I’m sure plenty of us students are searching for coping mechanisms as the dreaded finals week begins to rear its ugly head. It may be the fact that I am writing this fairly sleep deprived, but the more I think about it, the more similarities between said ugly finals week and zombie apocalypses come to mind. The most important part is automatically fulfilled: lots of (relatively) undead humans moving slowly in search of some brains. OK, they’re looking for smarts, not physical brains for zombie-esque consumption, but that’s just semantics.

The week-slash-apocalypse begins with a sudden shift in surroundings. Chaos is afoot–where a zombie TV series might show its characters beginning to disregard typical hygiene and wardrobe in the face of imminent terror, in the beginning of finals week students arrive to school wearing pajamas. The next day, many are possessed to wear ugly holiday sweaters. Much like the makeshift armor of zombie fights, these sweaters are prone to be very uncomfortable, but we wear them anyway because we believe that somehow, its smiling snowman will ward off stress and negative emotions. (Apocalypse characters simply hope their armor wards off zombies.)

On Wednesday, the battle is in full-swing. The number of walking dead (read: students who really need a Venti mocha) has increased, and it’s time for those who still have the ability to heal themselves to do so. The school (or in our analogy, the frantic, falling-apart government) hands out hot chocolate to all those who can get to it. Caffeine is like a flu shot for sleep-deprived, zombie-like states. While the movie “Contagion” is about a disease epidemic and not zombies, whenever I see hot chocolate stains on the floor I can’t help but remember the scene in which citizens break into and ransack pharmacies for the mystery drug that could cure them, leaving disaster and destruction in their wake.

Then comes the end of the week: the suspenseful season finale. All this buildup to the drop: everyone in the entire school disappears. They’re all gone. (Until January.)  Were they consumed by the zombie-ism? Did they find a planet without the disease and attempt escape to it a la “Interstellar”? I guess we’ll just have to tune in to the next season to find out.