Today I attended my last lecture. I also picked up my graduation outfit, but as the sentimental realizations there were limited to the chagrin of knowing that I was paying 40 buckeros to rent a gown that has shoulder pads and smells like hot-dog wienies in BBQ sauce, I'll skip the weepy descriptors.
I spent my last lecture drawing a robot man with square eyes on the desk and after giving him (the robot) six legs and adorning each foot with a hiking boot I wrote very melodramatically "Last Lecture" above him. I am well aware that I should have been listening to the Professor discuss "The Deserted Village" by so-and-so Goldsmith, and as eighteenth century poetry goes it's really not bad (the best couplet: "His best companions, innocence and health/ And his best riches, ignorance of wealth"). However, I was fairly distracted and felt that the last lecture of my career was hardly the best time to begin acting studiously.
Okay, that last bit was sort of a lie. I am largely very studious. I even re-read "The Deserted Village" before going to class, despite the fact that I abhor haughty English poetry and I vaguely recalled having read it some time ago in some Masterpieces class. When is comes to being a geek, I summon all other geeks to proclaim me as their overlord and pay me a yearly tribute in Buffy comic books. Geek though I may be, I just feel that there is no real reason to behave in such a fashion during lecture.
Chronological Development of my Lecture Behavior Patterns:
1)Falling asleep in class, in bold defiance of twitching motion that implies the weird falling sensation that characterizes these sort of naps. Oddly this has not happened to me since Freshman year.
2)Forming back-row coalitions of sarcasm. It's difficult to find the right mix of disaffected youth and slacker in the back-row, because there's no fun in forming a coalition of suffering with someone who never shows up. In fact, the only thing that is worse is forming a coalition with someone who always shows up but never wants to shoot the shit. A good unit of measurement is to try to locate someone who always looks around incredulously whenever that kook in the front-row who looks like Uncle Joey from Full House opens his mouth to bring up 24 again. Disdain for active participators is a serious plus.
3)Doodling. I started with boxes, moved on to cubes and finally settled on drawing circles and shading them to look like Easter eggs. For awhile I was daily re-drawing a reindeer with wings on this particular desk in my totally bitchin' Manifest Destiny class, because on the desk in front of me the words "Beer Run" had smeared to look like "Deer Run." I had high hopes that someone in another class who sat in my seat might respond to the weirdness of the Deer Run phenomenon, but the only thing that ever happened was some jerkwad inked in a joint for the deer to smoke, adding some tacky subtext to my flying friend.
4) Struggling to conquer the crossword. This very well might be the ideal lecture leisure activity. Firstly, it is deceptive, because your look of confusion and your furious scribbling suggests that you are zealously taking notes. Secondly it embodies the perfect level of lecture socializing. It doesn't require chatting and the exchanging of phone numbers to set up study groups, but there is an unspoken solidarity between crossworders. You know that if you are working on the crossword beside a fellow crossworder that there will be some healthy peaking going on, and perhaps even some collaboration. Nothing brings people together more solidly than the realization that "A Flower from Holland" is a tulip.
I spent my last lecture drawing a robot man with square eyes on the desk and after giving him (the robot) six legs and adorning each foot with a hiking boot I wrote very melodramatically "Last Lecture" above him. I am well aware that I should have been listening to the Professor discuss "The Deserted Village" by so-and-so Goldsmith, and as eighteenth century poetry goes it's really not bad (the best couplet: "His best companions, innocence and health/ And his best riches, ignorance of wealth"). However, I was fairly distracted and felt that the last lecture of my career was hardly the best time to begin acting studiously.
Okay, that last bit was sort of a lie. I am largely very studious. I even re-read "The Deserted Village" before going to class, despite the fact that I abhor haughty English poetry and I vaguely recalled having read it some time ago in some Masterpieces class. When is comes to being a geek, I summon all other geeks to proclaim me as their overlord and pay me a yearly tribute in Buffy comic books. Geek though I may be, I just feel that there is no real reason to behave in such a fashion during lecture.
Chronological Development of my Lecture Behavior Patterns:
1)Falling asleep in class, in bold defiance of twitching motion that implies the weird falling sensation that characterizes these sort of naps. Oddly this has not happened to me since Freshman year.
2)Forming back-row coalitions of sarcasm. It's difficult to find the right mix of disaffected youth and slacker in the back-row, because there's no fun in forming a coalition of suffering with someone who never shows up. In fact, the only thing that is worse is forming a coalition with someone who always shows up but never wants to shoot the shit. A good unit of measurement is to try to locate someone who always looks around incredulously whenever that kook in the front-row who looks like Uncle Joey from Full House opens his mouth to bring up 24 again. Disdain for active participators is a serious plus.
3)Doodling. I started with boxes, moved on to cubes and finally settled on drawing circles and shading them to look like Easter eggs. For awhile I was daily re-drawing a reindeer with wings on this particular desk in my totally bitchin' Manifest Destiny class, because on the desk in front of me the words "Beer Run" had smeared to look like "Deer Run." I had high hopes that someone in another class who sat in my seat might respond to the weirdness of the Deer Run phenomenon, but the only thing that ever happened was some jerkwad inked in a joint for the deer to smoke, adding some tacky subtext to my flying friend.
4) Struggling to conquer the crossword. This very well might be the ideal lecture leisure activity. Firstly, it is deceptive, because your look of confusion and your furious scribbling suggests that you are zealously taking notes. Secondly it embodies the perfect level of lecture socializing. It doesn't require chatting and the exchanging of phone numbers to set up study groups, but there is an unspoken solidarity between crossworders. You know that if you are working on the crossword beside a fellow crossworder that there will be some healthy peaking going on, and perhaps even some collaboration. Nothing brings people together more solidly than the realization that "A Flower from Holland" is a tulip.
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