declivity

Just like I wish "gaiety" connoted only twinkle-toed happiness, I wish "grades" were only gentle upslopes capped with promises of sweeping, sun-flooded vistas, sharp intakes of breath, and escapes from treeline. But I replenish my overfilled cup of dismay with the daily recognition that "gaiety" actually associates me with Mary [and Lynne] Cheney and Roy Cohn, and real "grades" provoke my semesterly aversion to NYU Home, the system that tells me whether my latest season of truancy and dereliction, at $19,575 per, will be validated by a grade that rhymes with "Hooray, Gus!" or will be castigated by a loopy mark of shame that rhymes with, "I have brought shame upon my family, Linus."

I have no pleasure - save for the pleasures of perspicacity, foresight, karma, masochism - in reporting now that my precise handwritten transcription of my Criminal Law outline into the eleven blank pages at the end of my textbook was a labor of love/loath that ultimately produced nothing more than symptoms of early-onset basal joint arthritis and the lowest grade of my life. Only the sad little letter I got in Andy Moravsic's international human rights seminar compares to this one, but that one I deserved (living wage sit-in, suicidal urges, late adolescent hormone surges, dirges) and this one I am ready to protest as the arbitrary decision of a tyrant. Yeah, I'm that hubristic: I think I deserved better.

I know there's nothing to be done now but seethe and wait with dread for the next two grades to come out. I'm so bad at handling rejection, though you'd think that at this point, with this many to have handled, I'd have developed better coping mechanisms than merely laying supine and accepting all the apocalyptic scenarios that Brian plays out on an instructive filmstrip of life possibilities. Or balling my fists and hitting inanimate, durable things. Or elevating the night-time tooth-grinding to all-time highs ("It didn't sound like grinding, but like two barges colliding," said L recently), or just working on that permanent crease of worry between my eyebrows.

Now I'm being a baby. According to the principles passed down to me by an ancient and extinct breed of cliff-dwelling sages, I should balance bad news with good. So here's my good news: I got a spontaneous bloody nose in Torts yesterday, and I didn't even bleed on my neighbor as I rushed for the exit!

Score!