Finals Week: Days Three and Four Plus Results

Finals Week, Day Two

     This day was challenging, to put it lightly. I started my day by oversleeping and having to take a rushed shower. Then I slung everything I needed into my messenger bag and ran out of the house without breakfast. I was five minutes late for my geography final, which is about how late I've been for the class every day.  The test wasn't too hard. 40 multiple choice questions, 9 matching questions, and six written ones. I finished it with an hour to spare and headed off to the library to return books before the semester ended and I was stuck with a pile of books and a hit put on me by angry librarians.

     As I made my merry way to the library, disaster struck. I stepped on a tree root(oak, if anyone cares) and my foot slipped off. I escaped physical injury, but my nice, new flip-flop was ruined. The strap ripped right out of the left side, forcing me to hobble along halfway across campus to the library. After returning books, I hobbled down the street to the science building, where I took my flip-flops off and ran around like an overly-tall hobbit.

     Since I had an hour to go until my forensics final, I took advantage of the school's campus-wide wifi to go online and download Doctor Who episoudes. Then I went and took my final. It went pretty smoothly. Then I hurried home, stopping only at the public library to pick up a stack of books to replace the ones from the campus library. And thus the second day ended.

Finals Week, Day One

     Today I only had one final and it was the easiest and most fun one. British Lit, of course. I got to sleep in today, since the final didn't start until 12:30. I did go about an hour early, so I could print off my extra credit papers and the report part of my research project on the Cold War. You might wonder what the Cold War has to do with British Lit, but I was able to tie it in with George Orwell's book Animal Farm. Good book, by the way.

     Anyway, I was almost late for the final because it took longer than I thought to format everything. Documents don't transfer well from Wordpad to whatever Microsoft word processor program it is they have on the computers in the computer labs at school. I couldn't run to class either, because I was carrying two plates of homemade oatmeal cookies in my tote bag and I didn't want to arrive to class with a plateful of cookie crumbs. I wasn't horrifically late though, just a few minutes and there were people later than me.

     Besides turning in papers today, we were also turning answers to embedded questions. The English department came up with an incredibly daft list of questions that our prof had to ask us to test our reading comprehension. I say they were daft because they didn't ask anything about the content of what we read. Example: Name two poets who wrote in English after 1950. We ended up conspiring to answer with really ridiculous answers. My reply to that question I cited was Dr. Seus and J. R. R. Tolkien. On another one, they asked what a dramatic monologue was and give an example and author's name. I answered, "It's a poem with somebody talking". My example was "My Last Duchess"(which is correct) by Mr. Elizabeth Barret Browning(it should be Robert Browning, but he was more famous for being her husband for awhile than he was for his own poetry). The guy I always sit with said he put Tina Turner down on the poets after 1950 question. He and I are always doing goofy stuff like that.

     There were still three people who still had to do their oral presentations. One girl did a video featuring her mother as June Cleaver and her little brother as Beaver. She even shot it in black in white. My favorite part was when "June" said that they were having a casserole for supper which she described as "Yesterday's leftovers combined with today's ingredients." Then another girl did one on the 60s. She played a Beatles song at one point, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. Of course, we scholars at the back table found this song hilarious, especially since she'd just been talking about LSD trips. We had the one girl at the table who was trying to be serious just about suffocating from trying to stifle the laughter. If you've ever heard the song, you know what I mean. It's so weird, it has to have been written while they were on drugs. Afterwards, the other guy at my table drew a picture of our prof in the sky, with diamonds and gave it to her for her refrigerator. It's a wonder she was able to teach this semester, considering how often we made her laugh.

     After the presentation were over, we finally got to the main item on the agenda, reading a play. The play was titled "The Real Inspector Hound" and it was a spoof of the mystery novels from the early part of the century, especially Agatha Christie. It's really a play within a play. Two theatre critics, Birdboot and Moon are watching a mystery play and gradually they become apart of the play, taking over the roles of two integral characters. I was hoping to get the part of one of the critic parts, but I ended up with Major Magnus Muldoon(the crippled half-brother of Lord Muldoon, who disappeared ten years before the play begins), a character in the play inside the play. I didn't have many lines at the start, but I like to think I had some of the best ones. My favorite was the repeated use of "Well, I think I'll go and oil my gun." And then in the end, I reveal myself to have not one, not two, but three secret indentities and I was the villain of the piece. And I still got the girl.

