In Honor of Exam Week

Excerpted from a curmudgeonly essay I wrote instead of working on a response paper that I ought to have spent more than an hour on:

Try and imagine this. It is the week before winter break. All our papers are coming due. I spent the night before last writing my first-ever twenty-page paper for a class on the North American landscape. It had twenty-five pages. I took a two-hour nap after class and then finished an entire problem set for my economics class in one evening. It helped that I don’t care about the class, so none of the answers had to be right or anything. I made an outline for a research paper I have to write tomorrow morning and then went to bed at four-thirty am.

BBRRRRRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAARR
RRRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZRRRRRRRRRRRR
RRRRRRRRRRRBBBBBBBBBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAA
AAAAAZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZAAAAAAAAAAA
RRRRbbbbbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I have slept for five and a half hours out of the last forty-two and have just woken unexpectedly to this sound. I do not know what the sound is or where it is coming from. Maybe we are under attack. Maybe someone is drilling into our basement with one of those big drill tractors that they use in mines. How am I supposed to know? My eyes won’t even open all the way. The little muscles in my cheeks and temples and eyelids are squinty-squinchy. I slouch up in bed. The room is still half dark because it’s winter and only just eight, goddamn it, I realize when my straining little half-eyes finally find my clock-radio. I meant to wake up at nine-thirty so I could get a full five hours.

Now my ears are working again and I can sort of tell that the sound is coming from the direction of the window. Going to see what it is will require me to get up and stagger fifteen feet across a cold hardwood floor. The noise keeps stopping and starting and every time it starts it opens with this plaintive whine, like someone is abusing a puppy. Maybe they are torturing a puppy down there. This, I simply will not tolerate. I throw off the covers and practically fall across the room, since I’m so dizzy I can’t stand up straight.

I think I am hallucinating when I first look outside. They have got one of those trucks set up like the trucks the phone company uses to fix a problem with the telephone wires. That’s the kind with the arm that stretches out towards the sky with you cradled in its basket like it’s delivering you up into the clouds. This one is right up next to a tree that has its top branches about twenty feet away from our window. There is a guy in a hooded sweatshirt in the truck’s basket. He has the hood up, which always makes you look like a gang member or a serial killer. The guy is also clutching a massive chainsaw. This makes him look more like a serial killer than a gang member. His friend has the driver’s side door of the truck open and is messing around with something on the dashboard that is making the arm move the little cradle up and down. The man with the chainsaw just stands there with the damn thing held inches from his chest while he and his little basket move a couple of inches up and a couple of inches down for practically a whole minute. Eventually the basket stops moving and the guy takes his chainsaw and slides it into a big thick brancheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeBBBBBBBBBBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
RRRRRRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRBBBB
BBBBBBBBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZRRRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZbbbbbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I am deeply unhappy. We were not informed that this work would be occurring today. No notice was tacked to the proctor’s bulletin board. No message was posted to the Pennypacker listserv. Stupor has been replaced by irritation verging on hauteur. The university couldn’t send us an email? They couldn’t wait another two hours to destroy this tree? My head probably would have hurt anyway this morning, but this feels like someone has inserted the bit of a power drill into my ear and flicked the on switch.

Now my roommate is awake. She’s a heavier sleeper than I am, but even she cannot sail blissfully through this. “Mmmmmmfffgggfffgggddisthaaaat?” she gurgles. I do not answer. Instead I stalk back to my bed, rip off the comforter, and cannonball onto the middle of the mattress, allowing the blanket to float slowly down and cover my rage-quaking form. I try to clench my knees over my ears to block the sound, but they don’t reach up that high. Where the hell are my earplugs? Gone, probably, vanished on moving day.

“MMMMFFFHHWWHHHAAT?” she asks, this time with an angry force that is not softened by her cotton-mouth.

“The motherfucking grounds service is doing a tree-fucking-removal and I’ve slept for five hours in the past two days and I want to die right now,” I retort.

“Whattimesit?”

“It is eight. I went to bed at four-thirty.” Where is the sense of decency? Does this institution retain no trace of gentility from its illustrious past? Were Theodore Roosevelt and T.S. Eliot jolted out of bed at the crack of dawn by the sound of a cannonade? Did they stand at the windows of their apartments in their dressing-gowns and caps and watch a pair of madmen re-landscape Harvard Yard with dynamite?

I am not a complainer. I do not return spoiled foods to the supermarket for a refund. I do not send back my dessert when the waiter brings me chocolate ice cream instead of Rocky Road. But right now I am angry. I could throw dignity out the window and lean out after it, red-cheeked and hollering like a 19th-century English fishwife, my semi-transparent t-shirt flapping wildly with every gust of cold morning wind.

...Yadda yadda depressing yadda, but I think you get the idea. Merry finals week, all! And to all a good night!

(If it makes you feel any better, we in Cantabrigia have our finals after break. It's even worse if you're in the humanities: you also have a volley of papers due before you leave for vacation. It's like two exam weeks ("exam month"? Oh dear God), and I don't even want to think about it. In fact, pretend I never told you that. One day of classes-- lovely classes, but still-- left in the fall semester!)