David Takes a Gander at Geese

Not two days ago, your young, captivating hero joined with his fellow Berlinsketeers Alex Calta and Jenn Smith on what spontaneously became a walking tour of our nation's capital. Somewhere along the National Mall, we encountered a particularly patriotic group of waterfowl plying their trade upon the banks of a reflecting pool. Yet just as we were about to give them the old "Howdy, partner," tip our Stetsons and ride on past them to Mama O'Grady's General Store with the sun to our backs, they started acting suspicious. They smiled toothlessly at us; they punctuated every thought with a single repetitive sound; they were spooked by our concealed, unregistered firearms; they administered health care to one other in a sickeningly egalitarian manner. That's right. These were Canadian geese.

What say you and your anchor goslings learn some goddamn English, eh?

Anyways, since we'd already passed the responsibility of determining an individual's right to exist in this country based solely on stereotyped profiling on to the officers of Arizona's state-level law enforcement division, we moved on to other more pressing concerns: namely, what one calls a group of Canadian geese. Other than "socialists," of course. We considered the merits of each of the following options, among others that escape my memory:

• A herd of geese
• A goose colony
• A pride of geese
• A phalanx of geese
• A pack of wild geese
• A wild goose chase
• Pillows (pre-production)

Pillows (post-production).

• A heap of geese
• A goose bump
• A whole heapin' pile of geese
• A peck of geese
• A murder MOST FOWL

We just couldn't seem to hit the nail on the head. Anywho, we continued on our merry way, and the entire episode flew from my mind like a contubernium of geese.

UNTIL:
Fast forward to the next day when, whilst looking up the number of spots on Barney the dinosaur (answer: 8) on GALACTIC KNOWLEDGE COMPENDIUM Wikipedia, I find myself linked to, of all pages, the article on Mother Goose. Scrolling through this page, as is my wont, I encounter the following poem, which is not only written by, but is also about Mother Goose:

     Old Mother Goose
     When she wanted to wander,
     Would ride through the air 
     On a very fine gander.

     Jack's mother came in
     And caught the goose soon,
     And mounting its back,
     Flew up to the moon.

Now, I had the first thought here we all did: Hey, Jack's mom, that's a pretty shoddy parenting job, neglecting Jack to go play goostronaut; also, you might want to double-check and make sure you didn't just commit a goose-murder-suicide.

But look back up there, and you'll have the same second thought I had as well: notice the word "gander." THAT'S IT. That has to be it. A gander of geese. How could we have forgotten gander? "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." What's good for one goose is good for all the geese of his ilk. What's good for you is good for yourn. Everyone knows that. Upon realizing such an obvious lexical oversight, I entered an emotionally heightened state wherein I was too excited with scientific/idiomatic discovery to actually check what a "gander" might be, and hastily scribbled on Jenn's Facebook page the following:

Well, joke's on me, because a "gander" is not a group of geese whatsoever. A gander is just a male goose. A group of geese, for those still wondering, is known as a gaggle of geese when said geese are grounded or asea, but once such geese transcend this terrestrial coil and reach cruising altitude, they become a skein, according to GALACTIC KNOWLEDGE COMPENDIUM Wikipedia. 

Which ultimately evolves at Level 36 into a shitplague of geese.

My research shows that a simple "flock" would work as well, but that's just for fools. Interestingly, "fool" apparently fits a second definition of "gander."

If you're anything like me, and you are everything like me, the idea of "gander" as plain old Mr. Goose is anything but satisfactory. It begs the question: What precisely does the idiom "What's good for the goose is good for the gander" mean? Does it mean "What's good for the goose of indeterminate gender is good, too, for the male goose"? Because that is much more difficult to apply to humans than what I thought it meant. And it certainly has no bearing on a group of female humans ("humanesses," the science calls them).

