Two On, Five Off

They ruined it, the bastards!

When I was in elementary school, I was a real Mario Kart 64 fiend. I’d race home from school every day, eschewing the childhood social events like sports or playdates that laid the groundwork for many of my classmates to get laid in high school, and boot up my Nintendo 64 to spend hours tearassing around Mario Speedway in hopes of shaving a few seconds off of my best time. Keep in mind that this was in the days before XBox Live and online stat leaderboards – I wasn’t in it for the glory. It was all for the sense of accomplishment.

Some time after I’d played Mario Kart into oblivion, I read about a new game, called Diddy Kong Racing, which took Mario Kart’s basic formula of cartoon animals teaching children defensive driving tactics and took it to the next level by adding airplanes and hovercrafts as available vehicles. I was thrilled by the fun potential this offered, and spent many 4th grade afternoons ignoring the teacher and daydreaming about playing this new game, eschewing the childhood building blocks of multiplication tables and fractions that laid the groundwork for many of my classmates to pass math in high school.

After a few months of anticipation, the game was released and I bought it, then raced home to play it. After an hour, I came to one definite conclusion:

This game sucked balls. I couldn’t quite put my finger on how – let me remind you, this game featured monkeys flying airplanes, so the deck was truly stacked in its favor – but somehow it had found a way to take a delicious pile of lemons and turn them into boringade.

This is the case in 90% of my life – I spend a lot of time anticipating something that by all means should be great, only to have it turn out to be disappointing, if not outright depressing. The Rose Bowl. Dating. The series finale of Battlestar Galactica. The list goes on and on.

Thus, when I was finally able to organize my schedule so that all of my classes fell on Tuesday and Thursday, essentially guaranteeing me a two day on, five day off week, experience taught me to expect that this would suck.

How could it suck? After all, I’ve only been wishing for a nonstop parade of four day weekends since I was old enough to bitch about having to get up early. The thing is, Diddy Kong Racing seemed like the answer to all my prayers as well. In my experience, the great things magically find a way of sucking.

I assumed that having four classes in a row would be so stressful that the rest of my week would be spent dreading the days on which I actually had to go to school. Or that I would have so much homework that I would scarcely be able to complete it all in my seemingly endless weekends, let alone go carouse with my friends.

So imagine my shock when, for two weeks in a row now, my schedule has been absolutely incredible.

Last weekend I got drunk (or, rather, hammarettoed) two nights in a row, and still had a day and a half to not do my homework and then six hours to rush through all of it.* At the end of the weekend I remember thinking, “Damn, this was a great weekend – too bad I’ve got a whole week ahead of me.” And then I realized that the next weekend was just three days away, only two of which would require me to even leave the house.

*This may not sound like much to you, but it was a pretty big deal for me. There just aren’t a lot of opportunities for me to be hedonistic anymore – you can only look at so much bizarre pornography before it gets sort of played, after all.

That this wonderful class schedule should coincide with my being newly 21 is an added bonus. The past two weeks have been a blur of friends’ houses, bars, liquor stores, and, occasionally, my classes, although I’ve been doing as much as possible to keep them from intruding into my five days off as I can.

There it is, though – right now we’re standing on the cusp of Week 3, when shit gets real. This is where the clusterfuck usually begins – classes have been going on long enough for students to have a knowledge base large enough to test, so professors begin tossing out midterms, and when you’re taking four classes like I am, they start to neatly overlap, one or two per week, until the end of the term. Guaranteed.

So really, to say that my schedule is the best in the universe is like calling a ship unsinkable before you ever go blazing through iceberg infested waters. You haven’t really tested it in bad conditions yet. I’m sure your ship is really unsinkable when it’s floating in the harbor, just as my schedule is when my classes consist mostly of syllabi and reading I’m not doing.*

*Except for J371, where I diligently do every scrap of reading. Incidentally, my professor for J371 knows about this blog, so if you see her around, do please give her a warm welcome and tell her how much reading I’m doing.

So maybe by next week this blessing will turn out to be the disappointment in disguise that I’ve been expecting. But if it does, I can always look back fondly on these two great weeks before the wheels began to fall off. This highly anticipated event at least warranted two weeks of joy, which is way more than Diddy Kong Racing ever gave me.

Truman Capps is disappointed that everyone else gets Monday off this week as well, because it makes him feel less special.