You wake up from a long night’s slumber and glance down at your phone. It reports back to you that it’s 7:50 a.m. You burrow back into your bed and resume the peaceful snooze the all-too-familiar marimba alarm tone just so rudely interrupted. There’s a stupid, content smile on your face, because you think everything is fine and dandy … until reality bitch-slaps you hard upside your head. Your UGBA discussion is going to start in twenty minutes without you. Not even Berkeley time can save you now.

You now face one of two decisions, but you have to think fast: give up and faceplant into your pillow in defeat? Or be a hero, defy the odds and make it on that attendance sheet? You choose the latter. A surge of adrenaline courses through your veins as you catapult yourself out of bed like someone just lit your sheets on fire. You catch a glance of yourself in the mirror. There’s that crazy look in your eye that only prospective Haas-holes know.

Have no fear. All students, freshmen through seniors, have experienced how being late can throw your entire day into a tailspin of worry, uncertainty and mismatched socks. To help you win your battle against the clock, we have made a list of five tips you can use to redeem yourself.

1. Take a “baby powder shower”

Unfortunately, by waking up late, you have automatically forfeited the proper hygiene privileges reserved for those who are on time. Luckily, there’s an alternative we like to call the “baby powder shower.” Grab a bottle of baby powder, and sprinkle some in the greasy spots on your scalp. Take a brush, and use it to distribute the powder through your hair. Then grab some baby-powder-scented deodorant (or any other scent, but try not to make it nauseating) and apply it liberally. If this all completely horrifies you, please carefully step down from your high horse of principled hygiene. Life’s a crazy place. Sometime you just need to put baby powder all over your body.

2. Dress for the occasion

Ladies, it is a scientific certainty that the best clothing item to wear under these conditions is a dress. It’s a singular piece of cloth that requires zero “outfit-matching” or whatever that 20-minute process is called when we try on five different pants/shirt combinations until we are satisfied enough to walk out of the door. Also, you can laugh smugly to yourself when people tell you, “Oh my god, I love your dress! You look so cute!” when in reality, you haven’t showered in two days. Fellas, feel free to participate in the dress thing, but if it’s not for you, pick up those dirty jeans off the floor and the first T-shirt you lay eyes on.

3. Grab a Clif Bar/Luna Bar

Unfortunately, you have also forfeited a proper balanced breakfast. Apparently, being late is sort of like giving up a lot of your human rights. So you don’t starve to death, have an easily accessible stash of Clif Bars/Luna Bars/whatever your gender identification tells you what kind of bars you should be eating in your backpack.

4. Walk with purpose

Now it’s time to actually get to class. This is no time for a stroll in the park. Really ramp up the mph. If you’re feeling particularly zealous, kill two birds with one stone: Skip the gym later, and take it up to a light jog. Of course, with your backpack on, you’ll look like a complete idiot. But it’s Berkeley. People voluntarily do this kind of thing naked … in our public library.

5. Apply some eighth-grade geometry

Remember when we were bratty middle-schoolers, and we would slyly ask our poor teachers, “When will we actually use this stuff?” The answer is now. Right now. Think back to eighth-grade geometry class. The shortest distance between any two objects is a straight line. One word, five syllables: hypotenuses. If you encounter a square lawn, instead of wasting all that time being polite and walking around its perimeter, think about the lawn as two congruent triangles, and use your good ol’ pal the hypotenuse to cut across it.

Baby powdered from head to toe, dressed to the nines, with a digestive system full of energy bars, walking with a brisk pace and with the power of mathematics by your side, you made it to class on time. Shine on, you crazy diamond. You just leveled up in life.

Image Sources: GIF1, GIF2, GIF3  GIF4, GIF5, Russel James Smith under Creative Commons