WHEN I GET A LOW GRADE ON A PAPER, I:
So, so, ok. Get this. I'm sad.
(Hello, journal. You will be the symbolic, tiny, little cotton-comforter-hot-choco-musical-movies existence enshrinement, and I will put the sadness on a pedestal and cocoon it with all good, hopeful things, cushions of comfortability, and I will fan it with palm fronds. I mean, in the space of this journal entry I will wank about the sadness as much as I want to, because I have to reconcile the disappointment into inspiration and also, I must premise the hell out of everything.)
I got a C on a paper that's 15% of a 2-unit lab course. It was Psychological Testing - Lab, and I am, as of yet, unused to getting C's for English papers. Or psych papers. I mean, B's disappoint me (actually, most everything disappoints me) because I tend to do these things weeks in advance, make preliminary drafts and plans for my own enjoyment, and work up the inspiration and excitement of OMG-I-GET-TO-BE-GRADED-FOR-SOMETHING-I-DO-FOR-FUN at least a month before), and usually, I get A's. That makes me sound like a smug douche bag, but I like working hard for these things, and even when I'm working hard, I try to work as best as I can, and logically, more often than now, they pay off, you know?
Except now, that is.
So, imagine my disappointment (actually, don't, because it is an embarrassingly huge amount disproportionate to the usual size you'd associate with papers, or roughly a paper that's 0.3 units in an 18-unit term, [I know that because the fifth thing I did upon receiving the grade was compute for its weight]) when I get my paper back and my professor was just standing there with this really stiff, but lip-shivering expression (comes of being anal but intense, or something; I swear when he gets pissed) and saying, "...and Tasie, it was very, very rough. Very troubling..." like I'd just invented cancer or something. I mean. I was, like, O.K., I was sort of expecting to get not-good results (while I try to put in more than enough time and constantly, try to do my best, I really, really suck at instructions; I think there's always a way around them, that they're suggestions the teachers are waiting for you to break -- I feel almost obligated to disprove them, and well, that tells you about my level of acculturation and sense of self-preservation and conscientiousness, and I am rambling, see, this is what happens in these situations [basically, I wrote a lab report when I should have written a narrative, considering that I was making a case study of a human being]) but did he have to say it like, "you shot a stone at the moon with a sling-shooter and now it's smashing into the earth and humanity will be wiped out because of you," or something equally ridiculous but troubling, did he have to look so disturbed saying "very, very rough"? IT'S A PAPER. I WOULDN'T ACTUALLY BE FEELING THIS TERRIBLE ABOUT IT IF MY TEACHER HADN'T LOOKED SO FATALISTIC.
So.
And, and the weather is smashing hot. I keep on waking up at 5 am with asthma wheezes, so I have to either nebulize/drink tablets, and my rhinitis is getting worsened by sleeping 4 hours a night and I sneeze wherever I go, and also my eye-allergies kick in when the sneezing does, and I've had a cold-related-headache all week now. My kidney stones are the ones giving me the least grief, on a day-to-day basis.
That is, I feel kind of bad, you know? And then this paper comes along.
And you know the crazy thing about this is, when I feel bad I have to make a thousand other qualifications for good and bad, then I have to make value judgments like is it good to feel good about this, or would it be better to feel bad? why are you so self-centered anyway?, and then I have to think that maybe I should count my blessings and all, because God has been awesome and is forever going to be and your soul will be breathless trying to keep up with how great He is, and then I think, but then, does that mean that I discredit the fact that these things are bad and that I have bad feelings about these things, and then I think, what does that make me, in-denial/crackpotty/maladaptively-idealistic and it goes mushroom-smoke-shaped from there, booming quite slowly under the fuse of a firefly's butt going off near an atomic bomb (of thoughts and feelings, I am so hyperbolic) and this mushroom-cloud-ball of flame and smoke rises up to be more complicated than anything and wouldn't you know, you've lost 30 minutes you could've used to fix that draft for the final submission, next Monday?
Have I said that? I got a C on the draft. On one hand, it's 0.3 units, and on the other, its a draft. There is Yet, Still Hope, and More Than That, a Need for It.
