Subject:

Subject: FINALly over

Date: 18 Dec 97 19:40:02 GMT

From: bg19354@binghamton.edu.NoMoReDaMnSpAm (Nully Fydyan)

Organization: Church of the Ungendered Yeti

Newsgroups: alt.slack

My finals are over, and it would be a shame not to share some of that

excruciating experience with you. Of course, now that it's over I can say

it was all pretty funny, and I really did try to make it seem funny at the

time. I failed, but I really tried.

I studied for something like 50 hours for my French final. It was all I

did for four days (if you exclude bitching about French and avoiding

studying and taking long study breaks with the chick who lives

downstairs). The final was 40% of the semester grade. Why? I don't

rightly know, but probably for the same reason that we just learned the

subjunctive tense. In my first semester French class. If you're familiar

with learning languages, you probably know the subjunctive usually isn't

taught until at least the third year. So we don't know how to conjugate

-ir verbs, but we sure can use the subjunctive. My teacher for the class

was a grad student a year younger than I, who decided to leave the school

after this semester. I don't think she really cared how any of us did,

which may explain why there was stuff on the final we haven't seen since

September. How often, unless one is a Japanese tourist, do you need to

know the word "camcorder" in a foreign language? I didn't know it, but

there it was on the final. And now I shall never forget "camescope".

Same with "stade", which for those of you not in the know (as I certainly

wasn't) means stadium. Among the other fun bits on the test was a

paragraph I think I wrote entirely in the wrong tense, though I'm not

actually sure, because the question was in French, and employed words I

SWEAR I've never seen before. I can't even look them up, cause I don't

remember what they were. Oh, I also had someone accidently commandeer the

subway. For some reason my teacher didn't think that was plausable, and

was sure I meant to use the word take. Which I did, but could she be

*sure* of that?

The good part about my French final: I've been talking to a latent in my

class about "Bob" for most of the semester. She and I sit in the front

row, and the teacher, who's pink but still has a sense of humor (hell, we

did watch Le Noel de Mickey on the last day of class) has also got to hear

quite a bit about "Bob", as did a couple of people who sit near us. I was

saying that I wanted to bring "Bob" to the final for luck (and I did

actually have tBotSG on my desk - not that it helped) and my teacher joked

she'd put "Bob" IN the final. So there we were, doing the listening

comprehension, and she starts reading the next section. "Le apartement de

"Bob"". I laughed so hard I missed the entire paragraph, but they read

them each 3 times, so I caught it the next time around. It was pretty

obvious which of the few people in the class got the joke by where the

pencils dropped. By the way, you should hear "Bob" with a French accent.

It kind of sounds like a sound a frog would make.

I was exempted out of one of my philosophy finals, so I actually only had

one other (there's no final in creative writing). Unfortunately, it was

the *easy* philosophy class for which I don't have to take the final (or

I'd be taking it tomorrow), so I still had the final for my Descartes,

Hume, and Kant class. That was yesterday. It was a cummulative final, so

he could ask us anything about any of the philosophers, both independently

and comparitavely. And he did. There were 6 essays to do it 2 hours, and

3 of the essays had 4 parts each. For some of the questions, I had no

idea what was going on. Sometimes I didn't even understand the question.

I felt like I spent most of the final making stuff up.

I actually skipped one of the questions, "Compare and contrast

transcendental deduction with demonstration.", because I had no idea what

the hell it was talking about. When I went to hand the exam in to the TA

(the prof was long since gone) she told me to go back and write

_something_ for that question. I told her I couldn't, and she said "Think

of it in terms of Descartes' and Kant's views of a priori knowledge."

Once she said it that way, I actually understood the question, and could

write on it. I'm not sure if I wrote about it correctly, but at least I

wrote about it.

Question #5 may have been my favorite: You look for your pen so you can

answer this question, and find it on the right hand corner of your desk.

You pick it up. How would Hume and Kant explain the experience of your

pen? -- I kid you not. This was further comlicated by the fact that the

exam was in a miniature lecture hall with these tiny desks, you know, the

kind that are attached to the chairs. And the desks were, for some

unknown reason, shaped like cheese wedges. So, I automatically looked for

my pen on the right hand corner of my desk, and realized that my desk did

not HAVE a right hand corner. I spent the next few minutes pondering

this, for it made more sense than most of the test. I had difficulty with

the experience of my pen, since I was gnawing on the cap at that point,

and imagined my pen wasn't having a very good time of it.

After the exam I spoke to someone who said, for the refutation of

idealism, he wrote, "I don't believe idealism, which states that

everything is in the mind, because if everything was in the mind I

wouldn't have severe writer's cramp right now." At least he explicated. I

didn't even bother explicating. I was just giving up.

And now I don't care. Cause it's over. It's finally, finally over. And

I get a month of vacation. During which I will go home to the folks and

work at my old job at the record store for two weeks (they desperately

need experience X-mas help). Retail during the Christmas season. I can

feel a hate-on forming already.

During finals I was struck with one little bit of wisdom, which helped me

make it through. Finals were invented by a Rogue. They must have been --

no one other than a rogue would have been able to generate that great a

slack vacuum over that large an area. And once I knew a rogue did it, it

was a lot easier to understand the sheer insanity of it all. Fuck the

pinks -- let's kill all the Rogues.

Rev. Nully Fydyan

Church of the Ungendered Yeti

"NO! NO! THAT YO-YO IS A NO-NO FOR BOBO!" -- MegaLiz