Start it up again

The epic hurdle known to most as “the first freakin’ year at college” has been hurdled, and I have cleared the bar without nailing my groin and making a fool of myself in front of hundreds of spectators. Like the unintentionally hilariously named holder of Lakeside’s High Hurdle speed record, Dick Shafer (no, I’m not kidding), I cross the finish line defiant of those who expect my failure, or at least hoping for some laughs on my behalf as a result of tragic comedy or accidents.

For those of you who can’t wade through my “shitty sentences coagulated into a glob of a paragraph’ paragraphs such as the one above: I’ve seen this college higher education shit now, and I’m back and badder than ever.

Well, let me qualify that by saying that “badder” doesn’t mean that I’ve compromised my moral character. Nor do I wish it to imply that the first quarter of the higher education process has somehow made me an inferior person in any way. I mean “badder” in a strictly hypothetical, vernacular sense, without any negative implications, the same way that being a “bad ass,” two usually negative attributes when taken out of context, can actually mean a good thing when put together.

I’ve hella slacked off on this updating crap, and I’ve received earfuls from my legions of adoring fans who have nothing better to do than check if I’ve updated providing them yet another temporary distraction in the labor that is life. And, lo! Like a doctor performing a cesarean section on a desperate mother, dear readers, I update and proclaim that you shall labor no more!

Let me explain some of my laziness. I am famously prone to declare USC to be a joke of an academic institution and that I have achieved a sort of academic nirvana where I experience a complete utter lack of need to study for tests and do the reading and still manages to perform like a finely tuned racehorse (a finely tuned racehorse, incidentally, whinnies a perfect 440 hertz “A”). But like a 747 landed by an amateur pilot (who, incidentally, the crew and the pasengers’ last hope) screeching across the rainy LAX tarmac without the aid of brakes, flaps, nor landing gear, the momentum of eight years at one of the most challenging private schools in the nation has yet to cease up, and I still have this irrational drive to achieve.

This irrational drive for academic excellence is made even more absurd when one is surrounded by vomit filled hallways, the end result of constant alcoholic excess, and highly intellectual banter wherein a group of legally adult males sit and talk about their sexual conquests, measured in sheer numbers of “babes” they’ve “boned,” and occasionally “boned in the pooper.” To attempt to achieve at USC, where in the last week of school, the same legally adult males started a food fight in a cafeteria, is needless to say patently ridiculous.

So it follows that, I, connoisseur of all things ridiculous and irrational, feel this drive. Much time was spent pawing away furiously at a DVD final project, where I slyly typecast future roommate Max into a suavely evil CEO position. He has expressed a mild disappointment at being given these “evil douchebag” roles, kind of like the disappointment Morgan Freeman feels after all those “wise old black guy” roles. The project was a success, at least. It’s one thing to be an evil CEO. It’s quite another to be an evil CEO who is a failure. Most of the fruits of this project, I might add, will be seen by perhaps two instructors before being filed away into some dark dank archive of multimedia somewhere in the bowels of USC.

Max, besides being an evil CEO, happens also to be the sexiest indie gamer alive and of all time. What this necessarily entails, I cannot say, but I’m sharing a room with him, and dammit man, I don’t want to wear the earplugs again.

Let me explain: for a period of about two years of my life, I could not sleep without earplugs. Absolutely could not. I could not psychologically relax unless I was in complete silence. The reason was that right outside my window we had placed our security system alarm siren, which basically is set off when the door to the garage is blown open by the wind downstairs and loudly and annoyingly lets all of Nomandy Park know that the freakin’ Wong family forgot to shut their door tight again. For a period of time, the alarm would go off once a week at around four A.M. or so because of some wiring problem. I would be rudely jolted awake over and over until I became a nervous wreck, and required earplugs to sleep through a night. Needless to say, (although I probably shouldn’t say this online where all the sickos are) we’ve since given up setting the alarm.

I’ll protect my family by noting that, in place of the alarm system, we protect the home with three highly trained assassin dogs armed to the teeth and trained in close quarters combat, biting crotches, and fetching tennis balls.

It always baffled me as to why we so desperately needed this alarm system. In 2003, the FBI reported a whopping 3 violent crimes here, or half a violent crime per thousand retirees and small children that dot the Normandy Park landscape. To put this in perspective, the chance of getting a violent crime committed against your person while within Normandy Park city limits are very small. It’s like taking a quarter and flipping “heads” ten times in a row, and then having somebody come by and heartily but slightly maliciously pat you on the back.

Other than that DVD project, I had two finals to really study for and another project.  This project required me to produce a portfolio of my writing steez consisting of two topics for USC’s ridiculous freshman writing program, a.k.a. the dreaded required semester of Writing 140.

To properly imagine Writing 140, pretend that you are an accomplished Formula-1 Race Car driver. Imagine that you live and breathe high speed cornering, chicanes, late and early apexes, outbraking your competition, and shaving off milliseconds from your lap time. Imagine that you are able to make your vehicle do anything but standing backflips, and even those you’re pretty close to nailing. The open road, the limitless boundaries of freedom that lie before you, are your lifeblood and very essence.

Now pretend that you are forced to go through driver’s education once again – the videos, the Max Headroom era 3D animations, the mind numbing boredom, the shackles of education you don’t need, and you’ll have an idea of how Writing 140 can crush a man’s immortal soul.

Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that I am some lion tamer of the tenacious English language, nor do I wish to imply that my handling of the syntax and structures of the written word being to even approach what might be considered mastery among the circles of the elite. I am not the Michael Schumaker of the English language by any means. In fact, in all honestly, I’d wager that Writing 140 made me a slightly better writer. But the soul crushing lunacy of that class did not justify the improvement.

