Thursday morning I warily made my way to school, as I knew I would find out how well(/poorly) I did on the brutal tax midterm I took Tuesday. The parking at OSU is bad enough that I don’t even bother trying to find a good parking spot these days (my classes all start at 10:00 am, which is the worst time to try and find parking), so I found at spot at Reser and made my way to the shuttle stop.

As I approached the stop, I noticed Lee approaching from the opposite direction. He was sporting sunglasses, which (oddly enough) have been more than appropriate as of late. We greeted each other and chatted on the way to campus. Lee talked about how busy he was going to be that day, and also noted that he walked off the street—figuratively; he didn’t have any of the prerequisites—into an International Finance class and was setting the curve so far. Ha.

In front of the business building a Spanish class was writing down characteristics of the ideal person in sidewalk chalk. I danced around their hunched forms and made my way to tax, where I asked Michele (the instructor) how the ideal person would respond to having flunked the midterm.

The results of the exam: high score: 83. Average: 57. (Yes, the average person flunked.) Low: 33. I, despite being a walking zombie the day of the exam, had the 83. Score! That fired me up through the majority of the rest of the day.

Faces turned ashen as the grade sheet made its way around the class. Michele, noting this (and in light of the actual results) decided we needed Happy Points—points for smiling and looking interested at certain parts of the lecture. The gal sitting directly behind me told Michele that she just couldn’t fake smiling; Michele responded that she (the gal) would never make it in business, then. After a short pow-wow with the friends sitting next to her, the gal announced that “OK, I’m ready. I have my game face on.”

Michele tried to lecture for a few minutes, but realized that nobody was paying her any attention. So she whipped out a fresh overhead transparency, and wrote a big fat F on it. “We all know this is what you’re thinking about, so we might as well get it where you can see it,” she said. “What could this ‘F’ stand for?” She then started writing things next to the giant F:

Failure

Fun

F _ _ k

Fantastic

Future opportunities

You can guess which one resonated most with the class. During the midway break, another person from behind me described taking the exam as “like running backwards through a corn field with your pants down.” It was hilarious, because nobody had any idea where that analogy came from.

The topic of funny quotes reminds me of Linear Algebra earlier in the week: midway through a lecture, a classmate asked Dr. Faridani what he had just written on the board a moment ago. Dr. Faridani clarified the word, paused for a moment, and then said: “My handwriting deteriorates as my vigor rises, so please ask if anything I write isn’t clear.”

On the way back to my car, after dance, I ran into Dan Elefant (high school classmate) on his bike. He graduated last year, and said he had been bumming around since then; he thinks he has a job at some place that tries to make buildings out of garbage, and seems quite excited about it.

At work it sunk in that I hadn’t died (in a relative sense, at least) in tax. A huge weight, that was heavier than I thought it was, had been lifted from my shoulders, and I experienced the largest surge of energy that I’ve had in quite a while as a result. I actually had a spring in my step at work—basically unheard of, these days—but ran out of energy by the time I got to go home. I need more exercise.