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If I had woken up to a mound of stale pizza crusts, empty bags of frozen potstickers and an unfamiliar body passed out on the living room futon on any other morning, I might be in the market for new roommates.

Or an alarm system.

But seeing as we’re smack in the middle of the finals crush, I realized a few moments later that she was a study-group vagabond who just forgot to go home.

That’s a little bizarre, if you think about it. It probably wouldn’t have happened on any normal Thursday – “Hey, lemme crash on your futon, study-buddy” – but finals week is somehow a good excuse to get cozy.

Have to admit, it’s kind of sexy.

Not in the Girls-Gone-Wild kind of way, please. Save that for spring break. (Then again, don’t. GGW is rather passé.)

It’s because finals week is that rare occasion when we university students actually meet with each other to think about things. Smart things, usually. All at once. Together! The combination of immense stress and amateur intellect is contagious.

I love it.

It’s a creepy feeling, when the libraries start filing up, when the Westwood coffee shops are a little busier than normal, when students start wearing sweats to school. And then there was the cloud of anxiety that started brewing last Wednesday.

Part of it is the collective anguish from running on three hours of sleep, six cans of Red Bull and one scrappy page of notes – the unfortunate consequence of sleeping in for nine too many weeks.

Another part is the mental torment from calculating exactly how close to completely acing the final you’ll need to get in order to catch an A – and we all inevitably underestimate. This usually comes from the younger half of the campus; we elders know better than to care about grades.

But we care, too. Just a little bit, maybe.

For just this one twisted week, that promise to cut back on calories just gets blown to hell. It seems you’ll either eat constantly, at every possible opportunity, or you just won’t eat at all. For a week. Until it’s all over and done with. It’s kind of sick.

You know, the swooning aside, I despise the whole arrangement just as much as anyone else. It’s an ugly, miserable experience. But having expected college to be something of a mega think-tank, I still think academic pain is a little sexy.

(The ragged agony of the whole situation doesn’t hurt either.)

It’s as if we’re experimenting with our own intellect, sharpening it a bit, trying it out and then jabbing it back into wherever it came from before someone sees us doing it. Smartness isn’t always a badge of honor around here.

So, I know it’s a once-a-quarter occasion and the only reason it happens – tests – is a less-than-romantic one. But still. Squint your eyes, and you might catch a glimpse of it: UCLA’s looking like a real university these days.

Then, once it’s gone, sell back those books (they never get read afterward; who are you kidding?) and buy yourself a drink to celebrate with the pennies you’ll get in return.

E-mail cjenkins@media.ucla.edu if you’re suffering a severe case of wanderlust, and you have a doctor’s note to prove it.