Spring Break 2008 is but a mere memory — gone and in the past until we college students get another big break from school. As we careen our ways through international airports and long, desolate highways back into Knoxville, the bright sun, warm sand, glistening ocean and the infamous flash beads are still calling our names. Well, for the lucky of us.

While much of the student body spent Spring Break in some exotic tropical destination, many of us went home. Here are nine reasons why you should not make the same mistake next year.

One: You’re probably going to be fairly lonely. Granted, you have the family, which can certainly be fun. But for the week and a half or so we have for Spring Break that you spend home, you can count on spending the majority of that time by yourself since other schools have different breaks than ours.

Two: You’ll also probably be very bored. You might sleep in for half of the day and still find yourself bored because all of your friends are either passed out on a beach in Panama City or back at school, since the rest of the SEC was passed out on the same beach the week before.

Three: Anything that you might find entertaining will get really old, really fast. Watching movies will get really old. Filling out a bracket and watching college basketball will get really old. Going to the gym by yourself with moms and businessmen gets really old. Logging on to Facebook six times a day and seeing everyone else’s Spring Break photos gets really old. It’s just too cold out at home to do anything outside, and if it’s not too cold, you’re still by yourself, and it’s still no fun.

Four: You might commit to working out over break and toning up that body of yours. But what for? You don’t walk around campus with your shirt off, and the chance to show off anything that you already had was with your friends in Miami.

Don’t waste your time on working out over break when you’ve got a whole extra month before classes end and summer starts. You’ll have plenty of time to lose the extra pound or two you may have put on in South Beach.

Five: 99 percent of the time, “home” means going somewhere colder than where you might be going on Spring Break. That means while everybody else is wearing their new bathing suit in Mexico, you’re still wearing your North Face at home … as you go out to get a burrito by yourself.

Six: You’ll come back pale. Everybody else will be much farther ahead of you in attractiveness because of their all natural Bahama sun tan. It’s hard to get tan when you’re inside playing Guitar Hero or outside in a jacket.

Seven: Contrary to what you had originally planned, you won’t actually get any homework done. You figured you had a week and a half to start that History of Rock paper, but since you had so much time to write it, you’d just wait until later on in break. You’ll procrastinate and end up writing it the night before it’s due (two weeks after school started again). Besides, do you really want to skip a trip to Key West just to do homework?

Eight: At first thought, the idea of going home and doing absolutely nothing for a week and a half sounds really great after all of those midterms. By the time you’ve sat around and done nothing for three days, you’ll wish you had spent at least half of that week in Florida.

Nine: You miss out! Not only do you miss out on the location, but you miss all of the inside jokes, the stories, the pictures and the fun with your friends. No crazy stories about the bum at the gas station, the creeper next to you on the airplane, or the girl your friend danced with at that bar. All memories you could have had. We’ve only got a few years to get away with everything that goes on over Spring Break before it’s considered creepy, so take advantage of it while you can.

Spring Break is just that — a break. It’s a time to shed any fears or anxieties regarding schoolwork and life to go out and have some fun. It’s worth the money and the effort to plan out some wild trip with your friends for that week and a half we have every March instead of spending it at home idle. Don’t be the columnist who flew home on his Spring Break the same day his grandparents happened to be going on a cruise.

Imagine how that felt.

— Oliver Casey is a sophomore in enterprise management. He can be reached at [email protected].