We now have a mystery on our hands, folks. I turned to the various Internets and posed my query on the Googling machine. The Internet horde replied: it apparently understands the idiomatic expression as a pre-industrial cry for the equality of the womenfolk. To these Mongol rubes, the phrase means "that which benefits the humaness is that which benefits the huMAN." This interpretation is honestly all over the fucking Interwebs. Be not fooled, ye faithful minions, nor be ye deceived by the fumbling keystrokes of these witless ganders. For to find this answer, we must delve into the darkest depths of the Internet, boldly going where no man has gone before: the second page of the Google search.

What, no, that's just nonsense. Sorry if I made anyone nervous there. No, seriously, you can come back from cowering in the corner. We're just going back to GALACTIC KNOWLEDGE COMPENDIUM Wikipedia. Stop trying to set your computer aflame. We'll get through this; that was really immature of me. There is no second page of a Google search.

MOVING ON:
Returning to the GALACTIC LEXICOGRAPHIC COMPENDIUM Wiktionary definition of "gander," we see underneath the word's definitions the terms derived from that word under the cryptic heading "derived terms." And here we see our fatal mistake: the phrase "What's good for the goose is good for the gander" is merely a corrupted form of the original idiom, "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."

"Gosling? More like 'sauce-ling'! They're talking about the sauces we eat, right? Those humans?"

Further investigation (i.e., clicking the GALACTIC LEXICOGRAPHIC COMPENDIUM Wiktionary link) shows that the sentiment conveyed in the idiom is absolutely not a rudimentary peasant expression of the ideal of the equality of the sexes. Rather, the sole definition is precisely what I had always believed it to be: "If something is acceptable for one person then it is acceptable for another."

Still, since the idiom meant what I thought it meant, we're left with the same problem. To say what it actually says, the saying should go: "What's good for the goose is good for the gaggle," or "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gaggle." Although that last one unfortunately carries some connotations of goose-genocide (which was, apparently, a thing?), no ganders need be included to muddle this whole thing up with post-modern feminist notions to begin with. And if we don't want to bring up horrible memories of the Goose-ocaust, we could just say: "What's sauce for this goose, Goose A, similarly serves as sauce for that goose, Goose B." Finally, I've found what I've been searching for for all these years: idiomatic clarity.

Pictured: a thing. Goddammit. 

Now, since we've already shown that you and I are practically the same person, I don't have to tell you, adoring reader, that there's a second mystery here which should be bugging you, weighing down, in fact, upon your very soul. Don't you fret, because we're covering that next. No, you are certainly not done with this blog post, get back here, young lady. So let's just get it out in the open: "What, pray tell, is a 'peck,' if not a unit of goose?" you ask in despair, hoping against all hope that I might provide your salvation. Well sit right on back and put your sexy-time reading shoes on, because I'm about to knowledge you up something fierce.

We'll begin this discussion where we began the last one: children's rhymes and idiomatic expression. We know that a "peck" can at least describe some measurement of pickled peppers, yet even our very source leaves unanswered the question: "How many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick?" We don't know; but we know he picked a peck. That is a fact, and it is undisputed.

Once children's rhymes and idiomatic expressions have inevitably failed us as researchers, we must move on to the next best option: GALACTIC KNOWLEDGE COMPENDIUM Wikipedia. According to the peck-based article, a peck is a customary unit of dry volume. In fact, it amounts to a quarter of a bushel. For those of you unversed in the measures of dry volume, that's half a kenning. So Peter Piper knocked out 2 dry gallons of pickled peppers, is what I'm saying.

This definition is actually good news for our goose-related endeavors. It is technically possible to obtain a peck of geese. All we have to do is find out how many geese make 2 dry gallons worth of goose. But therein lies the rub. I might be just taking what I learned in 7th grade and trying to apply it to the world outside of middle school, but I recall that taking the volume of any irregularly shaped object, as some consider the common goose, is best done by determining its water displacement, or the amount of water it displaces when it is completely submerged. So even dry volume gets a little wet. Unfortunately for us scientists, all empirical evidence attests to the goose's renowned buoyancy.

Quick! Hold him under!

Since measuring the dry volume of waterfowl via water displacement technically falls under PETA's definition of "drowning animals," we're going to have to come up with another means of figuring out just how much three-dimensional space one goose encloses. As luck would have it, a Google image search reveals that apparently they make baskets that hold varying denominations of peck. 

