Scholarly Pursuits

I devoted this weekend to figuring out my university schedule for next year and, ultimately, deciding if it was feasible to graduate this coming year. Why would this take me a whole weekend, you might wonder. The answer is that I have very little courage. I am like that Lion. You know the one, he was in that movie, _THE SOUND OF MUSIC_. Or something like that. I think he mauled and ate the face of one of the Von Trapp children. Not that I can blame him. All those kids went to bed at the exact same time! That was just messed up; the oldest was like 15 years older than the youngest.

So, anyway, I have no courage. I tell people I do not care about my grades and, for the most part, this is true. During the year, I do not care. I spend my days never going to class, take whole weeks off when the mood strikes me and hardly ever start an assignment until the night before it’s due. So, really, obviously I AM very apathetic as far as school goes. Why else would I have such a terrible work ethic. It’s not like I’m incapable of working. Look at all the things I have written this month. (Thousands of them! Each better than the last!) But, in all honesty, when it comes to checking my final grades when everything is said and done, I simply… don’t.

Seriously. People tend not to believe this, but it’s true. When I get an assignment back, I usually just put it in my bag without bothering to check the mark on it. In the cases where the professor has written the mark on the front, I do end up seeing my results, but I still don’t really bother looking at the comments inside. It’s not that I’m arrogant — I’m sure a lot of effort went into those comments! — but just that I don’t really consider any of my written school work to be particularly good or representative of my true ability so what use is all that grading stuff for me, anyway? So I don’t look at assignment grades and, at Christmas, I never bother to check my final semester grades. What use would they be to me? None, I tell you. None! It would simply cut into my annual Yule-Time Lazing About Activities.

But, come summer, I reach the point where I DO have to check my final grades. And when that time comes, as it finally has, I get a little scared. All my life, I have been told my so-called “study habits” will catch up to me. That I will finally reach a point where I will really have to buckle down and get to work. Seriously, I have heard this since Grade 4, when I first declared that I would not do any homework. I went almost the whole year, filling in the daily journal we were supposed to write at home during the final minutes of class. When I was finally caught, after forgetting about the journal until literally the final minute of class and turning in an entry that was was two-sentences long and described the day’s field trip as ‘good’ and the paintings we had seen at the gallery that day also as ‘good’, my teacher gave me the soon-you’ll-have-to-buckle-down speech for the first time. I heard it from someone nearly every year after that, until I graduated high school.

I have not heard it so much since I started university, mostly because less people — but still, infuriatingly, SOME people — care if you go to class. Some professors — and these are my absolute favourite professors — don’t even bother learning your name. But, still, it haunts me. Like a ghost! Or a lost love. Or a scary little kid who whispers nursery rhymes. I worry, each and every year, that maybe THIS has been the year that I should have buckled down. And since I didn’t bother following my grades, I totally wouldn’t KNOW that it HAD been the year I needed to buckle down until, well, now. Seriously, I could have failed most everything! And I never would have known!

“Buckle down” is a weird expression. The only other time you’d use the word ‘buckle’ is in relation to belts. You buckle a belt. A belt has a buckle. How do you get from that to ‘buckling down’? Perhaps because I am living life in a freewheeling way, with my figurative pants all loose around my figurative waist, flapping in the figurative breeze? And I need to buckle my figurative belt and start wearing my pants like a fine upstanding citizen, as opposed to a wild street kid with a boom box on his shoulder and a pocket full of dreams and, potentially, PCP? Still, though, how do you buckle something DOWN? Is that like tying something down, but instead of using rope or something, you use a belt? Because why would you do that? Why would you use a belt instead of rope? Ropes are easier to come by than belts! In fact, I would even go as far as to say that I see three-to-four times as many ropes in my day-to-day life than I do belts.

So my point, as far as that last paragraph goes, is that ‘buckling down’ is a stupid expression. And my greater point (in fact, you might as well call all that stuff about the ‘buckling down’ expression a SUBPOINT, as it is a point-within-a-point!) is that I still fear the great buckling down threat, so much so that I require a whole weekend to check my grades. Because I have to build up to it! Have to get a good night’s sleep, eat a good meal, watch a good movie, listen to some good songs, use the word ‘good’ seven or eight times in a single sentence, go for a good drive, before I can finally click the link that will show me my grades.

But I did it. I did it tonight! I finally clicked that link and let my eyes rest upon those letters and numbers that mean very little unless they’re, you know, all D’s and F’s. In which case I understand I might get in trouble and possibly booting out of school and maybe then I’ll lose my job and have to move into a squalid hellhole in the city and become one of those guys you wave at from your car as I approach you with my bucket and my squeegee. “No!” you’ll cry. “My window is clean enough!” And I will smile and wave, like a polite Canadian, all the while thinking about how much I hate you. My heart was beating really badly when I clicked the link; I never want to have to own a squeegee. It’s demeaning and, also, I intrinsically distrust things with names that contain more vowels than they do consonants. It’s why I’ve never had a friend named Aimee. Or Artie. Or Ernie.

I am happy to report that, after all of that preperation and worry, this year was NOT my buckling down year. My grades were suitably strong enough that I was actually baffled by some of them. Remember that Narrative in the Cinema class I talked about on this site? Great mark in it! Never went, the only lesson I really learned from that class was that EVERYTHING in film comes back to the phallus (and, thusly, made that the main point of all my essays for the course) and thought I sort of bombed the final exam. So how do I manage a damn good mark? I can only assume it was a clerical error. Or perhaps my crazy magician-like professor was giving random grades entirely based on how much cocaine he had on him at the time. That’s probably more likely.

So it’s another crisis averted for me. I can look back proudly on all my slacking this year, including the extreme circumstances like Gothic Fiction and the aforementioned Narrative class where I probably only went to 2 or 3 classes maximum over the whole semester. My buckles will remain up, as opposed to down and, as a special bonus, it looks like I *WILL* be able to graduate this year. I might have to take 6 courses one semester to get the degree, though. Do you really need 120 credit-hours to graduate? That seems like cash-grabbing!

I should protest! And I would, too, if my pants weren’t so loose.

Matt