Yesterday was kind of funny. I had a psych midterm, which was fine. Afterwards I spent 5-10 minutes in a friendly debate with the teacher about the wording of one of the 70 multiple-choice questions. There were two correct answers for it, technically (says my bias), but he thought there was only one. So we had to agree to disagree. Actually, he agreed to disagree and I disagreed about agreeing to disagree. Most teachers actually like to be argued with, you know. It shows that the student was paying attention (too much, perhaps). Dr. Wong even told me the technical, psychological name for over-thinking instructions (i.e., for what is wrong with me). For those of you fortunate enough not to interact with me in school-world, I’m a wee bit of a hairsplitter (read: annoying). I am fine with this though; it’s easier to be the annoyer than the annoyee.

I had the same problem during the second midterm I wrote, even though it was a 3-essay English exam, rather than multiple-choice. In this case, I was actually supposed to wrangle with the wording of the question; Dr. Rans intentionally used controversial language in his question to throw a postmodern monkey wrench (which is much heavier than a normal monkey wrench) into the works. So, that was fine, except I spent 5 pages writing about why I couldn’t answer the question, and only 1 page answering it. I also spent 1.5 of the 2.5 hours on one third of the exam. Time management is not my forte. I need a person with a cattle prod to attend exams with me: “Bzzzt! Keep writing. You don’t have as much time left as you think. Bzzzt! Bzzzzzzt!”

Along with faking/sleeping my way through my 3rd class, that was my day. Usually I prepare a ton for that class, then I talk too much and everyone tunes me out. But this time I just made shorter general comments and everyone was like: “Ooooh, yeah, that’s what I thought too.” Which probably translates to: “thank you for not annoying us to death.”

Later Rock & I went to some b-day type thing for Stamos. No, not John Stamos, we had already filled our quota for early 90s sitcom hunk birthdays in May. Stamos is actually Stephanie & Amos. Btw, it wasn’t both of their birthdays; it was only Amos’s. I ate cake and listened to a guy called Dan who had had so many concussions that he couldn’t remember the number. He is going to Kyrgyzstan and/or Tajikistan next year to climb mountains that have not yet been climbed because they were formerly behind the iron curtain. He’s also going to work with youth-at-risk in those countries. Presumably bringing them along on mountain climbing expeditions will put them less at risk. He’s kind of like Jake Doyle (if I can infer anything from a half-hour conversation); you know, a person who likes to raft, swim, climb, jump, or ski (etc.) off of things just to see if it can be done. I think this is a healthy ethos, and I would gladly trade some teacher-arguing skills for some of it (not that the two are mutually exclusive).