Front row, far right: one peck. 

So yeah, what, like, goose, goose-and-a-half? 

David Goes to College: The Decline and Fall of a GPA, Vol. I

Roughly four years ago, I arrived on the campus of the American University in Washington, DC, with the wide-eyed wonder of a college freshman, ready to take on the world one midterm at a time. Signing up for classes in political theory, comparative political science, international relations, history, and law, David Wile was going to march into the halls of the Ward Circle Building and show this town something it ain't never seen before. Four years, forty classes, twelve countries, 72 all-nighters, 43 hangovers, and two jobs later, ecce homo, battered, beaten, world-weary, with upwards of $2800* in fines owed to the American University library and using Latin in a blog post while legitimately trying to pass off "la isla del Easter" as Spanish for Easter Island on an exam.

"Hey David, what in the hell happened?" you might find yourself asking, and yea, I too have found me posing such a question myself. Well, let's go back to the beginning and see if we can gather any clues from there.

The Beginning
Our story begins with my fabled entrance onto AU's campus. Herald angels proclaimed my arrival to the breathlessly anticipating university; a new star shone from the heavens to announce my prophesied coming; and, lo, three kings bedecked in the grandeur of the ancient Orient appeared to bestow upon me the gifts of royal birth. 

Like so.

My first week of classes, suffice to say I had no idea what was going on in school. I was showing up to class expecting to get taught me some facts and stuff, and instead everyone was talking to the professors like they already knew all the facts I wanted to be told. This situation wasn't ideal, and after about two weeks, I did some independent research to figure out exactly why I was apparently the dumb one in class. In the course of this investigation, I discovered that some professors don't just tell you your homework at the end of class; they put it in the syllabus, and expect you to have done by a certain date whatever reading assignments had magically appeared on this omniscient sheet of paper. My classmates weren't geniuses, they just seemingly intrinsically knew how to do homework. This little discovery would have a massive impact on my future college career.

Anyways, after this initial bump in the road, I settled into somewhat of a routine. I read for the two classes I thought I had to read in, and in the other classes I waited till the day before the exams to flip through the books and get a general sense of the learning material. As hard as it may be to believe, I never went to sleep after 4 in the AM; no all-nighters, no two-thirds-nighters, nothing past your run-of-the-mill half-nighter. In bed by 4, awake by 9:10 AM for the 9:55s I had 4 times a week. Yes, I even took 9:55s. Please, adoring millions, just bear with me. I know this insight into my past might irreparably shatter that unconditional respect and love you previously had for me, but I just couldn't bear to keep it a secret any longer. There you have it: my dark, tormented past. It's just one more lie I don't have to live anymore.

During that semester, I earned myself a 4.00 GPA. I also checkmated a computer chess program on its highest level. Neither of those achievements would ever happen again. This retrospective aims to determine why such was the case. Did I stop trying as hard? Did I lose focus? Did I get a very large and shiny television set? Did college make me dumber? Did I perhaps subordinate academic endeavors to straddle that thin line between awesome and alcoholism? Hypothesis: Yes.

But let's return back to the facts we're studying. After that first semester, I assumed that getting an A in a college course just meant handing in all of your work with a decent level of competence. Despite all evidence to the contrary over the next 7 semesters, I would maintain that assumption with the blind confidence of a post-epiphany Oedipus asked to gauge his certainty that he banged his mom on a scale of 1 to eye-gouging.

"Well, 9.5, but I just rounded up."

Those next 7 semesters would systematically kick my ass. 

The Decline: Part I
Upon starting my second semester at AU, I convinced myself that I was able to attend class five days a week. This completely unjustified confidence would prove my undoing. With 9:55s 3 times a week and 11:20s on the other two days, I was waking up on the AM side of the day far too often for my own health. That fifty minutes of class on Wednesday destroyed the easy-going life of my first semester. 

I began staying up later and later. It became a common occurrence to go to sleep at 6:30 AM, watching the sun rise over the smoke stacks behind Anderson Hall. Under these inhumane circumstances, my GPA took its first hits. 