We had so much fun reading the play. We had exactly the right number of guys for the male roles, but one guy backed out, so one of the girls had to take Birdboot's role. One of my favorite parts was when Birdboot is shot. She didn't realize Birdboot was dead, so  she whispered "Dr.        , am I dead?" about six lines later. When the prof whispered yes, she collapsed backward onto the table. It was hilarious.

So my first final was a success. Just hope the next one goes as well.

Weird Events and Geekiness

Friday was an exciting day on campus. I arrived early(for once) for my intro to geography class and was puzzled by the fact the classroom was nearly deserted. A lot of people cut class on Fridays, but only ten students showing up when normally there's around twenty-five was more than a little odd. Next, I headed over to the cafe/deli in the student union annex to take advantage of the lovely 56 megabytes per second wireless internet. I once again noticed a severe lack of students. I stayed there until it was getting close to time for my British Lit class, then bought myself a bagel dog and some Earl Grey to snack on in class. I hurried over to the class and quickly found out that there had been some sort of threat made against the school. Maybe half of the students showed up for British Lit and so we ended up goofing off for fifty minutes instead of having class. We did read Elizabeth Barrett Browning's How Do I Love Thee poem (which is unbearably cheesy), but were quickly sidetracked when a few of the students started working on translating the poem into Spanish. There was much joking about locking the door to keep homicidal maniacs out and we actually did do that and forced latecomers to knock and put their faces up to the little window so we could ID them. Like I said, we were being goofy.

Turns out, I had several emails sitting in my student email account inbox informing me of the threat, but because I didn't check my email the day before, I missed the warning. If someone had actually planned something, they made a big mistake letting people know about it in advance, because the cops descended onto the campus in full force. We even had two SWAT teams running around the place, I found out later.

In other news(probably only person reading this blog will care about this, but I'm excited), I picked up the latest Adventures of Spider-Man. I wasn't sure if I would even enjoy the book anymore since they changed history and eliminated MJ's and Peter's marriage, but surprisingly, it's really good. The stories aren't as dark and there's a possibility that MJ is actually a superhero in this reality. I always thought it would be cool if she were a superhero and could team up with Peter.

My British Lit midterm was posted online last week. Mostly it's identifying poems and writing about the significance of the quoted passage, but the last quarter of the test is an essay question. Of the seven possible essay I can pick from, I chose the one where I have to take either Frankenstein, Christabel, or The Eve of St. Agnes and recast it with cartoon characters and retell it. I chose to recast Christabel with the Teen Titans. My working title is ChristaRaven or How to Fragment a Classic Poem. That's kind of a ripoff of the title Bunnyraven or How to Make a Titanimal Disappear from Season Three of Teen Titans. I'm hoping she'll read us the others if anybody else does the recasting thing, since I'm sure they're going to be funny.

Currently Reading Pride and Prejudice (Bantam Classics) By Jane Austen see related

It's been a month since school started. So far all of my classes are going well. I've only had two tests so far; both in biology. I got an A on the first and a B on the second. I actually did much better than the class average, which is really weird. All I've been studying for the tests is my notes from the lecture and printoffs of the Powerpoint slides. I've barely cracked the book open. Everyone else is complaining that they have to read the book because the test material isn't in the lecture. I'm beginning to wonder if we're somehow not attending the same lecture.

I really like my British Lit class. We're still working on the Romantic period. We started on Lord Byron Friday. Thanks to Strange & Norrell, I actually knew something about him. I think I read some of his poetry in high school since I remember learning about the Byronic hero, but other than that, I don't remember much. I decided I didn't much like Wordsworth. Coleridge is pretty good though. After we read his poem Christabel, I wondered if the villainous vampire in it might have somewhat inspired the LotGK.

Geography is still boring. I will be glad when I'm through with that class.

My Orientation to Forensics class is awesome! We're meeting now in the partially completed crime lab on campus. First test is Tuesday, but the professor said he's taking the test questions from the review questions at the end of each chapter.

I really like my biology lab. Especially the microscopes.

That's all for now.