The worst part is this: Writing 140 is absolutely necessary. When we peer edited our papers, it was downright embarrassing how bad some of these elite USC kids wrote. A girl peppered an essay with vernacular “like totally”’s, making me want to reach across the room and choke her with her inane ponytail. If there’s anything Lakeside teaches you to do, it’s to be a somewhat decent writer. But there’s no way to place out of this insipid writing requirement at USC, so hack and Hemingway alike must toil through it.

And to add final insult to injury, my teacher happened to be the one person in the entire writing department who took the
whole “this class is teaching kids to write because high school frankly blows” thing seriously. Although that’s probably a good thing, there are no words to describe what it’s like toiling over a paragraph long writing prompt asking you to talk about the cross class fantasy film genre during the Great Depression and how these films were a means to sate an otherwise dissatisfied working class while your friend down the hall who’s also taking Writing 140 is writing a paper on “The cultural significance of the freakin’ OSCARS.” That class must be full of drooling dolts who clap and moan in glee for themselves as they drool upon their keyboards for every syntactically correct sentence that providence helps them manage to piece together from the regions of their broken minds.

But the idiocy of the Writing Department cannot hold a candle to the lunacy of USC’s biology program. Now, I am guessing to any other person, the biology classes at USC aren’t a big screamin’ deal, but you have to understand that one of the reasons I am a film production major is precisely because there is no biology involved. Film production is probably the farthest away you can conceivably get from any sort of biology. “Thank goodness,” I remember thinking to myself as I got the USC acceptance letter, “I won’t have to deal with freakin’ cells any more!”

And as time shows again and again, my predictions are utterly incorrect.

The lecturing professors, save for the very last one, were utterly incompetent – our first spent an entire lecture on nutrition and the body’s dietary needs on how he is one of the blessed souls who is able to eschew the meal known as “lunch” completely. The other talked briefly about how USC isn’t like the “school of hard knocks” and how you get lessons pounded into you at the school of hard knocks, a.k.a. prison. Pounded into you. As the class sat aghast, he told us “Bottom line: Don’t drink and drive.”

“Now Freddie, surely if this class is that bad, then there must’ve been some uproar, and USC, the paragon of academic excellence, the jewel in the crown of higher education, must’ve done something about the class!”  I hear the wiseasses quip at their screens. The problem is this: the class was basically AP Biology. Unfortunately, I never took AP Biology. Doubly unfortunately, a good portion of the class had, explaining the inexplicably above average bell curve. Every week I would download the latest grade reports and stare at that bell curve as it tolled the demise of my grade point average week after week, hour after hour, like a cacophonous symphony issued forth from a cathedral tower calling all within earshot to lay down and repent for their staggering mediocrity.

To further back me up, master of all things scientific A. Rob took a quick jaunt around USC during Stanford’s spring break. I showed him this question (or one like it – my memory has faded and the original test is but ashes now), which was on the latest midterm:

“Pretend you isolate two colonies of bacteria – one from a hot springs and one from a room temperature environment. Upon analysis, one colony shows a 30% composition of guanine and the other shows a 20% composition of guanine in the DNA.

WHICH FREAKIN’ COLONY CAME FROM THE HOT SPRINGS?”

During the test, I threw my hands into the air shouting (in my mind) “The one with the freakin’ bath towel!” Alex could only look at it momentarily perplexed, stroking his chin, before declaring a decisive “What the fuck.” The answer is equally ridiculous, having to do with the number of bonds between G and C in DNA. Frankly, I don’t think I’ll ever need to know this, and frankly, I don’t think I’ll ever go to a hot springs again.

Fortunately, I was not alone in the cellular biological hell known as “The Nature of Human Health and Disease.” I had a comrade in arms on my floor, Brian, who good-naturedly teamed up and split the lectures with me. Trust me – I know that if I went to every lecture my grade would’ve been higher, but trust me also that if I did, I would not be alive to type this today.

Brian, in his radiant wisdom, took the class “Pass-fail,” reasoning that any class with four midterms and a final likely warranted that grade designation. In college, “midterm” refers to every test rather than the middle of the term, which explains why they can get away with four midpoints in a semester.

Based on a hasty calculation of mine, Brian decided to go bezonkers on one test and totally blow it off. Unluckily for him, it happened to be the easiest test, but the fake test he made was seriously hilarious. He wrote poetry, drew Waldo on pages, challenging the T.A.’s grading to find him, and openly mocked the class and the questions. The best part was that one T.A. obviously wrote him off right away, grading the entire page a zero, until coming back and realizing that, buried within his iambic pentameter, he had actually answered a good chunk of the question, if in an unorthodox manner. One T.A. actually got into the swing of things, gleefully circling Waldo and writing “I found him!” along the side.

This momentary joy was crushed when we realized that this tactical blunder required him to almost ace the final in order to pass the class. We spent the day before in study shifts chipping at the impenetrable block of science (in my mind, at least, it’s impenetrable). We were, for all intents and purposes, boned in our poopers when by some glorious miracle the test happened to cover everything we worked on for the last two-hour study blitzkrieg. The happy ending is he managed to pass the class. The moral is never take a class that is reviewed online as your peers unanimously as “The worst class at USC.”

I’m going to get some lunch or something. Next time I’ll talk about mad road trippin’ + I’ll have pictures finally because at that point I bought a charger for my digital camera.

-f.w.