Exam Season

No, Google Image Search, not that kind of exam. Not for the next 21 years, God willing.

Although I’ve said before that I felt like I had much harder classes in high school than in college, don’t take that to mean that college isn’t difficult. Sure, I’m going to a state university and majoring in a subject based entirely around knowing how to read and having good hair (broadcast journalism), but there are a few times every term when I’d rather be swimming naked in a vat of extra-carbonated Mountain Dew than going to school. Now, you might object to this and call up my previous blog entry in which I praised myself (as I often do) for my ability to handle a metric crap-ton of work with all my characteristic poise and control. Well, frankly, I was full of crap back then, because I didn’t write that during midterms.

Here’s the thing: Somebody needs to set him or herself on fire, or maybe just write an angry letter, because these midterms certainly aren’t in the middle of the term and I think that ought to change. I arrived at college assuming that each term I’d face the academic equivalent of being shot in the juevos with a taser once in the middle of the term and once at the end of the term. I knew it would hurt like hell, but it would only be twice a term, and I was prepared for that. Only that’s not the case at all – I had my first midterm in week three, for God’s sake, and more midterms nearly every week since then! I’ve been getting academically tasered in the family jewels for seven weeks now, almost nonstop, and as I’m sure you can imagine I’m getting slightly tired of it. Midterms don’t care what part of the term it is, as evidenced by the Spanish midterm I took Thursday, or the Spanish midterm I took Friday, both in the end of my eighth week. In a week and a half I’ll be missing three midterms to go to the Men’s Pac-10 Basketball Staples Center Adjective Championship in Los Angeles (California’s El Paso), and that’s in week 10! A midterm at the end of the term isn’t a midterm anymore, it’s a final! If the midterm was for false advertising, the University of Oregon would get 100%.

Perhaps you’re surprised at how many midterms I’m taking. Well, here’s the thing: there are literally hundreds of midterms in my Spanish class. I don’t know what it is about that language that makes it so midterm prone, but this is my third straight week of midterms in Spanish. I’d like to think that maybe it’s just an oddity of the language – you know, in English we have, like, gerund phrases or whatever, and in Spanish maybe they just take a lot of midterms. The thing is, I’m pretty sure we as a class don’t have enough accumulated knowledge about Spanish to be tested this often. I, like everyone else who’s taken Spanish, am now an expert at buying train tickets, asking where the library is, and having abbreviated conversations with my professor about what I did over the weekend (provided that all I did was go to the movies or read a book, because handy phrases like “blow up doll” and “petroleum jelly” don’t translate very well). On Friday I completed my second written exam, in which I had to talk about my house and home life, something I’ve pretty much been doing in all of our homework assignments as well as the previous written exam. The only reason I can see for this constant repetition of the details of my housing situation is that my professor moonlights as a cat burglar to make ends meet, and armed with my poorly conjugated description of my family’s condo in Portland he’s going to sneak in and rob us blind one night.

Having this many midterms in any one class sort of runs contrary to the idea of a midterm. I see a midterm as I’m sure oppressed communist peasants saw the secret police – it’s what keeps you in line. Sure, go ahead, skip class and don’t do the optional homework – come week 5, the midterm will jump out of the dark, pull you into a black van, and tase the crap out of your goolies. When there’s only one midterm it’s all scary, like the trailers for Cloverfield, but when there’s a bunch of them it’s lame, like Cloverfield. When you have two midterms in the same class in two days, you start to realize how little of your overall point total they make up, and you stop caring.

Last night I probably should’ve studied for today’s written exam, because I sure as hell didn’t know what costo meant when they asked me something about costo in relation to my house. But I didn’t study, I played Tetris, and the reason for that is because I wasn’t all that scared of the midterm anymore, having already gotten solid Bs on the past three. This morning, as I showered before class, it occurred to me that I didn’t know what habichuela meant. Is it an adjective or a noun? Does it have to do with food? Maybe it’s the name of a city. I didn’t know, and when I went back to my room to get my stuff and go to class, I didn’t look it up. Why? Because I didn’t care. I still don’t know. Maybe I’ll never know what habichuela means. Maybe it’s not even a word, maybe I just made it up!

This is the sort of apathy that constant midterms bring. Maybe getting tasered in the knackers hurts at first, but over time you start to get used to it, you stop caring about it, and maybe even get the slightest inkling that you might find it subtly pleasurable. And when it comes to that, you’ve got to wonder what the point is anymore. Until next time – habichuela, everybody!

Truman Capps has not actually seen Cloverfield, he’s just heard every reviewer talking about what a letdown it was, so please don’t tell him what the monster actually is – he looks forward to finding out on DVD.