Wednesday, December 5, 2007

What I lerned in colage

Today I attended my very last class of undergraduate school (unless some unforeseeable circumstance arises and I’m forced to take botany over again). Here is a list of things I learned in college.

1) Turning on the passive voice setting on the grammar options for Word is the most annoying thing I’ve ever done. That green squiggly line under every “did go”, “is maintained”, and “was forwarded” almost caused me to throw my laptop though the window this morning.
2) When I’m trying to look casual, I usually look awkward.
3) When I speak in class, I don’t throw up on my feet like I always think I’m going to do.
4) However smart I feel at home is directly proportionate to how stupid I feel in class.
5) Getting through with classes has not eased my anxiety, now I’m a basket case over grad-school.
6) I’m old.
7) How to actually believe the B.S. I write in a paper. I can convince myself of anything now.
8) My hand starts to shake when I hold it in the air too long.
9) Witty banter is not my forte.
10) That the piece of plastic that clips a Bic mechanical pencil to your shirt pocket breaks very easily.
11) That when people bring food to class I’m usually too worried that food will dribble out of my mouth to actually eat any.
12) That when you try to say something funny and people just look at you with a confused look on their face, what you said wasn’t funny.
13) A lot of adult students complain.
14) A lot of traditional students skip class
15) Occasionally a student will show up drunk to class, no matter if he is a traditional or an adult student.
16) That when I have a day where class makes me feel smaller than a bug, writing a post usually helps.
17) That if I can’t be a creative genius all the time, then life ain’t worth a damn.
18) That I don’t know how to spell genius (but spell-check does). Officially, you can’t be a genius unless you know how to spell genius—so scratch #17.
19) I lack confidence.
20) Singing the confidence song from “The Sound of Music” doesn’t help, it just makes me feel creepy.
21) Without spell-check and my dog, I would have flunked out.
22) Never look at your transcripts from when you were an eighteen-year-old punk.
23) Applying to grad-school is like trying to work your way out of burlap sack in order to play a sonata on a piano in another state.
24) Every professor I had here was awesome in one way or another, even the one who gave us a study guide for an exam and put none of the questions on the actual exam.
25) That I would rather write history than lit. theory.
26) To love postmodernism (sigh).
27) That at this school, for the first time in my life, I might be considered a conservative—but I’m not dammit!
28) That film classes are not an easy way to pass the time and earn some credits. They can be tortuously dull.
29) That any school where you spend a week discussing “The Big Lebowski” is a school I’d be proud to graduate from.
30) That sometimes it’s alright to end a sentence with a preposition.
31) That the sun just came out and I feel better!

8 comments:

Unknown said...

God, I feel you on the film classes one - I made that mistake once and needed copious amounts of caffeine to stay awake. Congrats on the end of undergraduate!

Anonymous said...

I loved these. Unfortunately I'll have to end my comment here as I arrived full of enthusiasm only to find that Courtney had said exactly, almost word for word, what I was intending to. Isn't that something else that could be incorporated into your list?

Litlove

IM said...

Courtney, I took 3(!) of them. Talk about being a glutton for punishment. But the cult film class had its moments.

Here's one Litlove. #32 When you think you have something brilliant to say in class someone will invariably say it right before you.

Jeremiah Paddock said...

Bravo. You're my hero.

IM said...

Jeremy, Yes! Hero status--always a good thing. And thanks for turning me on to post-humanism, now I'm not paranoid that my computer is out to destroy me, only that I'm as annoying to it as it is to me.

Froshty said...

I'm sorry to admit that my film classes were thoroughly enjoyable, but they really were, especially my History of Film class, even though I studied like heck for it and got a B while my now ex-husband cruised in and took the exam after staying out all night drinking and got an A. I'm still depressed about that and it was 26 years ago.

Emily Barton said...

Congratulations! And I only took one film class in college called "Cinema as an Art Form." Saw some great, great movies ("A Clockwork Orange," "Being There," "Mad Max"), but the classes themselves were boring as hell.

IM said...

I think the problem was that I took three. The first one was alright, but my film viewing has decreased dramatically since finishing the last one.