Why me?

Ok, this is hopefully one of very very very few downer entries...I'm just feeling a bit lonely, a little homesick, and a lot overburdened.

I spent hours this weekend working on papers and studying and researching...nobody esle seemed to. I haven't seen my room mate since Thursday afternoon. She's practically living with her boyfriend (she comes in during the day to get changes of clothing) and I don't know when or if she's doing her homework. I feel like I'm working 10 times harder than anyone else around me at this whole college thing. Even now, some of the girls next door are supposed to be doing an essay for their freshman seminar class but their study time has somehow degraded into ordering pizza and talking about movies. I don't begrudge them this...more power to them, I say. But why do I end up working so hard?

My mom keeps telling me that if I'm working ten times as hard as everyone esle then I'm learning ten times as much. That's great...I mean, I love learning (yeah, I'm nerdy like that), but I can't help but feel at least a little bit cheated. I mean, you know what you call a guy who gets all C's in med school? Doctor.

Normally this sort of thing doesn't bother me. I'm not a competitive person by any means. I don't really care what the other students are doing with their tuition money. More than anything, I think I feel lied to...by all those grownups that say college is easy and fun and not nearly as hard as high school.

I guess the biggest problem is that I can't do anything to change this. I've thought about it, too. What would it be like if I started acting like my room mate? If I started ignoring homework in favor of "The OC" or went out partying on the weekends? What if I didn't feel any sort of guilt about being late or even skipping class?

Maybe it doesn't even have to be that extreme, I told myself. What if instead of working for 3 hours on editing the rough draft of my paper (ok, side note, the way I write papers if I have to change one thing I might as well re-write the whole stinking paper...which is pretty much what happened) I only glanced over it, fixed the typos, and turned it in. I only need a B average, I told myself, to keep my scholarship.

None of it worked. I'm sure if I really tried, I could cut back on all this work, but I'd still feel crappy about it, to adopt a crude phrase. You guys know me. You probably know me better than anyone else ever will. I'm not normally this discouraged...I rely on my own general sense of optimism to get me through the day (and the hell that is peer review), but it's failing me right now and I don't know how to fix it. I think I'm broken.

Any advice?