Bullshit

Final exams are all finished. I only had three - Catalan, Anthropology, and Spanish. Monica told us Catalan would be easy, but as Shelby said, "she said that about all the others too!" But this final one was easy. Too easy. It was all "introduce yourself!" and "describe your family!" and only worth 12 points, which is scary because it's 20% of the grade or something unreasonable like that. I'm going to accidentally misspell mother or something and drop down to a B. :P Anthropology on the other hand was the toughest test yet, talking to Tina and Troy we all guessed and conjectured about the same though, and Troy has 100% in the class so far and Tina and I aren't far behind, so I'm not super concerned. Still, when I was writing about hedonism for example I tried to just give Palmer what he wanted and I found myself too conflicted... so I gave my own arguments more on this test than on any of the previous ones, which won't help my grade but hopefully won't hurt it too bad. The extra credit questions were insane - I'd never even heard of the people's names. And I kept almost falling asleep while taking the exam. Meh.

I went straight from that into another essay test in Spanish. He gave us surprisingly little space to write our answers, and yet everyone was like, "do we have to use all the space?!?" I used all of it, writing two small lines inside each lined space on the page. The first two questions weren't terrible - I had to talk about how people build their social image and how poems and plays differ (on a deeper level than 'poems are shorter'), but the third one was yikes. Like being back in Smith's class, but worse because there simply weren't any words. No, I'll be fair. There was one. One word. This is a literature class, and they were asking me to write a three page paper about a single word. This is what was on the top of the paper:


Instructions? - Analyze this.

I saw this while looking through and panicked a little bit. Was this a joke? I only had one crappy sentence to write in analysis of this poem: "Esta imagen representa que los poemas pueden ayudarte entender el mundo y la vida, porque las poemas abren la puerta al sabio, como llaves." Great essay, right? Well, great poem too, buster! I calmed down, and repeated to myself, "Do you think this is easier for anyone else in the room? Really? Just relax, you can bullshit your way through this." And it's true. I just have to relax and say one thing, and then here comes another and another. And I had no enthusiasm about it and no real ideas, of course, so each point seemed awfully contrived, just one step from being mockery of the assignment, but I just had to pretend to believe in my points, and for the duration of the exam, I almost forgot I was bullshitting shamelessly. Almost.

Bullshitting, right? So the teacher isn't even giving you a question to work with. So, first make up questions. Then make up answers. What can I say about this?

First. The obvious. Keys are tools. A poem can be a tool that the reader uses to understand something, and a tool that the poet uses to show the reader something.

Time to get more specific. Why poema (poem)? Why not poesia (poetry)? I realized with a start that I was a bit curious about this. Of the points I brainstormed, this was the one I could answer least well - some nonsense about poema being more accessible, less fluffy sounding than poesia, and how it's an individual poem that functions as a tool more than poetry in general... but mostly because i would look stupid at the end of the key. And yes, I did write that last part. Because style is important too.

What else? The poem is short. Only one word. If it was longer it would look ridiculous, too many keys! Why a key for each separate letter, instead of one key that has the whole word poem? BS - Well, when you write a poem, because poems are short, and have to express a message at the same time that they often have to maintain a rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, etc, each word has a high weight and needs to be just the right word. Even the single letters within the poem are chosen specially. That's why each letter has it's own key, because they were chosen that way by the poet.

Okay, come on, I just need one more crappy thing to say... I think I've exhausted the word poema now. What else is in the poem? Uh... the handles of the keys. Good enough. Keys have handles. Handles are what you hold to use keys. So seeing the handles around the letters of poema is interesting. I can see two possible interpretations: One, that to the poet the poem always looks sort of like this, the poet considers the the letters/words of his poem keys to open doors of understanding for the readers. Two, that the handles are hanging there looking all appetizing, begging the reader to pick them up and use the poem and understand.

And yes, somehow I managed to make all of this sound a little bit smarter, except for the last one because I don't know the Spanish word for handle, so that was a fun bit of circumlocution...

I got to turn in the Bernarda Alba essay as well, and knock out some of my study abroad stuff. All that remains now is...

- Staff stuff!!!
- A few more goodbyes...
- Getting mom from the airport on Friday
- More Germany stuff
- A little more Spain VISA stuff
- Packing!!!
- Nihonjinron!!!
- Andorra !!!!

Wa yeah.