Week 16 unspectacularly came and went. I had battened down the hatches for the last few weeks of the year in an effort to get my papers done (something to definitely consider for next semester is to get on top of the writing aspect a lot sooner. I did a reasonable job organizing, but only left myself a week and a half to write at the end, which was sub-ideal), and the last week was no different. And consequently, very un-exciting and uninteresting to report - basically a whole lot of me sitting at a computer typing surrounded by six piles of articles from the 1970s. I did finish, though, with time to spare, and thanks to the helpful editing of Beck, I got my papers in on Thursday. Semester one: done.
The other prominent feature of the final week was my officemate's Jenny attempt to grade 150 papers and 90 exams in far less time than normal human effort can manage. She's TAing for Andrew's Science and Society class, an upper level Bio & Society class, and let me tell you WOW - you should see some of the CRAZY stuff people write in their papers. I may be spilling a long held dark TA secret here, but there's only one way to bear the psychological burden of reading 450 pages of undergrad stupidity, and that's to laugh your ass off as you share it with your officemate. I don't feel bad about this at all; if you don't have the courtesy to read your own work before you turn it in, well then, we reserve the right to mock. Seriously - simply reading these things out loud before handing them over to the peanut gallery would fix 90 percent of the problems. They could catch the spelling-check gaffes, they could hear that their verbs don't match their subjects, they for-pete's-sake could hear how absurd some of their sentences sound. Just off the top of my head, here are some paraphrased passages from this semester:
"In his latest work, [Smith] takes us, the readers, on a magical philosophical journey through time."
"Some Diary products turn out to be not so good for you." (This was an opening sentence!).
"There haven't been too many people quite as wide as Aristotled."
"What you may not know is that milk contain nine vitamins. And I disagree that its bad - I drink one cup a day at least and I am not fatty."
"There have been five most influtential people in history: Jesus, Hitler, Einstein and Edison. Issac Newton could be a sixth."
"In elucidating, Dawkin's theory remains unclear, and I can't exactly get his meaning.*"
"* - I e-mailed Dr. Dawkins to ask him to explain, but as of this writing, he has not returned my e-mail."
Let me reiterate: those are just the ones off the top of my head. Don't get me wrong; they obviously stand out as absurd-plus, but just trust that for each of those there are fifty more run of the mill ridiculous mistakes and claims. So to get an idea of the past two weeks, picture Jenny and me hunkered down in the Ethics Lab1, brandishing a red pen as a similic dagger and typing away furiously, respectively. She interrupted the monotony every so often with one of these gems, and we just laughed and laughed. So despite the stress of deadlines, we managed to make a good time of it. I like our lab.
One day last week - Wednesday I think - I had just finished another round of edits and was headed home for the day. My cold was in full effect, so I stopped by the overpriced Yogurtini shop on the way back to my car and got some cold dessert to soothe my aching throat. It was a cool 60 degrees and the sun was setting, so I kicked up my feet on a patio chair and watched ASU rush hour while listening to something appropriately pastoral - Erasure Pop! - to pass ten minutes before going home. And in the midst of the mayhem, this decidedly unpeaceful scene of finals stress on top of gnarled bumper to bumper, I achieved a certain sense of calm. The thousand crossing itineraries made a sort of senseless sense. It's easy up close to papers and tests and work and whatnot to lose purpose. Easy perhaps because there really is no purpose, strictly speaking. I've often held the erroneous notion that there's a right thing to do, a trajectory, something of import to be accomplished. Sometimes I conceive of it as a something generally for people everywhere, sometimes as a something for me, like I was somehow carved to do a certain set of unknown things and it's a matter of finding them. This smacks of some weird sort of fatalistic, teleological ridiculousness, and certainly did so in that moment. How does Mike end up in law school, Frank geologizing, Beck a vet, Nyet sitting in a stupid Tempe cafe subconsciously concerned with mid seventies science communication? What, we're all whittling down towards proper life trajectories? Tres dumb. And just for a second, I capture it, that we're the multi-headed beast, mattering not in what we accomplish individually but as the grand collective. Probably a symptom of too much "level of selection" type evolutionary thought. But it strikes and make sense for just a moment, carries just the right mix of horror and solace. We don't matter. There ain't no life path nowhere, just blind trajectory seeking based on uncertainty and arbitrary values. That's got the typical vibe of Parisian cafe despair. But the other - no life path to which to adhere. Only thing mattering a generalized attempt to transcend. No burden outside that of trying. And the beast benefits. Kinda nice.
Of course, eventually my cup runs out of choclate and reece's, and it's time to head back to the Honda and join the fray. The traffic's a lot less symbolic when viewed from within.
The other COOL development of the end of this semester has been Beck picking up Ultimate. I am psyched. I was still feeling sickly on Sunday, and with league finals supposedly happening on Monday, I elected to skip pickup. Beck and I instead jogged up to a local park and threw the disc around. I coached a little, but mainly we just tossed and ran around and enjoyed the afternoon. Beck's already faking and pivoting and looking every bit the part. Very, very schwank, and a thoroughly lovely way to spend the PM. Rain has so far prevented her attending another practice (the latest was Thursday, when she still couldn't walk because of the body-beating she endured Tuesday - seems not sprinting for 9 years is not the best Ultimate training regimen), but I'm excited to see her out there. More news on that as it happens.
That's probably enough waxing for this morning; on to work. I'm Nyet, and I apparently think I'm as wise as Aristotled.
1 Our lab is jokingly referred to as "The Ethics Lab." We have a large table in the middle of the room as this space used to be an actual lab lab. The latest ingeniousness we've come up with is to buy a model train set with a big locomotive and a splitting pair of tracks. On one track will be five lego figures, and on the other will be a lego Einstein-as-a-child. When people walk into our lab, Jenny and I will drop everything and just stare at the set up. When the inevitable question comes - "What the hell are you guys doing?" - we will calmly reply: "Ethics experiment. We value our lab space."
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