Oh My Gosh

My brother is home this weekend.  I shared with him some of the academic work I've done over the past eight days. He was perplexed by one of the papers -- the one about sexual inequality among pygmies in the Ituri Rainforest of Zaire.

"Anthropology is about real people, right?" he inquired. 

"Yeah," I answered, with the unspoken words, "and your point is . . ."  lingering in the air.

"So why do they let you write about mythical creatures for an anthropology class?" he continued.

"Huh?" I responded, not sure from where he was coming.

"Pygmies aren't real. They're just fairy-tale creatures . . . like Oompah Loompahs. Oompah Loompahs are basically pygmies."

"Matthew," I told him, not quite believing I was participating in the conversation, "Pygmies are real. They're tribes of people who live in rainforests and are less than fifty-nine inches in height. Roald Dahhl made up Oompah Lompahs, but pygmies are real."

"No way, " he countered.  "Mom,  Alexis just said . . . " I have no idea how he finished the sentence because he headed downstairs to question my mother about the lies he thought I was telling him about pygmies.

The bad news is that Matthew will be admitted to a more prestigious medical school than I'll get into because his grades are good and he interviews extremely well because he's so charming. In medical school interviews,  questions about general knowledge topics such as pygmies aren't typically asked, so he's safe.  In roughly six-and-one half years, Matthew may be interning in a hospital near you.

The good news is that he studies hard and learns what he is specifically taught or instructed to read. Just hope that someone either taught him about appendicitis or told him to read that chapter in a book before you walk with pain in your lower right quadrant into the hospital where he's completing his internship. 

This Work Is Killing Me, But I'm Almost Finished.

I finished a paper detailing sexual equality among pygmies in the Ituri Rainforest.  The same course also required a lengthy essay, the topic of which related to the respect of land rights in relation to eradication and assimilation of hunters and gatherers. Grading in this course is most heavily determined by essay exams. I'll need to be prepared to write essays on demand on a myriad of exhilarating topics.

I also wrote a long-winded and majorly snooze-worthy paper on the statistical inferences of skewness and kurtosis in interpretation of the valididty of studies.   Do you care about skewness and kurtosis? Have you ever seen the word kurtosis? Neither had I before about three weeks ago.  Imagine writing a 12-page paper on the topic.

I risked not endearing myself to my "American Regional Literature"  professor by rejecting her "Supremacy of the Literature of, by, and for People  from the Deep South" bias by focusing on New England and Robert Frost.  This, I understand, is practically suicidal, but one can only take on idiocy from a limited number of directions at a given time.  I will in the meantime reassure myself with the statistical probability (considering both skewness and kurtosis, of course)  that the professor herself likely never personally reads our research papers and will not have a clue as to what was my chosen topic when she assigns my final grade for the course.
'
I've written a comparison/contrast of Moore's "Appeal to Common Sense"  versus  Lewis' "View of Epistemic Contextualism."  I've also addressed the degree to which  habit is stronger than reason in a 10-page annotated paper. I've read more than I ever wanted to read about the importance of scientists' re-testing the results of one another and how such (or the lack of such) has impacted the current knowledge base in science and medicine. Additionally, I started off this entire fiasco with the infamous "Essence of Stupidity" essay.

I've written counterpoints of every variety until I can't go to sleep without dreaming of them. Music Theory IV has been my least taxing course of the term, but trying to cram a full quarter of work into one week creates obsession where it otherwise would not occur.

My gymnastics classes are only .5 units each, so I don't have any actual fingers-to-keyboard assignments related to them as long as I don't miss more than two class periods. I wrote one of the make-up assignments that will be required if I miss class just so that it's completed if I need it. If I don't need it, I'll sell it.    You didn't just read that here.

I'm finished. I'm going to drink part of a Guinness, which I've learned since I last consumed one is actually an ale.  (The classification is based on how the beer is brewed. Ales are top-fermented, while lagers are bottom-fermented.)  I will then sleep for probably thirty hours, after which I will resume attending classes, smug with the knowledge that the hard work for me has been done.