Ingredients:

1. 1 You
2. 1 Computer
3. At least 9 Furiously typing fingers
4. 2 Eye bags
5. 1 Slouched back

Instructions:

1. Think of the things that interested you most in the novel that you barely remember reading.
2. Once you have all the materials laid out, think of a thesis. Make sure your thesis is something that is indubitably correct so no one can invalidate your statement but disguise it as something that can be argued.
3. Let a few days pass by during which all you do is plan when to do the essay and not once open the document.
4. The night before the essay is due (unfortunately not the night of because the teacher wickedly made the due date at 15:30 and you cannot function at any time before 22:00), head toward your desk with some brain food, your computer that only has YouTube tabs open, and your book. No need to get your distracting phone. It’ll already be at your desk.
5. Look at the teacher’s rainbow slideshow and all the different ways that you could have started brainstorming what to write about. Free writes, mapping, bullet pointing. Ahh, the sweet sweet brainstorming with the sweet sweet time.
6. No.
7. Now that the lights are dimmed and the moonlight shines a spotlight on the imminent Schoology due date, turn on Essay Mode.
8. Look at your thesis that you wrote 7 days ago when you also made that magnificent plan to write the essay draft over the weekend.
9. Raise your eyebrows at what little evidence you need to prove your thesis because it’s more of a fact than an argument.
10. Use fingers to adjust your eyebrows to shape a more calm-looking facade that covers the inner rage and watery eye ducts and nagging regret about your essay, your writing, your procrastination, your A TUSH class, your cold feet, yourself.
11. Start writing body paragraphs.
12. Don’t forget to do some utterly nonsensical and egregiously overdone analysis to buttress your claim. But you have some close-reading, and that’s all that counts.
13. For the conclusion, copy and paste your thesis, and change all the adjectives with their synonyms that you searched on thesaurus.com. Then, extend your claim to make it loosely relevant to “modern-day society” (your favorite words).
14. Edit your essay. To garnish the essay, ensconce some zippy Membean words. But don’t do too much, or else your essay will become a tad too chunky.
15. To lessen the page number, make all the margins 0.9 inches and customize the spacing to make it 0.9. The font was already set to 11.5 from the beginning, so you can’t decrease that. Those wily eyes are too observant to be fooled.
16. Remind yourself that you have to look at the rubric sometime.

Author’s Note:
At that time, though, your brain food has probably already been extinguished. Sleep Mode is on, all until 15:28 when you wake up, panicked, like a cat witnessing a cucumber, furiously going to the English Schoology page, submitting your essay without looking at the rubric, without checking the MLA format, and without resolving all those hysterical comments you made at 2:44 AM.