Impossible, of course: my hair is far too short to be let down.

Since the end of August, I have been both a full time employee and a full time student. With the exception of the two and a half weeks between the end of the fall semester and the start of the January minimester and spring break, I haven’t had much of a break from the unrelenting schedule. And, of course, for one of those few weeks I wasn’t going to class, I was working more to help boost my bank account.

So now classes are over. My final semester as an undergraduate is behind me. And, as you might imagine …

… I want some free time.

There’s a practical side to having a reduced schedule: by keeping three or four weekdays free (working those nights, of course) for various job-search related activities (like, hopefully, “interviews”). Of course, I’ve still got bills to pay, so I can’t get too lazy.

But I can be a little lazy.

(Right after I work twelve hours tomorrow).

When I think of tomorrow lastnot to picture the drunk kid standing in the driveway peeing on his dad’s Porsche while eating a slice of pizza and trying to yell at his friends not to eat the entire pizza before he got back inside.

Thursday, when I returned to Towson in the afternoon for my 4:00 Film & Lit final, I stopped by Dr. Ballengee’s office because a little bird whispered in my ear that she’d been grading our finals from that morning. Indeed she had, and I was surprised to see that despite my lack of studying, I’d gotten a B on it. I’d done much better on the midterm, but Dr. B said she understood that I’d blown studying for the test off — Myth, although an English class, is still a gen-ed. I hope she read the sincerity in my voice when I told her that it was the exam schedule that prevented me from studying for her class: I’d spent all of the previous day (most of it, anyway) preparing for my History of the English Language final. Passing or failing Myth wouldn’t affect my graduation, but it was my second favorite class of the semester, and I regretted being unable to focus more precious studying time on it.

I had a stack of index cards that was, well, pretty damn thick, covering everything from the most miniscule to the most important topics and digressions from class. In addition, I calculated what grade I’d need on the final to pass the class: the final was the third of three tests, each worth 29% of the grade. Class participation and homework counted for the remainding 13% of the grade (Although I expected to recieve the full 13 out of 13, when doing these calculations, I gave myself a three point penalty, just to be on the safe side). Having recieved checks on the first two homework turn-ins (we only turned them in at the test for that session), and having missed only one class the entire semester, what really hurt me was the first test: I scored 61 (17.69% of the total class grade).

It was the phonemic word translations that hurt me so badly — don’t knock me until you’ve tried learning the phonemic alphabet. Not only is it fucking difficult, but it varies from dialect to dialect. You’ve literally got to know the sounds you’re making when you’re pronouncing a word: when you say “woman” and “women”, are you concious that it’s the “wo” you’re pronouncing differently to make that plural distinction?

Of course, by the second third of the class, we’d finished with phonemic translations, and were deeply involved in the history segment of the class. On that test, nearly everyone missed the question about the “Danelaw”, which seems bluntly obvious: the land in England occupied by the Danes. I got it right, and earned a much improved test grade: 87 (25.23% of my grade). I actually found out what I earned on that test before the class: I stopped by Dr. Duncan’s office to find out if we would be getting the tests back that day, and found him entering the scores into his gradebook. I literally danced a jig (a quick, arm-flapping, stupid looking one) in the second floor hallway of Linthicum.

So, with my figures reflecting a total earned of 53.92 points out of 71 total (pre-final), I knew I could score a D on the final and still walk away with a (very) low C. But I didn’t want to just scrape through the class, I really wanted to ace this thing. And so I studied that stack of notecards, and read the chapters of the books, and even went back through my notes, just in the off-chance that something might stick from that which hadn’t from the cards. And I neglected studying for Myth — I could’ve gotten a 40 on my Myth final and still had a C for the class (although my final grade hasn’t yet been posted, I’ve got myself calculated at an 86% for MythMyth to do well in History of the English Language, and I walked out of that final, that oh-so-precious final, confident that I’d done well.

At the end of the final, I wrote a note to Dr. Duncan, asking him to kindly e-mail my grade, if it wasn’t too much trouble. I was one of the first students to fold the test shut and walk to the front. When I handed it over, and verbalized my e-mail request (which he denied, stating the grades would be posted soon), Dr. Duncan asked me if I was graduating (I guess he forgot when I got buzzed and wandered in to his office with the same question). I suppose, if I’d been unsure of how I’d done on the test, I could’ve said “Maybe.” As in, “Maybe, if you throw me a bone.” But I didn’t. I said “Yes.” Because I knew I’d aced the fucking test.

And every hour I’ve been home over the last two days, I’ve logged into Towson’s Online Services to see if my final class grades had been posted. Even “Tradition and Form”, a class for which I took the final last Tuesday, hadn’t had grades posted since the last time I’d checked, late Saturday afternoon. When I got home from a particularly grueling night of work, a “New Message” on MySpace from one of my friends in that class excitedly informed me that Duncan had posted out final grades — she was quite relieved to have passed, and I confidently logged into the website.

The only question, for me, was how well did I do on the final? Well, to earn a C+ for the class (which I did!!!!), coming from where I was (grade- wise), I had to have between 24 and 26 points — meaning, from my admittedly rough calculations, that I scored between an 85 and an 89.

While History of the English Language was the class I put the most effort into this semester, it will also be the class I’ve earned the lowest grade in. However, I can honestly say that an “A” earned in a class not nearly this difficult will not fill me with nearly as much pride as that C+ I studied my brains out for. (And when students talk about “judicious allotment of limited study resources”, this is the shit they’re talking about).