Nah, not really.
I’m done with school for this semester, so let me tell you a story about an end of semester:
I stayed with Beth for extended periods both years I was at NYU, after classes ended in the Spring. Both times I had a class where the teacher gave us till the last possible day to turn in our semester-long projects, which were worth 100% of the class’s grade. Both times, of course, I did pretty much fuck-all for the duration of the semester, and then, in one fell swoop, tried to make good. This took a staggering amount of work to finish. It’s one thing to write a crappy paper on the Roman Empire for your final; it’s another to write the back end of a compiler.
Anyway, that’s not really the point. The point is that Beth is the world’s greatest hostess: aside from her company, which is of immeasurable value, she gave me a place to sleep, a place to work, and my own keys to the apartment. There were two different keys for the two different locks on the door, and the only noteworthy thing about the keys is that there was nothing noteworthy about the keys — both the same style, both the same general signature. You couldn’t tell them apart without super close scrutiny.
The weird bit is that whenever I came home, from getting pizza and tater tots and ice cream and whatever else I was eating to get me through this dark period, every time I came home I got the keys wrong. I’d put key A into lock B, it wouldn’t work, I’d figure out I’d got it backwards, and that was the end of it. No biggie, but it happened every time. EVERY time. You know how you think that stuff happens every time so you start to keep track, then quickly realize that, no, the light isn’t ALWAYS red when you come to it, no, you don’t ALWAYS miss the mailman by five minutes? Well, I kept track, and I was, indeed, wrong EVERY time.
But, I realized, if I’m wrong EVERY time, that’s still perfect information. So I started taking out the key that I thought was the right key, as per usual, and then, instead of using that key, switching it preemptively for the other key. Except when I did this, I was STILL wrong. So when my instincts said I was wrong, I was still wrong — nothing I did could open that door on the first fucking try.
I mention this as a metaphor for this semester. I’ve been through this enough times to have learned some lessons, which I duly implemented in order for the end of this semester to not be like getting shot in the face. And yet, even after having implemented these measures, largely successfully, I still fucked it up in the end.
Now I have nothing to do except post here all the time.