The first one came in the last week of classes. Having stayed up for a majority of the night working on my part of a group presentation for Macroeconomics, I rolled over the next day as the clock struck noon. This was unfortunate, because my class began at 11:20. I put clothes on and, breaking my personal prohibition against running in public, sprinted across the entire campus from Anderson through dozens of touring families to the second floor of Ward. I got to class right after my group had finished presenting. Whatevs, I didn't need that 15% of my grade. 

The next hit happened during finals week. Instead of a final for my Research Methods class, we just had to e-mail in the paper we'd been writing that semester on Blackboard. With my paper due Tuesday May 1st, I decided to get a head start on it that Sunday night. For some reason or other, my laptop couldn't get onto the Internet, so I had to go downstairs to the Anderson Computing Complex to do my work. Checking my e-mail before starting the paper, I see this little gem:

Hi David,

Your final paper is not on Blackboard - did you post it?  Please let me know what's up, and email me a copy ASAP.

- Prof. Robinson  

Apparently under the confusion that May 1st was that Tuesday, I had completely forgotten that May 1st was the Friday before, and I was calmly writing my paper not 2 nights before it was due, but 3 nights after. Well color me flabbergasted.

I'm not proud of my reaction in the ensuing minutes. As nonchalantly as I handle the daily shitstorm of my life now was as panicked as I handled this one then. Real talk, if that depiction of studious freshman year David made you queasy, by all means, scroll through the rest of this section with your eyes closed until you feel safe and grab a cold shower. If you do bravely read on, I just want you to imagine the D. Wile you know and love typing these actual words to another adult human person and laugh to your heart's content. Let's just hope we can still look each other in the eyes afterwards.

My first response wasn't so much an e-mail as a literary study on the onset of hysterics:

OH MY GOD, I THOUGHT IT WAS DUE ON TUESDAY. I'll finish it right now and get it up to you. I'm so sorry. Oh my god, I'm terribly sorry. Oh no...

followed immediately by this free verse masterpiece: 

Also, my Internet has not been working for the last three days (it's not the AU network, it's just my computer, and no one's been able to fix it), so I haven't been able to get online at all. (This is completely true. I'm in the Anderson Computing Complex right now because I needed to get on that site with the blank maps, and I can't get to it from my laptop. It's also not very good that I just had a slight meltdown after reading that here...)

I wrote the eight pages of my paper in about 3 hours, and put it on Blackboard. The next day, my professor responded in a much more subdued manner than I'd responded to her and, apparently unaware I'd already sent the paper in, asked when I'd get the paper in to her. My response apparently doubled as an exercise in Kerouac-ian stream-of-consciousness prose:

I put it on Blackboard last night at like 9:30-ish (I did the data analysis in like an hour and a half). If the penalty doesn't change and the fact that I'm not sure if I wrote most of it in actual sensible words would make the grade even worse, I can look over it and turn it in again later tonight. Although I also might not have too much time, considering I have 2 exams tomorrow, I don't own the internet at the moment, and I pretty much need a 100 on one of those exams to not destroy my grade (that's the class the presentation for which I slept through - I can't begin to describe to you how proud of myself I am this semester...). So it might just end up working out that what I slapped together on Blackboard last night remains my final.
So I guess the better question is, when do you want my paper? Because depending on that answer, you either have it already or you don't. 

Freshman David was apparently a huge fan of the ellipsis-closed parentheses combo.

Anyways, as luck would have it, I must've gotten that 100 on my Macro exam, because I got a B+ in that class when a B was the highest grade I could get after I sacrificed 15% of that grade to the sleep gods. As luck wouldn't have it, I was deduced 10 points from my final in Research Methods for handing it in late. Even despite this penalty, all of the grades posted on Blackboard still averaged to a 91, A-. And even despite this average, I got a B+ in the class because "Participation" is a bullshit little loophole in the grading system designed to let professors give you whatever grade they want within a 10% radius.

Thus my initial universal theory of college, that if assigned work is done with a minimal level of competence then it will be deemed an A, remained unchallenged because my own incompetence rendered me unable to meet that initial condition.


