In yesterday’s post, I was writing about flaws and positive attributes, then I wandered off the road as I tend to do. My main point was that we all have flaws. It’s part of being human. Think of how boring we would be if we didn’t.
There are flaws I have that I know I’m not going to change. Such as working to the back of a deadline. I will get an assignment/task done on time. However, I will get it done at the last minute possible. I do admire people who are able to do a task as soon as they get it (like pay a bill before that was all automated), but that’s not me. It caused me a lot of stress in college. Not because I didn’t get my assigments turned in on time; I did. But because I would waste the whole time before the deadline stressing about it.
I had a class in which the only grade for the whole semester was one paper at the end of said semester. That’s not entirely true. We were also graded on class participation, but that was maybe a quarter of the grade. Most of it was on one paper. The class was Psychology Through Biography. The assignment was to pick a person and write an analysis of their psychology. The professor was an older man who was very close to retirement and clearly could not give a fuck about the class. I liked him, but he was definitely a crotchety old man.
I chose Tina Turner after much consternation. I wanted to do an Asian women, but there were none of note at the time. Or rather, none for whom I could find enough resources to base a seventy-plus paper on. I also thought about seeing if I could interview a murderer–let me explain. At the time, there was a young black man (who went to my high school, by the way, when I did) who killed a gay senator and another gay man–and he wrote a manifesto about how much he hated gay men for spreading AIDS. He believed he had it himself, but it was never proven if he did or not (the fact that he’s sitting in a jail cell decades later says, probably not). He had been a student at Bethel College, a very Christian college, and he was clearly troubled. He had not shown that in high school, but he was strange–and that’s not me saying taht in retrospect.
I wanted to interview him, but I could not swing that, obviously. I decided Tina Turner would be an interesting case study because of her tragic history, but also because she was a woman of color in a time when that was not acceptable. More to the point, she was clearly sexual and had no qualms about showcasing t hat. Now, a conscientious student would have started researching in a month or so, then written the paper over the semester. I was not that conscientious student. I was and am very smart. Learning is easy for me, for the most part. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing for obvious reasons, but it’s a curse because I rest on my laurels. I’m trying to not say I’m sazy so much, but, well, it’s not far from wrong.
Let’s put it this way. I got into some really bad habits. I thought I could do anything within a very small amount of time. So I put it off as long as possible because I’m counting on myself to get it done in time. Which, mostly, it’s fine. Except I never account for life happening. For example. During that paper for the psych class, I started reading books about Tina Turner a month before the paper was due. Then, a week before it was due, I started typing. Remember. This was in the days before personal computers were really a thing, so I was typing my paper in the computer lab. This was also a time when WordPerfect (I think?) did not auto-save.
I own that this was on me. You knew you were supposed to save every hour or so. More if you were worried about losing your shit. But, I had gotten into the flow and forgotten that I needed to save. I wrote for six hours. I type over 100 words a minute. After six hours of nonstop typing, there was a group of high school kids touring the campus. One of them decided it would be hilarious to cut the power.
I lost 6 hours of work. Had I found out who this kid was, I would have broken both his kneecaps. Yes, it was my own damn fault for not saving, but still. I ended up redoing it beacuse I had no other choice. The paper turned out to be 75 pages, and I got an A. It was a pretty damn good paper. What did I learn from that experience? To save more frequently, but not to start the paper earlier.
My favorite story in this vein concerned another psych class–Neuro Psych. The teacher was an oddball, but I really liked her. She really liked me, too. The subject wasn’t one of my favorites, but it was interesting. One of my classmates was a Vietnamese American woman. I mention this because I think she saw us as having those two things in common (Asian and female) so she kinda latched onto me. For weeks before a big test, she would hurl questions at me every time she saw me on campus. I would shrug and tell her that I didn’t know because I hadn’t studied yet. I never studied for a test until the nigt before. Again, not a good M.O., but it worked for me.
The day before the test, she asked me to study with her in the early evening. Now, if this had been a few decades later, I would have felt comfortable saying no, I don’t study with other people. I do my best work alone. Back then, though, I felt I couldn’t say no. Instead, I did what I would passive-aggressively do, which was agree to study with her and then go before studying. When I got to her room, she did the rapidfire questioning once again. I told her I did not know because I had not studied yet. I went back to my own dorm room, fucked around for a few hours, then crammed in four or five hours of studying.
The next day, I took the test. It was essay questions, which was lucky on my part. I hated multiple choice tests because I could never figure out how the professor was thinking. I could come up with a conceivable reason for several of the answers, depending on the situation. I can talk my way out of anything so I’m down with essay questions. I did not feel good after the test. I thought I had messed up a few answers, and I had no idea about one question. I winged it for that one, so I would have been satisfied to have gotten a B on the test.
When we got the tests back ,the professor said she had never given a hundred before, but she had to give one for this test. When I got the test and glanced at it, it was me. I was surprised as fuck because there was no way I should have gotten a hundred. My classmate hurried over to me and started speculating about who had gotten the hundred. She had gotten 79. Of course, she did not think it was me because I had been so blase about it the nigt before. I didn’t w ant to tell her because I knew it would make her feel bad.
I’m tired. I’m ending this here. More in the next post.