Your Misunderestimated Quizo Update

Before we get to the meat of this week’s little diatribe, let me say upfront that Quizo attendance the last 2-3 weeks (since the tournament) has been just short of alarmingly bad. I understand we probably had a little post-tournament letdown and that last Monday was the tax deadline, but come on, people – let’s see a little enthusiasm for trivia, here. We’re definitely at the bottom of the curve these last weeks and we need to get back on the upslope.

This weeks transmittal is late because, as I mentioned, time has conspired against me. To some this may sound whiny and bitchy, and to those people I say, “shut the hell up.” This weekend was a classic example of me pulling myself in too many different directions at once and paying the price for it Sunday night (which, with my lack of access to GMail at work, is when I normally write the actual e-mail these days).

This death spiral of overextension actually started last week with the first exam in my Calculus class.

Now understand this is the first test/exam/inquiry of any kind I have taken in approximately… [checks calendar]… 9 years and the first one I have taken where I was not actually, physically drunk while writing said test/exam/inquiry in 13 years. I recall the last math exam I took where not only was I so completely and thoroughly drunk throughout the entire semester that I had almost zero knowledge of the subject material at the final - I now find myself wondering, in fact, why I bothered taking the exam in the first place – but I was blitzed enough while taking it that aside from actually answering (incorrectly) one question, the remainder of my examination on vector calculus consisted of several coarsely-wrought essays on various topics. At this great remove the only ones I can REMEMBER writing were about why the X-Files was great, why Metallica’s new album (new at the time) sucked and how they were total sellouts, and why OS/2 was a terrible operating system (which, similarly, was an issue at the time). For some of the shorter problems I just wrote random Simpsons trivia. I am not making this up. These were my answers on a Vector Calculus exam. This is what happens when you drink as much as I did back then.

Back to the present, for this first, actual test last week I was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past and to take this test – indeed, this whole school thing in general – and kick it in the junk. So I studied my ass off. I did problems left and right. I found a website that actually generates calculus exams – which is pretty neat – and did practice test after practice test after practice test set at the highest level of difficulty and complexity the site’s options would allow. I calculated limits until my fingers bled, a la Bryan Adams but not as cool (or Canadian, thankfully). At one point I was sure I had mathematically discovered a way to raise the dead. I studied the first three chapters of my textbook and the material therein until the sheer force of my calculus-bent will could destroy entire city blocks. I became the Jean Grey of introductory Calculus, able to wipe out entire galaxies with but a thought. I became as unto a god. Nay, I WAS a god.

Then I sat for the exam to find it was precisely six questions, five of which were about 1/1,000,000,000th as hard as the practice questions I’d been doing all week, and one of which was something I had inexplicably never seen before and thus had no idea how to solve. I finished the test in 12 minutes and got an 85.

Walking back to my car – where I had overpaid the parking meter by something like two hours – it briefly occurred to me that my time-and-effort-studying-to-test-difficulty ratio was slightly out of whack before my brain melted under the stress I had put it through for the previous seven days like a crayon in the back of a station wagon.

The stress of studying for the Exam to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Being when studying for “Hey, kids! Calculus!” was all that was really necessary left me in a sort of psychological lurch all weekend. My thoughts became reduced to the 21-st century equivalent of caveman grunts. At work on Friday all I could think was “weather nice. Get home. Galactica.” I picked up an Xbox 360 on the way home from work on Friday and I’m not entirely sure why. I honestly have no memory of deciding to get one, but there it sits on top of my DVD player anyway. It’s very nice. My Gamertag is Kozemp (duh!). Feel free to hit me up.

On Saturday I made the further mistake of going to the driving range and (in what is becoming something of a disturbing trend) hitting golf balls for the second time in 15 years and adding physical misery to my wretched intellectual state. Important safety tip: stretch before hitting golf balls. Also, if it has been many years SINCE hitting golf balls, going through an entire large bucket at once will make your hands, arms, elbows, shoulders, neck, back, knees and ankles feel as though they have been replaced with burning hot fireplace implements. Fucking OW.

After getting home from that, the entire rest of the weekend my thought process consisted of nothing beyond, “food. Water. Tylenol. Call of Duty 4. Supernatural. Sleep.” Occasionally I would swivel my chair to empty my ashtray. I’m amazed I remembered to watch my downloaded episode of Doctor Who. Seriously, I couldn’t bring myself (in a physical or emotional sense) to rouse myself out of that chair for almost two straight days. At 11:30-something last night while I was in the middle of another online FIFA match I realized that a) I had to go to bed soon, and b) I hadn’t written the Quizo e-mail yet. I went to bed hoping that I would be vaguely human enough in the morning to figure out a remedy for that. And here we are. I’m feeling much better now, thanks.

All things considered, though, there are worse things than overstudying, hitting golf balls with friends in the best weather in the history of the world, and having a leisurely weekend watching TV and playing video games (even if I didn’t seem to have a choice in the matter at the time). I could be a Democratic superdelegate, cause that’s looking like it’s going to be the worst job in the entire WORLD pretty soon. Hell, I’ve got it easy…

JLK