Continue to David Goes to College: The Decline and Fall of a GPA, Vol. II.




*Ed.'s note: It's more like $30, but the American University library seems to be under the faulty impression that I have lost one of their hallowed Dell Ass-sucks from the stone age, and wants to charge me a market rate of $2700 for it. The American University library also seems to be under the faulty impression that "market rate" is the price at which a laptop was bought 6 years ago cubed. 

David Goes to College: The Decline and Fall of a GPA, Vol. II

From David Goes to College: The Decline and Fall of a GPA, Vol. I.

The Decline: Part II
Coming back to AU sophomore year, I moved into the suites of Centennial. By days, I watched television in the lounge. By nights, I pretended to do work in the study cell. By mornings, I slept until class started. Back to taking classes only four days a week for reasons of mental health, I had Mondays off. I joined APO and ventured to grow an oregano plant. I would competently hand in the vast majority of my work on time that fall semester. That semester would infamously culminate in a 17-hour study cell binge during which, inspired by Shakira's passionate imagination of the ideal of personal independence as a caged female wolf, I wrote a 10-page paper for Ancient Political Thought on Plato's references to animals in The Republic. These are groundbreaking contributions to global scholarship, people.

Upon the completion of this monumental task, I survived the first semester of sophomore year. I assume since I had yet to get an A-, karma stepped up and doled me out four of those badboys that semester. Still, karmic mediocrity was not enough to dispel my universal theory of college.

My next semester was enough to dispel my universal theory of college. For the first time, I began arriving habitually late to classes, specifically my Calculus II class. Fortunately, I was flipping fantastic at Calculus II. Just to rub it in Calculus' face, I showed up 20 minutes late to our last test, finished it first, and got the highest grade in the class. Despite my best efforts, Calculus could not destroy my GPA.

You know what else I thought I was flipping fantastic at? Shakespeare. You know who wasn't so pleased with my knowledge of Shakespeare? My Transformations of Shakespeare professor, who saw fit to give me a B. In a General Education requirement class, mind you. About fucking Shakespeare. I interpret scenes from Shakespeare in my spare fucking time. To myself. Two weeks of this class were spent on Christ-shitting metrical scansion. Let me tell you how much I need to be taught about metrical scansion. Years later, in my capacity as a Starbucks barista, I ran into my TA for that course, who told me that professor had been single-handedly trying to deflate what she perceived to be the rampant grade inflation at AU. Well thank you very much, professor, but I can do that my damn self.

Also that semester, this:

Yours truly, all up and studying on his Contemporary Political Thought.

Thus, one-professor crusades emerged as an unaccounted-for variable in my universal theory, which suddenly needed some revising.

That revising would not come the next semester, where I not only still neglected to account for the professorial madness variable, but I also failed to take into account the living off campus variable. Faced with a 42-inch television screen and an XBox with games and controllers and what-have-you strewn about it, my life became a strange mix of House reruns, Law and Order: SVU reruns, and FIFA. It wasn't necessarily a pixelated soccer player condescendingly yet endearingly solving rape-based medical mysteries, I just watched a lot of TV and played a lot of video games. Sleep, naturally, took a backseat to these noble endeavors.

Meanwhile, I dealt with the unfortunate circumstance that, in another Gen.-Ed. course called Dissident Media, my professor apparently took issue with the idea of writing. For example, his exams were 80% fill-in-the-blank tests, with the blanks completing quotes from the text. As in, we were expected to have the books memorized. Only twenty percent of the exams was an essay, meaning the only part of the test which required analytic thought and interpretation of the reading material amounted to 1/5 of the overall grade for both of the course's exams. 

He further proved his antipathy towards writing per se in his critique of a paper of mine wherein I was prompted to argue against capital punishment. My passionate report proving that the very nature of the capital punishment sentencing process constitutes a violation of the ideals of due process and the rule of law protected in our American Constitution left my professor coolly unfazed. Instead, he'd rather I'd made my section on wrongful convictions, which have historically convinced all of no one to abolish the death penalty, the focus of my paper.

