First things first: The first poll I posted (“What is your favorite ice cream flavor?”) has concluded. The results are as follows:
Chocolate: 0%
Vanilla: 16%
Strawberry: 50%
Other: 16%
This is a stupid poll: 16%
Really people? No one likes chocolate? Then again, it’s not my favorite flavor, either, but still.
Total votes were 6. Wow. Amazing. That was a whole person higher than I’d hoped for.
Instead of moving on to my previously planned topic, “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood,” I have elected to take a more practical poll. This time it concerns the type of blogs you’d like to see in the future. So do what the average American is too lazy to do and vote!
Anyway, as for the blog I have decided to put up an old MySpace survivor purely for your amusement, since the last blog was a bit heavy. Read and enjoy. Or don’t. But whether you did or didn’t, leave a comment (it can be anonymous) and tell me what you want to see.
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Every once in a while, there comes a time in a man’s life when he has to tell a story of a more crude nature. Tonight I was sitting at my computer, and I thought, “The time has come.” So I would like to share a story about the hardest chemistry quiz I’ve ever had to take.
Allow me to give you some background information. The year was 2008, and I was in a mid-series organic chemistry course in my sophomore year at OSU. For anyone who’s had to take a chemistry class (and I mean a real chemistry class, not one of those 101 things), you’ll know that it’s not an easy A. I look back to my early years at OSU, and despite having many other classes, all I remember were countless hours spent on studying for that damn class.
The quizzes in this particular organic chemistry class (which we lovingly called ochem) weren’t quite as challenging as the ones in the previous course, but they were nothing to blow off. Every Wednesday, I’d get out of choir rehearsal and go eat at the commons while cramming last-minute ochem knowledge into my head before heading to recitation and taking the weekly quiz.
Recitation that quarter was interesting, to say the least. There were all sorts of students in there, from the stereotypical Asian supergenius to the dumb blonde girl in the front who always asked questions like, “I didn’t understand the problem on the test, so I drew a smiley face instead. Can I get partial credit?” No one knew how she passed the prerequisites to get into this class.
Unlike last quarter, I didn’t really have any friends in this class. I did have enemies, however, I discovered. These two enemies consisted of the dude that sat behind and smelled like a dumpster behind McDonalds and a know-it-all girl that sat to my direct right.
As for Señor Smelly, well, I’m not really sure how we got off on the wrong foot. It might have had to do with me laughing when I saw his midterm score, I suspect. The girl, whose name I never learned (let’s call her Susana, since I’ve never really liked that name. Sorry to all the Susanas out there—it’s nothing personal), just plain ticked me off. Every time I answered a question, she had to add something. “Not that you’re wrong,” she’d say, “it’s just my answer is more right.”
Although I hate to admit it, her answers often were more right. But her talking down to me in front of the entire class? Not cool. So naturally, whenever she answered a question, if I saw the opportunity, I provided a “more right” answer of my own. You might call it a rivalry, but I call it we just didn’t like each other.
One week, we had a particularly competitive correct-the-other-one session that left us both peeved. The teaching assistant for the recitation looked relieved when it was time to give us our quiz just so the two of us would shut up. And thus the papers were passed back through the rows and silence began as we all started working on the quiz.
Then something happened. Susana farted. Nothing real loud, just enough to be one of those I-have-gas-and-I-need-to-let-it-out-oops-that-was-louder-than-it-was-supposed-to-be type of farts. But just enough to make me lose it.
I chuckled slightly to myself, but abruptly stopped when I realized that no one else was reacting to the… gas emission. “Surely someone else must have heard that, but no one else is laughing,” I thought to myself.
But I couldn’t hold it in. I tried everything—biting my tongue, holding my breath… none of it worked. The best I could do was emit a sound that was somewhere between a cough and hysteric laughter.
Meanwhile, concentrating on the test became next to impossible. I barely even remember what it was about. All I know is that I rushed through it as fast as I possibly could between bursts of “coughing.”
This is what we call a classic case of the Giggles, which I’m convinced comes in the forms type I and type II. Type I is when a situation just plain sucks. I’ll never understand it as long as I live… the best guess I can make is that when your mind sees that things are about as down as they can be, it invents some sort of strange idea to find amusing. Freud would probably say something about it being a defense mechanism (but then again, he also said toddlers get sexual gratification by taking a dump, so… yeah).
The Giggles type II is when you’ve been laughing for so long that anything’s funny. Maybe this can be attributed to an overactive happy gland. That is, of course, my scientific medical opinion.
Either way, I had the Giggles, and I had them bad. Not a very mature response to little miss know-it-all, a.k.a. Susana. And I know how they say you shouldn’t care about what other people think, but I figured it would be good to save at least a little of my dignity with the rest of the class.
After scribbling down something that looked like an answer to each question, I got my belongings, turned my quiz in at the front of the room, and bolted out the door. As soon as I was out of earshot of the classroom, I burst into side-splitting laughter, in which I remained for the entire way back to my dorm room.
Amazingly, I managed to get a 75% on the quiz.
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