Final exams for my first semester of school are tomorrow and I have not studied for finals in over twenty-five years. The thrill of pulling an all-nighter has been greatly diminished by the almost interminable delay of the season premiere of The Shield, a show that Husband won’t even be in the same room with so I have to watch it on the little 13″ TV in the spare room. Thirteen inches can barely contain Vic Mackey and his tortured derailed morality let alone his band of testosterone fueled merry men. So I’m watching repeats while I study and even on mute this is one disturbed cesspool of public servant humanity. Good times.
I studied for five straight hours today interrupted only by my painter touching up the trim in whatever room I moved to which actually had us laughing after a while it was so predictable. I also had three phone calls from the accountant about our upcoming taxes which included a conversation about Son’s tax return, this being the first year he is filing independently since he paid his own tuition last year and had a full-time job as well and will no doubt be surprised to see the accountant’s bill made out to him now that he’s running with the big dogs. Next year he’ll probably calculate his own taxes with Turbo Tax or whatever Daughter uses to bargain with the government. She finds it hilarious that we pay a professional to do this for us. Jesus, I color my own hair, cut me some slack. We’re not pioneers.
At school I get a kick out of my classmates bickering over grades with our teachers. I think our class has acquired a reputation for being ‘grade brats’ always fighting for that extra point. Our primary teacher, who we had for 3 hours a day and who I wrote about in an entry entitled Down the Rabbit Hole, left a while back on a medical leave and the school juggled staff around to find a suitable instructor for us but the damage was kind of already done. Our replacement teacher was fairly appalled by our classroom etiquette or lack thereof. We were so accustomed to being educationally abused that we forgot how to learn in an appropriate manner. One day our new instructor yelled in exasperation, “What’s with you people? Who calls out like this in class?” I tried to speak for the group when I said, “You have to forgive us. We were raised by wolves.”
The flip side to this strange situation is that we all really look out for each other. We’re an interesting group of strangers of all different ages and backgrounds thrown together in a program with a dropout rate of 30%. It’s an intensive two-year course of study for a specialized Associates Degree followed by professional accreditation without which we go nowhere. The bar is set high and we’ve all had some degree of higher education or work experience that left us inspired to strike out in this direction. We have one more semester together and then we proceed on individual paths according to our level of skill and how much we’ve managed to absorb from our varied instructors and course of study. But first we will be tested tomorrow. It’s midnight right now and whoever said, “Good night and good luck” could have been sitting in that class right next to me.