post-apocalyptic

Yesterday's and today's exams were a blur. I maintained a state of almost Zen-like tranquility throughout, and was hardly aware that I was taking an exam. I can picture myself in the distributed computing classroom, sitting at one of several compound desks (as I suppose they can be described) arranged in circles, paper in hand and a serene smile on my face. I can see the virtual hourglass on the projector screen count down the minutes with obscene accuracy. I can see the TA standing awkwardly behind the podium. He doesn't look so menacing anymore, now that Casper's shadow does not impend over him. Where is Casper, I wonder? Vacationing in the Bahamas, no doubt, as it is any professor's solemn duty to do when his class is being put through an exam. A lot of people may not know this about me (or then again, maybe they do), but I really enjoy discomfiting people who are nervous before a test by appearing as insouciant as possible. I didn't even have to put on much of a facade this time, since I was truly not very nervous at all. You have to be at least a little optimistic about your odds in order to be nervous, and I was blissfully unencumbered by anything resembling the faintest glimmer of hope. Thence the insouciance. I must say, I really did enjoy standing outside the classroom with Nicky before and after the test, breathless with laughter, almost rolling on the floor. I didn't look very closely, but this spectacle might have got not a few beads of sweat rolling down the foreheads of my comparatively better-prepared classmates.

What did give me pause was the sight of people who had habitually paid attention in class (unlike me) poring madly over their notes, sitting in corners with computers and stacks of paper lying gutted before them, clawing at their innards like a hungry man desperate for the tiniest morsel of knowledge. You would ordinarily expect such franticness only of people who are not well prepared. People like me. And you can't blame us for feeling a pang of contempt for these other people, because we don't often get to see greed like this in its purest and most appalling form. "You've always paid attention in class," one gets the urge to remind them. "What more could you possibly want?" One might even go so far as to say, "Share some of your marks with the poor and the needy," - a sentiment that is perhaps better rendered in a language like Hindi, hence the italics. But at the end of the day, it's these people who leave the exam room with a faint smile of satisfaction on their exhausted faces, and it's people like me who roll around on the floor, clutching their sides, laughing manically for no discernible reason. I'm sure I won't be laughing so much when the grades come out, so one could argue that I'm making the best use of my laughter, like spending all your coupons before they expire.

So that was distributed computing. I suppose I had expected to be vindicated by algorithms this morning, but the exam left me feeling a good deal less satisfied than it should have. I'm definitely losing a few points. If I'm lucky, those will be the only points I lose. But that won't change the marked lack of vindication that I left the exam room with. When I got there before the exam, I was a little surprised to see that everyone, almost without exception, was animatedly discussing problems and concepts from class, with about a hundred times more desperation than I had seen at distributed computing yesterday, and I felt a mixture of smugness and self-doubt as I leant against a pillar, scrolling aimlessly through my phone. If I had done well on the exam, I would have come out feeling like the Kaiser that I am. Instead I came out feeling like the Kaiser that I'm not. And now I'm spending this unexpected little mid-semester break at my aunt's place. This break is romantically referred to at school as "fall break", but most meteorologists would agree that summer has not quite left us yet, and even though it seemed last week as though we were in the clear, we should be able to hear footsteps descending the steps to the basement any minute now. We must brace ourselves, because summer is cruel and sadistic.

I don't know why I'm so flowery today. Maybe it's the Wagner. I will say that this period of my life, while perhaps not post-apocalyptic in the strictest sense of the term, is at the very least post-examination, since I no longer find myself approaching exams with the respect and awe with which I approached them in the tenth grade, for instance, as evidenced by some of my earliest posts on this blog, when I also did consistently better on exams than I seem to be doing lately. I'm not failing or anything - yet - and I'd like to keep it that way, if you don't mind - I suppose I ought to be addressing myself to the Pagan God of Pumpkins, now that Halloween is around the corner, and grocery stores across the country are stocking up on surprisingly delicious and not even fake-tasting Halloween cookies. The real and the irreal become as one on Halloween, and concerns about sublunary things like exams vanish altogether.