Do you remember who this guy was? Check your Facebook status from last September. I'll wait.

Good thing AU makes Political Science majors take Communications courses, is what I'm getting at. Regardless, Professor Loves-Arbitrary-Government-Rule, as I so pithily call him, lived up to his nickname and arbitrarily gave me a B- for the class.
It's cool, I'm not bitter or anything. 

Didn't even want that Honors credit.

After this point, I simply lost all respect for college as an institution. I could not bring myself to care about whatever subjective grade a professor deemed to put at the end of a semester's worth of work. Probably less than a quarter of the grades I actually got, both good and bad, actually showed the percent of that course's material which I learned. Under this outlook, for the first time in my life I was psychologically unable to equate lower grades with academic or intellectual failure. Both my liver and my GPA became the collateral damage of my new Weltanschauung.
  
The next semester, I moved my dicking around to Germany, where I proceeded to get lost and lose things at pretty much the exact same rate I did in the U.S. Aided by a just and loving God, I managed to get to a 9:00 AM German class four times a week within at least 30 minutes of it starting for the entire semester. Apparently, however, being too exhausted to speak is no excuse not to do so in class, and I finished with a B+ in the class despite acing every test and exam. Fortunately for my GPA, it was a three hour-per-day class, so that one B+ counted for six credits.

My other classes were decidedly simpler until the last week of school, when I found myself needing to write 3 papers amounting to 34 pages due within 3 days of each other. Fourteen of those pages were to be written in German. For four days and four nights, I slept for no more than 6 hours total. In what would prove my GPA's last gasp at greatness, I got A's in all three of these courses. Like the Spartans at Thermopylae, like the Light Brigade at Balaclava, like the ANZACs at Gallipoli, my GPA fought on, courageously aware of the imminent onslaught it faced.

The Fall
Returned from my time abroad, with a part-time job, a full-time course load of 17 credit hours, and a magically transformed sense of responsibility which legalized the purchase and consumption of alcohol in these United States, something had to give. Apparently, those somethings were sleep and sanity.

Aside from the fact that most days my 6 hour shift at Starbucks was literally 12 times longer than I'd slept that night, I was also taking more credit hours than I'd ever taken before. These were bold times. I'd end up with a B in my Presidency course because I never bought the books and 20% of the grade was based on reactions to the readings submitted online, so yeah, my bad, GPA. I also habitually napped through my Calculus III course since it was scheduled in a particularly unfortunate spot just long enough after work where I could consistently convince myself I could fit in a half-hour nap, but not long enough after work where I could fit in the 6-hour sleep that nap would inevitably become. Naturally, I neglected to hand in an assignment which amounted to 5% of my grade because I only knew it existed once the professor returned it to the class. Luckily for me, I'm so balls-blazingly astounding at Calculus that I got myself an A in spite of my own ineptitude. 

But the real trouble this semester came in a class known only as the Honors Senior Seminar. A research class designed for those pursuing full-year capstone projects, the Honors Senior Seminar required essentially two things that I fundamentally lack as an individual: time, and the ability to come up with project topic ideas. Trying to get my Thomas Hobbes on, I decided that my capstone could be me just spit-balling out a personal theory of politics. You know, nothing grandiose.

Whoa there, Thomas Hobbes, spell much?

Strangely enough, political theory projects tend not to mold to the traditional project stages of "lit reviews" and "project proposals" and all that noise, so everything I was doing was pretty incompatible with any actual project idea I might have. Both my professor and my capstone advisor pointed this out to me at around the same time, about 4 days into November, which was interesting seeing as that was 4 days after the last day to drop courses. Undaunted, I dropped that badboy like a sick beat and expected it to work itself out. 

It most certainly did not work itself out. My ass got itself an X in Honors Senior Seminar. An X. They gave me a grade 18 letters below an F just to convey the sheer magnitude of my failure. That single X brought my entire college GPA down a whole .09, and there was nothing the three A's I made the rest of that semester could do about it. 

