There's nothing like the end of a college semester to remind a perpetual student and newbie teacher of the truth of the second law of thermodynamics.

I'm no Bill Nye, to be sure. I think I took physics in high school once, but only long enough to discover that it's much easier to carve "Ozzy Rules" on the Formica top of a detention-room desk than a hard science-lab table.

In any case, somewhere along the line, the apricot pit that serves as the left side of my brain saw fit to retain the idea that everything in the universe eventually moves toward dissolution, disorganization and chaos.

I believe the proper term is entropy, and it has something to do with heat transfer and the ability to produce work and the degradation of usable energy to unusable energy and, uh ... SparkNotes, please.

Fine, I don't fully understand the concept and all of its implications (and please, science nerds, do not e-mail me your definitions. It's embarrassing when my eyes glaze over at work). But what little I grasp seems readily apparent as this interminable semester wheezes to an overdue end.

My English classes, once full of bright-eyed freshmen, are now a M.A.S.H. ward of overwrought, sleep-deprived wrecks pleading dying grandmas, glitchy computers, flat tires and mysterious illnesses in an effort to wring a few days of deadline reprieve. Term papers start brilliantly and peter into page-long block quotes and unintelligible text-message-style rambling. Desperate late-night e-mailers forget not just the attachment, but the message itself.

Can't say I'm doing so great, either. Entropy is increasing; my transfer of heat to cooler surroundings is rapid.

At home, I tiptoe through stacks of ungraded papers and newspapers containing stories I barely recall writing. I haven't cleaned since Christmas break, and the only clear spaces on the floor are such because they're drying from my diabetic cat's latest bladder indiscretion.

And each day it seems harder and harder to get moving and stay moving.

The rules of entropy account for this, reasoning that the universe itself seeks a state of balance in which all energy is uniformly distributed. At this point, with no imbalances to be corrected in the form of work, work itself ceases.

Upon further review, I guess I do love science.