Mind Your Own God Damn Business

I think I have attention deficit disorder.

It’s finals week for me, and I was in class today, taking a test that was just two essay questions.

I hate essay questions. I like writing, and I can usually come up with decent essays, but there are two key conditions:

"Hey, bro - I ate your leftover pizza and took a dump on the floor while you were at work. My Bad!" - It'll make a little more sense in four or five more paragraphs. I promise.

1. It has to be on a word processor, so I can edit, re-organize thoughts, immediately recognize by the red line under a word when I’ve misspelled it, and, most importantly, get my ideas written down at a reasonable rate instead of the glacial pace that I write at when it’s by hand. As an added bonus, I’m left handed, so I have to put a piece of paper under my hand to keep from smearing my writing.

2. I have time to organize my thoughts. I’m terrible at extemporaneous speech and not very good at thinking on my feet, and so it takes me some time to piece together something readable. Otherwise, the results are a disaster. When I took the GRE, I ran out of time, submitted a partially finished essay, and was ranked in the 37th percentile. Awesome. I’m not William Faulkner, but I’d like to think that I’m at least good enough at writing essays to be considered average.

Unfortunately, when I’m taking essay tests, I get neither of those luxuries. I have less time to gather my thoughts and write them down coherently, AND the medium I’m using is about ten times slower than what I’m used to. It’s the perfect combination to force me into coming across as autistic. If my professors were to get a third party to grade my essays, I can only imagine that their reaction would be something along the lines of “Who is this gentle, retarded boy who’s taking your Electoral Politics class? It’s so sweet that the college lets this disabled kid sit in on your class! And make no mistake, he is clearly, profoundly disabled!”

The point is that when I have to take essay tests, I need to focus, so I can get as much smudgy, misspelled trash smeared into the blue book as I can before time is up.

So there I was in class this afternoon, my slow, pudgy, bumbling fingers desperately trying and failing to keep up with my train of thought about the UN General Assembly and its structure and global influence, and all I could think about was a story that a friend had told me the night before:

Kofi Annan, hamming it up as usual for the Security Council with his especially raunchy version of "The Aristocrats".

(To avoid confusion, I’m going to give everyone a name, so it’s not just “this girl” and “this other girl”): About a year ago, a girl I know named Steven moved in with another girl I’ve known since high school, Wang Chung. It was clear to…well, to everyone that moving in with Wang Chung would be a bad idea. At least, clear to everyone but Steven. So, a year later, my friend Stingray and Steven hung out, and she was telling Stingray that Wang Chung smelled like a water bison and ate approximately as much food as…well, as a water bison might consume in the same period of time. All things considered, it’s entirely possible that someone kidnapped her roommate, replaced her with a water bison in a wig and no one has figured out yet. She was beginning to think, she told Stingray, that moving in with this girl may have been a mistake.

…Is this a story that’s going to get me in trouble? I feel like this story is going to eventually get someone mad at me. We’ll see, I guess.

Anyway – today’s exam. While I was trying to organize my thoughts, I kept finding myself chuckling about Steven beginning to second guess a decision she made that shouldn’t have required a first guess. I kept coming up with what I consider to be equivalent situations, like “You know, I’m beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, fucking that horse was a mistake”, or “Look, I made a call, and I stand by it, but sometimes I wonder if there might have been another way to handle that dog crap in the street besides smearing it in my eyes.”

My train of thought works about like this most of the time, and it can make my life difficult when I’m around people who don’t know me very well. I’ll start giggling, and the people around me will wonder why, because we’re doing something unfunny, like taking a final exam in an International Organizations class. It’s hard to make up excuses, because there’s nothing going on that I can possibly pretend made me laugh (“I was just thinking about when Kofi Annan endorsed Amnesty International – he’ll do anything to get the laugh!!”), but I also can’t really tell them that I was imagining someone fucking a horse unless I provide the 30 minute back story that brought me to that thought, and even if I do, I still sound kind of crazy.

…Is this a story that’s going to get me in trouble? I feel like this story is going to eventually get someone mad at me. We’ll see, I guess.

Either way, I managed to hack out two passable essays and make it out of the class without embarrassing myself too much, and now I never have to worry about another international organization again. One m0re final, and I’m done for the semester, allowing me to do what I really love: share boring, yet still embarrassing stories about my life on the Internet.

At least, for 21 more days, until I can play video games again. The closer I get, the more suspicious I am that being able to play games after giving them up for a year is going to be a disaster. We’ll see, I guess.