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Today’s Tasty Tip is brought to you by the letter A+
DEADLINES
You know they’re coming. Like getting pulled over for getting road head or falling into a really big hole, there’s no getting out of it. Unless you’re a Fembot, or something.
Part of a bi-weekly feature regarding tenaciously tasty tidbits of advice, here’s a nice, little bullet-pointed list to help get your work in on time.
The painfully innocent, endearingly preppy hometown girl, at college for her first time. Boyfriend? Oh yes, he’s in college too. Just not here. “We’ve been together since junior year. The distance is actually really healthy for us right now.”
And you know him.
The earnest, stand-up nice guy with a cute girlfriend back home. “I asked her to prom by filling her car with 100 balloons and she had to pop each one to find the ticket inside. She might transfer here next year.”
Stress. The big, fat, towering rain cloud of impending doom, ready to explode with an acidic rainstorm of a malnourished, “I’m-just-doing-too-much!” meltdown.
Okay, I have a game. Let’s play daytime infomercial from the 90s.
Hi. [patronizing, sympathetic smile goes here] Are you feeling… overworked? Worn-out? Like there just aren’t enough hours in the day?
…you may have gained a few tidbits of magical wisdom. For example:
Shoving eleven handfuls of candy corn down your throat before crashing for the night may not have been the most fruitful idea. (Vomit is already orange. And gummy.);
Lining your stomach with bread product before imbibing copious amounts of the cheapest handle you could find may have spared you the embarrassing episode of forgetting how to walk. In the middle of the street. As people on the sidewalk point and stare, asking “What’s that person doing? Is that part of their costume?”; and
Even though you may be dressed up like a superhero, wield a deathly, plastic sword and have consumed the dark, magical ale of invincibility, you’re still just a flesh-and-bones, malleable human being underneath. With feelings. Aw…
Flu season is HERE. For those of you walking around all healthy, energetic and giddy about the weekend, let’s keep it that way, shall we?
Some tips:
Wash your hands.
It may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many grimy doorknobs, slick used bookcovers, and schweaty… basketballs, yeah, are home to thriving colonies of immune system-eating bacteria. Anti-bac hand gel may suffice, but wash your hands in every sink you come across, and be thankful you don’t have microscopic, X-ray vision. You’d probably puke.
Drink water.
College students seem to think that the 8-glass-a-day rule was only relevant in 6th grade health class, and you may have blocked out that semester from memory after having been forced to watch that gory birth video. Dehydration is the number one path toward dry mouth, nausea, lightheadedness and dry eyes, minus the crazy story of how you ended up there.
Sneeze into your elbow.
Classrooms are a breeding ground for campus-wide flu epidemics. While the smart, sickly students are in their rooms underneath a cave of blankets and dirty laundry, the rest of you who made the attendance sheet that day are in the symptom-free pre-Bird Flu stages of assumed health. Don’t be fooled! Keep some tissues handy, but keep them away from the window. Air-colored, deathly sneezes are flying around like Harpies out there.
Hey. You. Stop sucking the life out of college students everywhere. Halloween’s on Friday, and your victims need some breathing space to prepare for a night of debauchery. And good, clean, scary fun, of course. Corn candy, anyone?
Fall semester is almost halfway over, storefront holiday decorations are over-zealously jumping the gun on fuzzy, cross-eyed, dancing snowmen sales, and for many, the Turkey Drop is just around the corner (If you just said huh?, check back for a future post on this.).
And even though the next full moon is nowhere in sight, college classes are hell-bent on infusing campuses with the eerie, cultish chant of impending doom, reverberating the halls with “Midterm… Miiidterms… MIIIDTERMS!” I suggest wearing earplugs.
Buy your Scantrons now, and don’t let the paper industry fulfill their evil ploy of plucking your last breathing nickel and dime when you really should be stocking up on candy. And by candy, I mean… candy?
So however you decide to prepare for the bi-monthly slap of now-show-me-what-you’ve-actually-learned-in-this-class, it’s not the amount of studying and cheat-sheeting and Red Bull that matters. It’s not the weeks of color-coded, doodley note-taking that’s gonna pull you through. It’s how well you can decipher a Roman numeral clock during that blocked out test-taking time you have to perform. And who really uses Roman numerals anyway? Damn textbook indexes.
