Midterm Madness

I believe that most of my friend group is suffering from midterm madness, a terrifying yet unavoidable disease.

Symptoms include the inability to focus while studying, a desire to consume more food than usual, and an excessive amount of internet surfing. Insomnia or excessive sleeping can both occur.

It's definitely midterms time. It seems like everyone I know has a midterm or two creeping up on them. For me, the terrifying one is my Japanese history midterm - 1500+ years of history to remember, and all - which means that I've been putting in some serious study-party time. Yesterday and today, a group of us got together to review all of the primary-source readings, the handouts, and the textbook readings.

However, we were studying perhaps 55% of the time. The other portion of time was spent making cracks about Prince Shotoku's excessively complimentary historical portrayal ("So what did Prince Fabulous do NOW?"), or about changing power structures ("Shugo-daimyo already knows four moves. Shugo-daimyo did not learn LOYALTY TO EMPEROR."), or about Japanese vocabulary ("'These Buddhist nuns were called bikuni.' 'Wait, bikinis?' 'Well, you have to gain the illiterate townsfolk's attention somehow.'"). We also made a much-needed study trip into town, where we ate Chinese food and talked about potential essay questions (and chopstick etiquette)

All in all, we probably got less studying done than we could have if we had been going at it on our own, but we did get some necessary stress relief.

In other news, the applications to be a tour guide for Oberlin have come out; I'm finding it tough to fill out some sections... None of my teachers have posted grades yet, so I don't have any idea what my official GPA is, for example. I hope that won't be too much of a problem... I would dearly love to be a tour guide and spend my time babbling effusively at potential Obies. My fingers are crossed.