Let me write a poem to express the utter ridiculousness of the situation, and the thought processes it engenders:
coconuts.
start with the word coconuts.
innocuous, non-evaluative. simple.
a coconut can fall, a coconut is brown.
a coconut can drop on your head and crack open,
or it can crack your head open and you
will die, maybe. a coconut that will crack
you head open will fall at the same rate as
Newton's apple, only since this is your story
and this is not a vacuum, it can end up as
Tasie's Garden Death-trap.
a coconut can feed you or cheer you up
or let you write a poem, or it can kill you.
a coconut can be anything if you look at it through
a sphere, which makes it all wonky and has a thousand
continuous lenses for lack of sides.
You see, it never actually matters what the event is,
what the impetus or spark or situation is:
coconuts are coconuts and they describe
an original thing, but original things have repercussions,
and usually reprecussions last longer than the impetus
(spheres are non-discrete; they are continuous, see,
they provide endless points of view and lines of thought
when you look at things through them)
everything has a repercussion.
and the repercussion, or whatever it is that makes it all
very hard to chronologically and logically
describe a day, is what what jumps up
at the end to bite you in the arse. that is, the coconut does indeed exist
quite simply hanging there from the tree,
but because you have paid attention to it
suddenly your vision of it is shot through with gold,
or something that sounds equally confusing.
do you see the point? you can say anything
about the coconut. you can say about the coconut, "you are
not actually a coconut." the point is, spheres are always round
and therefore have no corners, no sides, no points, and whatever you look at with them
coconuts or otherwise, they vision will be too pluralistic
to contain.
Have I expressed myself sufficiently enough?
I must confess to being in doubt. (Writing is dangerous that way, see).
ETA: I mean basically, so much of what I think I understand is incoherent. There is no order anymore to what I am trying to say and do and think and feel. If I must focus on something, let me focus on the end of each written word. There's a really, really slow buildup of the crazy (I am of course, not serious) at the back of my head, but when I end it, please let it behave and agree that ok, I am ending. There's no putting a stop to these words and these thoughts, and every day I live with the headache, which might be actual or which I just imagine to use as an excuse. Even if I write the most word-vomit-y poems, they never actually ascertain what arguments I might propose in resistance to, well, the stimulus. Reality's stimulus. I am aware that this might sound crazy, but I think it's the words talking, not me.
Does that sound crazy? Someone, someone, maybe I, should wikipedia who Sapir and Whorf are. Maybe they have the right answers, or even, I don't know, syntax-error checking blades to sharpen the excess words into coherence. I don't know. Ouch. It's so hot outside, I think its the radiation.
(Hello, journal. You will be the symbolic, tiny, little cotton-comforter-hot-choco-musical-movies existence enshrinement, and I will put the sadness on a pedestal and cocoon it with all good, hopeful things, cushions of comfortability, and I will fan it with palm fronds. I mean, in the space of this journal entry I will wank about the sadness as much as I want to, because I have to reconcile the disappointment into inspiration and also, I must premise the hell out of everything.)
I got a C on a paper that's 15% of a 2-unit lab course. It was Psychological Testing - Lab, and I am, as of yet, unused to getting C's for English papers. Or psych papers. I mean, B's disappoint me (actually, most everything disappoints me) because I tend to do these things weeks in advance, make preliminary drafts and plans for my own enjoyment, and work up the inspiration and excitement of OMG-I-GET-TO-BE-GRADED-FOR-SOMETHING-I-DO-FOR-FUN at least a month before), and usually, I get A's. That makes me sound like a smug douche bag, but I like working hard for these things, and even when I'm working hard, I try to work as best as I can, and logically, more often than now, they pay off, you know?
Except now, that is.
So, imagine my disappointment (actually, don't, because it is an embarrassingly huge amount disproportionate to the usual size you'd associate with papers, or roughly a paper that's 0.3 units in an 18-unit term, [I know that because the fifth thing I did upon receiving the grade was compute for its weight]) when I get my paper back and my professor was just standing there with this really stiff, but lip-shivering expression (comes of being anal but intense, or something; I swear when he gets pissed) and saying, "...and Tasie, it was very, very rough. Very troubling..." like I'd just invented cancer or something. I mean. I was, like, O.K., I was sort of expecting to get not-good results (while I try to put in more than enough time and constantly, try to do my best, I really, really suck at instructions; I think there's always a way around them, that they're suggestions the teachers are waiting for you to break -- I feel almost obligated to disprove them, and well, that tells you about my level of acculturation and sense of self-preservation and conscientiousness, and I am rambling, see, this is what happens in these situations [basically, I wrote a lab report when I should have written a narrative, considering that I was making a case study of a human being]) but did he have to say it like, "you shot a stone at the moon with a sling-shooter and now it's smashing into the earth and humanity will be wiped out because of you," or something equally ridiculous but troubling, did he have to look so disturbed saying "very, very rough"? IT'S A PAPER. I WOULDN'T ACTUALLY BE FEELING THIS TERRIBLE ABOUT IT IF MY TEACHER HADN'T LOOKED SO FATALISTIC.