I still had the next semester to make up for that X, although I decisively did not use it in such a manner. I made the mistake of having no two classes scheduled consecutively, meaning I was on time for at most 15 class periods the entire semester. Punctuality completely escaped me for my two earliest classes, my 10:20 AM Modern German Short Stories course and my 1:10 PM graduate level Foundations of Mathematics course. I got B's in both of these courses because, let's not kid ourselves here, turning in homework is just not my forte.

Even in my political theory course, The Idea of America in European Political Thought, I only managed an A-. I'll assume this happened because my general tardiness saw me miss two of the weekly quizzes on the readings and handing in a progress report for my term paper 5 days after it was due knocked an otherwise A work down to a C. 

Of course, in the aftermath of that X in Honors Senior Seminar, I still had to churn out a capstone project if I wanted to graduate with University Honors. Still in need of a topic since my last one proved untenable, my advisor suggested that I write it in conjunction with the term paper for the political theory class mentioned above, which I happened to be taking with him. Considering my knowledge of the German language, he proposed the topic "The Idea of America in Austrian Political Thought," and I thought that sounded pretty good. I planned to write 5 pages a day for 5 days a week for 2 weeks, and attempted to clear my schedule to do so, even going so far as finishing a take-home math test at least 3 nights before it was due. This capstone was serious business.

I failed incredibly at this goal. Instead, in the first week I wrote all of 5 pages, leaving about 45 pages to write in the next week. I developed a Pavlovian response to my capstone to the extent that opening Microsoft Word made me instantly exhausted. I couldn't write more than 2 pages at a time lest I die or go insane. I was struggling.

And then came David Time, the shortest time-span possible wherein I can do all the work allotted to me for a particular assignment and still have it in on time, a divine gift I'd first recognized in the morning glow of the Centennial lounge. With the project due at 3:00 PM Monday, David Time apparently started on midnight Friday night, when I awoke from a five-hour capstone-induced nap on the couch with only 17 pages of capstone and five of six more sections of outline to cover.

Over the next 63 hours, with nothing but the sweat of my brow and the raw intellect of my brain interpreted through the nimble movements of my sweet, sweet fingertips, I wrote me 35 pages of capstone in a Five Hour Energy-fueled rampage, completing my 52-page opus. I went to campus to go to my Short Stories class, the last of my college career, and from there I went to the Tavern to write the conclusion and the bibliography. By this time, my brain was so fried that I had no conception of basic alphabetical order and put all my F's after my H's. Talk about mortifying.

I handed my capstone in at 3:12 PM, which rounds down to 3:00. Somehow, despite never getting anywhere near revising or even giving the first draft the old once-over, there were only 4 typos in the entire deal, and everything more or less made enough sense to elicit a solid A from my advisor.

I celebrated this monumental achievement through a series of Tweets all up on my Twitta page of capstone-related puns.

The culmination of my college career, everybody.

My genius confirmed, I still stumbled my way to my lowest GPA in any semester that didn't involve a letter grade beyond T. My total GPA dropped slightly more than .20 points throughout senior year, which saw four of my six lowest grades in college.

Here we bring our study to a close. I've had less sleep in the last four years than a Guantanamo inmate and gradually lost both my faith in greater truths and my ability to take anything people do seriously. My GPA has slowly stumbled from perfect to near perfect to above average to slightly above average. Freshman year I would panic when I missed classes; senior year I congratulated myself for going to every class I had in any particular day. I emerge the ruins of a high school graduate, more aware of myself, striving to strive for something despite all existential evidence not to. Hell if that's not worth $300,000, I don't know what is.

Not this materialistic hocus-pocus, that's for sure.

So in conclusion: hypothesis confirmed.

Epilogue
Oft have I said, in my bitching about college, that I could count all the things I learned on one hand. I now present that list of the things I learned in college. 

1. Read Nietzsche
2. Botswana's democracy is properly understood as a bureaucratic authoritarianism
3. Watch the Russian version of King Lear (1971) and Fritz Lang's M 
4. Comfort is the enemy of human freedom
5. A smattering of German vocabulary and grammatical structures

That oughtta save you the 300 grand.