. All of those notebooks you bought when you thought your lab would be difficult, but haven’t been opened since they left the bookstore? Pack them. The posters on your walls? They can go, too. Nobody’s really judging your dorm that much.

The more you can pack up here and there, the less you’ll be scrambling to cram into a couple of suitcases and three Yaffa Blocks 20 minutes before your ETD.

3. Stop. Buying. New. Stuff.

Seriously, if you’ve made this far through the year, you can live without whatever impulse-buy doodad caught your eye in the checkout counter. It’s just going to be more to lug later.

4. Make a few trips.

If you are fortunate enough to have a car on campus and be driving distance from the folks, start now. Load up your car, go home for some of Mom’s famous homestyle mashed potatoes, and drop a sh*tload of boxes in her living room, where they will sit…until May (or maybe even September when it’s time to go BTS).

5. Don’t get trashed the night before move-out…unless you’re totally ready to go.

If you’ve been neglecting these tips and plan to throw everything together an hour before your RA comes to check you out, you could be in trouble. Finishing that last exam might feel like a load off, but there’s nothing worse than being hungover-or still drunk- and trying to throw your life into a few boxes while on a time limit. You’ll break things, you won’t pack up with any given order (hence your beer mugs will be packed away with your underwear, and your PJ’s will be underneath your text books), and your clothes will be so wrinkled when you finally unpack at home that you’ll be late to your hometown reunion because you had to spend 20 minutes ironing. Besides, anything you accidentally leave behind becomes your roommate’s territory.

Your 10 page paper on the complete works of Shakespeare is due in less than a week. You vowed to spend all of Sunday at the library working on it, but an impromptu beer pong tournament broke out at your house on Saturday night and you were so busy eating Oreo Cakesters and chugging Vitaminwater that the entire day passed you by. Now it’s crunch time and you have no choice but to bang it out.

You decide not to waste any time, so you skip the long walk to the library and work at home. You tell your roommates not to bother you, lock the door to your room and settle in for some serious paper writing.

Only your desk is really messy. You can’t focus when you don’t even have space to spread out your books. So you clean it. Twenty minutes and a garbage can full of papers later, you decide to take out the trash. But before you do that, you might as well make sure there isn’t anything else that needs to be thrown away. You begin to clean your room. Once it is clean, you tell yourself, you will be able to focus.

As you pick up the pile of clothes next to your bed, though, you find your camera and are soon sitting on the bed flipping through photos from Saturday night. There are some real doozies on there and you have to share them. It won’t take long to post them on Facebook, right? You’ll just do that quickly and then get to the paper.

You load the photos online. Then you tag them. Then you caption them. Then you scroll through your newsfeed to see what everyone else is doing as you sit here on this Tiki Tuesday writing a stupid paper. You look through a few friends’ photo albums, you peruse the profile of the cute guy in one of the pictures, you message your friend asking her if he’s single.

“Sh*t,” you think to yourself. “I really have to get started on this paper.” You log off Facebook and prepare yourself to start writing.

But now you are hungry. You really didn’t eat much today, so you run downstairs to grab a bowl of cereal. As you are pouring your Frosted Mini Wheats into the bowl, your roommate walks in. You haven’t seen her all day, so you decide to eat the cereal with her quickly and then get moving on the paper.

Only it isn’t quick. You end up talking about Saturday night, the cute guy you just found on Facebook and what she should wear to the Tiki Tuesday party. Before you know it, you are up in her room rifling through her closet for the perfect “cute but not trying too hard” outfit.

Then you are on her computer looking at all the pictures you just posted.
Then you are helping her clean her room.
Then you are back in the kitchen doing all the dishes in the sink.
Then you are making coffee so you can stay up all night working on this paper.
Then you are looking for any excuse left not to sit down and write the damn thing.

By the time you actually make it back to your room, it is far too late to start writing. So you start rationalizing. “I would only get, like, a paragraph done tonight. And I work better under pressure, anyway. I’ll just skip lecture tomorrow and work on it then.”

So, you pull on apair of PJs and head to the living room to watch some TV with the girls. You still have a few days left until the paper is due. You’ll work on it tomorrow. Promise.

Yeah, we’ve all been there. In college, there is nothing quite like the last minute.

It happens—you’re out to dinner (most likely with someone you find attractive), you order some sweet-potato fries, and suddenly the glob of grease that was on its way to your mouth is blossoming all over your new white sweater/ blouse/ pants/ tank/ beautiful item of clothing. You might have to keep that glob around for the night (and swear to god that it is the only thing attractive boy is looking at), but you can get it out. Yes, even without mom’s help.

The first rule of thumb for getting rid of (embarassing) grease stains is more of a don’t than a do: don’t toss that sucker in the laundry basket when you get home and “deal with it later.” Detergent and water will NOT remove grease stains, so you’re going to have to get tough.

Now onto the do…

Perhaps the easiest thing to try is a stain-removal spray. You can find them in any store right by the detergents, and if you spray them on stains pre-wash and rub them in, they’re supposed to take any spots right out. I say “supposed to” because my spray is a little full of itself and doesn’t work quite as advertised.

If that doesn’t work, this page will totally bail you out. This person has compiled dozens of tips featuring numerous household items that will likely be able to save you in a pinch.

Most successful for me have been the following:

1. Dishwashing liquid. I have the foam-squirt kind of Dawn rather than the straight-up liquid form, but it still works like a charm. If you also have the squirt kind, pump the handle a couple of times and then rub the foam into the stains. If you have the liquid, pour a penny-sized amount on each stain. Press it in (it’s not necessary to rub too much), let it sit for about 15 minutes, and then wash as normal.

2. Baking soda. This won’t take out a stain by itself, but rubbing some baking soda into a glob of grease will absorb enough to make the stain manageable. You’ll probably need to couple it with something else, though, so don’t rely purely on baking soda to suck away all the grease.

3. Shampoo. I cannot figure out why this works, but it does. Pour a penny-sized amount of shampoo on each grease stain, and rub it over and into the stain. Let this sit for about 10 minutes, and then wash as normal. This can be coupled with other grease treatments, but it worked like a charm by itself for me.

A few more tips:

- Don’t wait around. You can still probably remove the stains if they’ve been there for weeks (or yikes, months), but it’ll be more of a challenge. As we all know from dropping toothpaste on our clothes and wiping it off right away, it’s easy to get a stain out immediately but hard to get it out as time goes on.

- Use hot water. Yes, it’s true that hot and cold water clean the same as far as washing your hands goes—and probably for most other things, too. But hot water kick-starts the detergent’s cleaning action, so you’ll want to use it when you’re throwing in a load that has grease stains.

- It’s not the end of the world. If you can’t get a stain out yourself, perhaps a dry cleaner or another cleaning specialist can. Or try calling up your grandmother—she’s probably full of old wives’ tales that just might work. And remember—it’s just a stain. If the piece of clothing is really a goner, maybe you can recycle it by sewing parts into a purse or using it to patch up an old pair of jeans.

All, of course, which I will teach you…

[Image courtesy of laundrylocker.com.]