It’s that time of year again. Yes, that’s right, time to dust off the books you haven’t opened since you made the pledge at the beginning of the semester to make straight A’s, write your three week overdue essay and only have a six pack before your 7:30 a.m. final.
Shouldn’t the term “dead week” apply to finals instead of the week before?
Then again, given that we receive our grades the week after, maybe it would be more appropriate for the first week back home.
In all seriousness, however, these two weeks will probably be the hardest fortnight I’ve experienced up till this point in my life (to be exceeded only in 2014 when, strapped for cash again, I’ll have agreed to be the quarry in the reality TV show “Man: the Greatest Hunt of them All”).
So for the rest of you whose scholarship is on the line, my advice is to bury your nose in your books and pray.
But I won’t dwell on that. It’s as a famous woman, far greater than I will ever be, once said, “It is what it is, move on.”
Instead, I’d like to take this last column for the semester to reflect on all the good things in life, at least in mine.
First, the professors. For those of you who have had the misfortune of having absent minded educational incompetents trying to drone over the collective snores of your classmates, I feel for you. That’s what chemistry was like for me in high school.
Most of the professors I’ve met here actually give a damn. True they might actually listen to NPR on their drive over and haven’t heard a new song since around the time Crosby, Stills, and Nash added Neil Young, but they also know more than we give them credit.
Indeed, I owe the fact that I’m fighting for my scholarship now instead of parking cars full time to several of the greatest pedagogues in the former Confederate States.
Among them are Dr. James Hardy, a man who is everything I imagined a great professor would be and then some.
He, like his contemporary, Dr. Jim Borck in the English department, are always there for students, lenient when it comes to that great imprecise science of grades, and more interesting to listen to than Radiohead’s entire catalogue.
Still, one mustn’t forget those fighting in the educational trenches.
I owe my grades and sanity to women like Karen Powell, Dorothy McCaughey and Allison Roark, who all went above and beyond the call of duty to impart their love of their subjects to sleep deprived students.
It’d be a damn shame to lose these types of people to ‘modernization’ or whatever they’re calling the massacre of talent in the Master Plan.
My friends too, have always been there for me, in the good and the bad.
Hell, I probably wouldn’t be writing this column today if it weren’t for them, seeing that I’d still be wandering around New Orleans somewhere looking for St. Charles.
So thanks Eric, Oneal, Laura, Ethan, Betsy, Brad, et al. What would I have done without you guys?
I also know that I complain a lot about this country. Well, that’s not going to change. Things are pretty bad now and they’re only getting worse as the days turn into weeks.
I don’t have the energy or space to even bother commenting on the war in Iraq, except to say that the causalities have reached, as I write this, 742, and will most likely reach 1000 by the time we get back to school.
Lastly, I’d just like to thank my parents. You guys have stood by me and supported me even in these rough times.
The little that I am all comes from you guys, and I love you both very much.
Good luck to everyone on their finals, and we’ll all meet up again next semester.