So.
And, and the weather is smashing hot. I keep on waking up at 5 am with asthma wheezes, so I have to either nebulize/drink tablets, and my rhinitis is getting worsened by sleeping 4 hours a night and I sneeze wherever I go, and also my eye-allergies kick in when the sneezing does, and I've had a cold-related-headache all week now. My kidney stones are the ones giving me the least grief, on a day-to-day basis.
That is, I feel kind of bad, you know? And then this paper comes along.
And you know the crazy thing about this is, when I feel bad I have to make a thousand other qualifications for good and bad, then I have to make value judgments like is it good to feel good about this, or would it be better to feel bad? why are you so self-centered anyway?, and then I have to think that maybe I should count my blessings and all, because God has been awesome and is forever going to be and your soul will be breathless trying to keep up with how great He is, and then I think, but then, does that mean that I discredit the fact that these things are bad and that I have bad feelings about these things, and then I think, what does that make me, in-denial/crackpotty/maladaptively-idealistic and it goes mushroom-smoke-shaped from there, booming quite slowly under the fuse of a firefly's butt going off near an atomic bomb (of thoughts and feelings, I am so hyperbolic) and this mushroom-cloud-ball of flame and smoke rises up to be more complicated than anything and wouldn't you know, you've lost 30 minutes you could've used to fix that draft for the final submission, next Monday?
Have I said that? I got a C on the draft. On one hand, it's 0.3 units, and on the other, its a draft. There is Yet, Still Hope, and More Than That, a Need for It.
Let me write a poem to express the utter ridiculousness of the situation, and the thought processes it engenders:
coconuts.
start with the word coconuts.
innocuous, non-evaluative. simple.
a coconut can fall, a coconut is brown.
a coconut can drop on your head and crack open,
or it can crack your head open and you
will die, maybe. a coconut that will crack
you head open will fall at the same rate as
Newton's apple, only since this is your story
and this is not a vacuum, it can end up as
Tasie's Garden Death-trap.
a coconut can feed you or cheer you up
or let you write a poem, or it can kill you.
a coconut can be anything if you look at it through
a sphere, which makes it all wonky and has a thousand
continuous lenses for lack of sides.
You see, it never actually matters what the event is,
what the impetus or spark or situation is:
coconuts are coconuts and they describe
an original thing, but original things have repercussions,
and usually reprecussions last longer than the impetus
(spheres are non-discrete; they are continuous, see,
they provide endless points of view and lines of thought
when you look at things through them)
everything has a repercussion.
and the repercussion, or whatever it is that makes it all
very hard to chronologically and logically
describe a day, is what what jumps up
at the end to bite you in the arse. that is, the coconut does indeed exist
quite simply hanging there from the tree,
but because you have paid attention to it
suddenly your vision of it is shot through with gold,
or something that sounds equally confusing.
do you see the point? you can say anything
about the coconut. you can say about the coconut, "you are
not actually a coconut." the point is, spheres are always round
and therefore have no corners, no sides, no points, and whatever you look at with them
coconuts or otherwise, they vision will be too pluralistic
to contain.
Have I expressed myself sufficiently enough?
I must confess to being in doubt. (Writing is dangerous that way, see).
ETA: I mean basically, so much of what I think I understand is incoherent. There is no order anymore to what I am trying to say and do and think and feel. If I must focus on something, let me focus on the end of each written word. There's a really, really slow buildup of the crazy (I am of course, not serious) at the back of my head, but when I end it, please let it behave and agree that ok, I am ending. There's no putting a stop to these words and these thoughts, and every day I live with the headache, which might be actual or which I just imagine to use as an excuse. Even if I write the most word-vomit-y poems, they never actually ascertain what arguments I might propose in resistance to, well, the stimulus. Reality's stimulus. I am aware that this might sound crazy, but I think it's the words talking, not me.
Does that sound crazy? Someone, someone, maybe I, should wikipedia who Sapir and Whorf are. Maybe they have the right answers, or even, I don't know, syntax-error checking blades to sharpen the excess words into coherence. I don't know. Ouch. It's so hot outside, I think its the radiation.