A piece of advice:
Don’t pull an all-nighter and stumble into class with mismatched shoes, gum in your hair, rubbing sleep out of your eyes and pen-marked notes transferred onto your face from falling asleep on your hand. All that cramming will have gone to waste as you sit in that cramped desk made for a 4-year old, dreaming of a sausage, egg and cheese breakfast sandwich and a Venti vanilla latte with four extra shots when you could be drudging up those answers you crammed into that spongy brain of yours and writing beautiful analyses on grade-deciding essay questions. Warning: Lack of sleep causes run-on sentences, and adjectives and prepositional phrases don’t come easily as you’re losing brain cells from an underabundance of REM cycles. And then you start making up words.
Get some sleep. Breathe. Eat some breakfast. Breathe Again. Pass your midterm with flying colors and then sleep until dinnertime. Or until Halloween. Nothing exciting happens until the trick-or-treaters are in their bed getting high on processed sugar anyway.
All in all, don’t worry! The end is near and it’ll all be over soon.
Can you see the light in the distance? Frolicking into the wee hours of the night with half your costume left behind in a gas station bathroom, keeping tabs on how many people went the distance with “The Slutty Halloween Costume Conglomerate” (see below), cavorting with inebriated partygoers until the cows come home… Those damn cows.
Thank the Greek gods Halloween falls on a Friday this year. You can wear your costume all weekend.
If you’ve never read Anne Sexton’s retelling of Lil’ Red’s oh-so-sexual encounter with the Big Bad Wolf, read this first, then Google it. Twisted literary retellings of fairy tales aside, popular college culture has brought its own twist to the age-old celebration of All Hallow’s Eve.
“Bubble-in your answers! … Make sure you fill in all the bubbles.”
Bubbles? Where? I want bubbles.
And then it hits you. Square in the center of your Myopic vision.
With today’s Scantrons, the best you can hope for are semi-outlined, insipid rectangles with the hint of a microscopic letter in the middle of each. If you’re lucky. It’s more of an Astigmatism-slash-color blindness test than a multiple choice review of your knowledge on Australopithecus afarensis skull parameters. I applaud you, BioAnth majors. Get some glasses, and get your bubbles at the dollar store.
Bubbles aside, the Scantron’s insult to aesthetics isn’t the reason why they’re so evil. They’re worse than ugly.
They’re forgettable.
Unfortunately, Scantrons are easier to forget than condoms during a wet dream.
According to the Personal Institute for Bitching about Scantron Usage, last accessed October 27, 2008, more than 90 percent of college students will (at one point) forget to bring the mandatory Scantron to a big exam, blow their GPA in one fell swoop, get rejected from every post-graduate institution on the planet, and forever be forced to cite this blog as the only credible thing they ever read in college. Ever. All because you forgot that one, measly Scantron on that fateful testing day.
Suck it up early on. Invest in Scantrons now.
Because really, dragging your sluggish, sleep-deprived, disheveled self to a morning midterm only to turn around and walk four blocks uphill to the student center to buy a single sheet of computerized paper (as copious amounts of facts and dates and the numbers of your student ID slowly seep out of your skull) just isn’t worth it.
I think that’s why people used to rub Chapstick down the little black marks on the side. Not to cheat, no. To infect the annoying sheets of paper with the Herpes they deserve. Sneeze into your elbow, okay?
So.
The Scantron numerical stamp has effectively replaced your professor’s “Good Job!” at the top of your exams. No smiley face. No winky, puppy dog sticker in the upper-right-hand corner. Robots are taking over, I tell you. Head for the hills. The one near the student center. That’s where the Scantrons are.
But hey, if you have a peddler’s license, waving around a 100-pack of neatly pressed Scantrons in front of a 700-person psych class on the day of the final is not only a good way to make some change (for laundry, remember?), but an easy cop-out for a pick-up line.
- girl geeks
- guys who like girl geeks
- scientists
- documentary-lovers
- hungry artists
- artsy web developers
- Trekkies
- cat owners
- single-celled organisms, because they don't know any better
- scholars
- grad students
- people who buy magnetic poetry kits
- people who receive magnetic poetry kits as gifts
Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com title: "The Avoidance Cycle" - originally published 5/14/2012 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE! […]
Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com title: "Grad Stereogram" - originally published 5/9/2012 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE! […]
Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com title: "Where are you from?" - originally published 5/7/2012 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE! […]
Questions > Answers
