This is Cantay

For those precious few (two, three? four?) of you who have heard the splendiforous song This is the Story of Cantay, you might be excited to hear that I am considering a return to music. That's right, more not-quite-rapping-at-all to a sexy but noticeably unsynchronized beat.

The inspiration struck me yesterday right before the test I was whining about earlier. I didn't go to my other classes for the day because I was studying. The problem was that my studying consisted of doing non-academic things like trawling YouTube for videos of little goaties. I did run through the tests from last year, and glanced through the book for some more knowledge on series solutions, which was about 20% of the test. I was confident that, since the last test was very similar to what was done in the review session, I had all the information I needed.

I decided to take the bus to class a touch early so that I could do some last minute looking-over of things in the book in case I'd forgotten anything. So I left the co-op at 1:30 and plopped myself down at the bus stop, opening my book and trying to understand what actually happens at singular points of second-order differential equations.

After a bit of reading, I noticed that it had been a while since I'd sat down, but the bus hadn't come. I checked my cellular phone for the time, shrugged my shoulders, and assumed the bus was just going to be late. If I'd spent all this time waiting, there's no way that the bus would be much longer, and it would be better to wait for it than to hoof it. So I kept reading.

Then a car came up. A man who looked a bit like one of Pedro's cousins from Napoleon Dynamite leaned out the passenger window and asked if I could move the barricade in the road so they could pass. Even though the car was not as cool as Pedro's cousins', I obliged, moving it aside and then back into position once the car had passed. I shrugged to a passer-by and went back to the bus stop to do some more reading to wait for the bus.

It was at least thirty seconds before a rather obvious epiphany struck me: there was a barricade in the road. The road that the bus normally went down. From that point, it wasn't too hard for me to figure out that the bus wasn't coming. I checked the time (fifteen minutes until my 2:00 class), stuffed my book into my messenger bag, and broke out speed-walking to try to make a twenty-five minute walk in just over half that time. The best part of the walk was passing by the people who'd passed by me while I was sitting down at the bus stop. Kickass.

The second best part of the walk was feeling like I was about to suffer from heart failure because of the strange way I was walking, tensing every muscle in my body in an effort to move quickly while not looking stupid. In hindsight, chances are that I looked extremely stupid and moved at less than my top walking speed. My shins, especially, were unnecessarily bunched up.

Somehow I made it to class at about 1:57 and I grabbed a seat by two fellows from my co-op, Stefan and Tyler. At least I made it, I thought. Now to kick the test's ass.

No dice. The professor apparently (rightly) thought that the last test had been too easy, so this one had some stuff that wasn't covered in the review session. Awesome. There were five questions, each worth ten points. For each question, assuming I had no errors in the work I did do, I could have gotten respectively 7, 10, 7, 4, and 10 points, meaning a total score of 38/50. My honest expectations, however, hover around 32/50. And it could reasonably be as low as 25/50.

My first test was a frakking 57/60. Even my last one was a definitely better 39/50. What has happened to me since then? Arrogance and laziness, my dear Watson. I miss studious, confident Cantay, but he always seems to disappear when I start to do well on the grounds that we don't need him anymore, and playing TextTwist online is fun. The slippery slope may be a fallacious argument, but it's a reality for me and many other students. And it sucks. I miss one class here, one there, and suddenly I'm skipping regularly to play TextTwist and sleep. And as nifty as it is to rearrange the letters YSPRCT to form the word crypts and others, it's not as nifty as returning to a scholarly equilibrium instead of this bad, lazy one.

Oh, and I have homework to do now. Sweet, huh? Now I just need to do that. And write a cover letter for a job I won't get. And figure out how to squeeze this post into a song for my musical resurgence.