A couple of months ago, I found myself meandering home at five in the morning, quietly self-reflecting at the tail end of a Saturday night. As I strolled through the empty streets of Madison, I gazed up at the clear, enchanting, star-filled sky, and random questions filled my head. How far away were those stars? What made them so bright? How long do stars live?
And then it hit me.
\Wait, those aren't random questions,"" I said. ""Those are things I need to know for my astronomy midterm on Monday.""
When Monday morning rolled around, things only got worse. After a pathetic attempt at cramming the night before, I slept late for the exam. Sprinting over Bascom Hill, I arrived at the Sterling Hall classroom 27 minutes late for a 50-minute exam. I realized I had missed 54 percent of the test.
""Hold on,"" I said, talking to myself again. ""I just did math. Maybe I can pass this thing after all.""
Naturally, I failed the test pretty handily.
It's amazing how quickly a semester can take a downward turn like that. It just takes a few weeks, a few crossword puzzles during lectures, a few school nights at the bar. Then suddenly, you look up to see a pile of unwritten papers and a backlog of flubbed exams, and the person for whom it was worth staying out until five a.m. in the first place has exited your life stage right.
At this point, there were two things I could do. Either I could try a shameless route and devote a whole column to how good looking my astronomy TA is-and may I say for the record that Tommy is a handsome, handsome man-or I could take the path of maturity and try hard work. For once I chose the latter.
Doing schoolwork is difficult, though. Some people find school to be its own reward, but many of us just feel like hamsters running on little wheels-caged animals asked to do parlor tricks like science or literature classes. So we deal with this by finding distractions and other ways to expend our energy in more satisfying ways. That's the reason why doing basic schoolwork is so hard. It's not that the material is so hard. It's that we'll go to extraordinary lengths not to do it.
But as I studied for my second astronomy exam, there was one concept that really stuck with me. When stars emit a full spectrum of energy, often it is only the dimmer, red light that we can see, because the blue light of higher energy is deflected by interstellar dust clouds between the earth and the star. In some ways, this is like what happens to us. We get so mired in the dust of frustration, distraction and stupid impulses that we sometimes lose our best selves.
Maybe that's what college is actually supposed to teach us, that if we can survive academic requirements and personal relationships without getting completely lost in the scattered fragments of stupidity within us, then we're ready to enter the world.
I'm pretty sure I passed the second exam, but as I start to plod toward that maturity, I realize that maybe there would be worse things than having to retake astronomy next semester.
After all, I hear the department's TAs are really attractive.
And sympathetic.
Cough.
