Monday, May 12, 2008

WHY WON'T IT STOP RAINING?

In improv yesterday, I got to be a zombie and superman and I got to throw up on stage and pretend to lick someone. Improv is fun.

This is maybe just superstitious, but I think before I can be good on stage I have to fail first. I secretly suspect most people are like this. You need to freeze up and have a completely wooden, boring scene, just so next time you get up, you can be like, "fuck it, it can't get any worse than that disaster," and just play without overthinking things.

Hopefully, flights don't get delayed too badly and I make it to class next Sunday. Three hours of getting the fuck ups out of our systems immediately prior to the showcase will help a lot.

Friday, May 9, 2008

finals

As my buddies still in school suffer through finals week, I'm feeling oddly reminiscent about my own stressful final exam/paper experiences.

My senior year, the last night of reading period, I moved my entire life into the computer science lounge. I had a 20 page philosophy paper to write, and I had not even started the research. After I skimmed through about 10 library books, I came up with a sort of thesis, but it was based on a computer science class I'd taken the previous semester, and only one of the books I'd skimmed was actually helpful.

So I went to the previous class's website, pulled up all the online journal articles we'd read, and tried pulling some quotes from that.

Still, I needed more. I thought I could find something useful in the Computer Science class's textbook, but a friend and I had shared one book, since it's not like anyone actually ever did the reading in computer science classes, and I had no idea where it was. At that point, it was around midnight, so I couldn't go knocking on her door to see if it was in her room, but I had vague memories of us leaving it on the grand piano in the living room many months before, so I made the walk back to my house to see if it was still there. It wasn't.

I freaked out for a while, and then pulled myself together and found the paper I'd written for that class. Sure enough, there were quotes from the textbook. I plugged them into google, and figured out that with a little ingenuity, I could use the "look inside" feature on Amazon to get what I needed.

And then, I put on some music (NPR All Songs Considered. Perfect for getting into a trance-like state.), and stared to type. I have no attention span, so every paragraph or so, I'd award myself with a nytimes.com article.

When I was about 3/4 of the way done, my all-nighter compatriot in the lab informed me sunrise was coming (apparently he procrastinated by reading weather.com? it's not like there were windows in the lab), so I went outside to watch it rise. I picked up the newspaper delivered to the science building door and scanned the headlines. I'd already read them all.

I walked to higher ground (near the campus center) to get a better view of the sun. Then, the sprinklers went on and I decided to run through them. Finally, I went back to the lab and pounded out the rest of the paper. What a piece of shit. But I finished the damn thing and somehow managed an A in the class. Possibly because my professor cared even less than I did.

ah, school. why am I seriously considering going back next year?