But my concentration and comprehension skills were still snaz this morning with my last-minute studying. I was slower in reading stuff, but I was still going good.

The exam wasn't terribly difficult. The questions were straight-forward and I'd studied about as much as I should have. What it was was loooooooooooong. The final was scheduled to take 2 hours. We ended up moving to another room in a different building across the street. In there, most of us took 3 hours to finish. Because I'm anal about reading questions right and making sure my answers look good, I checked over everything once. That tacked on another 30 minutes to the process. But eventually, thankfully, I did finish. I even put in a course evaluation form saying that some parts were great (the end), some parts sucked (most of it), and some profs were great (the end ones), and some profs didn't even belong teaching the course. I mean you don't go into the cellular and molecular underpinnings of Long-Term Potentiation in 3 hours worth of detail for a Systems Neuroscience class. Just talk about brain imaging studies. That was my two cents. That and "less is more." That should be the classes mantra.

My hand was slightly cramped, but I felt ok. I didn't feel jubiliant. I can't recall a recent time where I did after an exam. Of course one mitigating factor for that would be needing to edit my undergrad's honors thesis today for inspection tomorrow. We'd planned on rapid firing drafts back and forth to each other. This sounded like a fine plan a few days ago. But considering how draining that test was and that I had next to no sleep, I was dreading having to read over the goddamn thing. Chris really just wants to have her turn it in , give her the A, and be done with it. But unlike his general pessimism over the process, due to comparing her paper with a 50 page paper his son wrote at a small liberal arts school, I think Rachel has shown a lot of improvement. I mean true I had to basically hand most of the references and the logic/background of the study on a plate, but she put together the pieces well and I'm proud of her. She also wants to give Chris a talking to about not exactly being on the ball with making edits to her stuff.

All 3 of us could have engendered better communication. Giant frogs could use wooden doors for surfboards and create electronic carpets to traverse time and space. But some of these things you can only see when they've occurred. So we all had a learning experience. It's very PBS.

To celebrate being done with at least one final thesis edit and that 4 hour long exam, I am going out to dinner with Emily at El Pastor and then going for drinks with her and her 'sometimes' friend and their friends at Greenbush. I need alcohol. My head muscles feel like the pulsating teats of a body-builder only slightly on the flab, just waiting to bunch up into those spherical fuckbags of rippled amazement.

I am Jack's distant sense of self-perception.

He was right: everything does seem far away when you get no sleep (or next to no sleep). Still, this was the very last exam I'm presumably ever going to take. I may have to take an 8 week course and write a paper for it, but I already know what the subject matter would cover--and a paper is a paper.

This was a good exam to end my graduate student class career with. It was long, it involved a lot of good thought, and it was quirky in some cases. For one question option, for instance, I had to talk about the various neocortex and sub-cortex regions and white matter connections for explaining stuff happening in real life. Fumbling for quarters in your pocket, paying a dude, realizing why you are paying a dude with a donut X amount of cash, putting the donut in your mouth. All of this requires a bunch of cells in your head to stimulate one another in an orderly miasma of highly rhythmic molecular poking. That section took for-fucking-ever, but it was neat.

I'm pretty sure I pulled at least a B+/A- for the thing and, therefore, for the class. I could be mistaken. But at this point, the fuck I give is smaller than the penis of a bacteria. I am sleep-deprived, caffeine-deprived, food-deprived, water-deprived, and Emily-deprived. I will renuncicate these deprivashums on the later and right soon. But for now, I will sit in this chair, or go outside and sit under a tree, and play Belle and Sebastian's 'Fuck This Shit' in my head.

Because we're all a harmonica song when the dogs are put to bed and the liquor is where it is.

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