On the first day of finals my professor assigned to me a one-page annotated bibliography.
On the second day of finals my professor assigned to me a two-page paper based on two critical articles and a primary text that was impossible to locate after hours upon hours of poring through databases and the library catalog.
On the third day of finals my professor assigned to me a three-minute oral presentation on the role and history of female characters in Elizabethan drama, for which I forgot my notes and was forced to ad-lib.
On the fourth day of finals my professor assigned to me four hours of reading the so-called Great American Novel, and after digging though pages of needless and meaningless description, static characters, and ostentatious language, I concluded that the assigning of any such text is merely a pretentious way to make classes seem harder than they really are.
On the fifth day of finals my professor assigned to me 500 pages of primary text material and a related research-based paper proposal that ended up being two pages short of the required length, and mostly paraphrased from Wikipedia. I actually forgot to write it until the morning on which it was due, and so typed most of it out using the text messaging feature on my cell phone and sent each sentence to myself while waiting in the drive-thru line at Tim Hortons.
On the sixth day of finals my professor assigned to me a six-page group paper for which only two people did any work and the rest skipped class and earned us a D minus. I developed a nervous habit of chewing on pencil erasers and cursing everyone around me in pig Latin. On-say of an itch-bay!
On the seventh day of finals my professor assigned to me seven short stories and a related seven-page paper assignment designed to compare and contrast the uses of different adjectival forms over the entire scope of Irish literature, of course taking into account the differences in modernist, post-modernist, and post-colonial writing styles and the effects of race and gender on each writer’s method. Instead, I located my car and drove around the interior loop of North campus at exactly 88 miles per hour, hoping to reverse the effects of time.
On the eighth day of finals, my professor assigned to me eight plays of Shakespeare, start to finish, complete with memorization of two sonnets, one soliloquy, and the writing of my own original monologue based on the themes of Henry V to be performed, dramatically and in costume, at the final exam. I cried.
On the ninth day of finals, my professor assigned to me nine books of Paradise Lost and a text-based research assignment that involved reading every biography ever written about Dante and his damned inferno, and then locating and describing each and every contemporary literary reference to the Divine Comedy. Again, I cried.
On the tenth day of finals, my professor assigned to me a ten-page take-home examination based on notes from lectures I had not attended and a comparison of three different authors whose works I had never read. I started drinking malt liquor mixed with rainwater in order to stay awake in the Lockwood study carrel in which I had created a permanent residence; the librarians and custodial staff began to refer to me as “that kid who looks lost all the time.”
On the eleventh day of finals, I don’t remember waking up or how I came to find myself on the roof of the Commons, yelling at passers-by while ripping pages out of library books and showering them over the people going into Starbucks. Campus police were summoned numerous times but could not succeed in subduing me. Apparently I also attempted to join Scientology, but the Catholic Ministries folks gave me a few free Bibles instead, so I spent the rest of the evening catching up on my religious theory homework that I had forgotten to complete, while eating potato chips and drinking Mountain Dew by the keg-full.
On the twelfth day of finals, my friends picked me up from the police station and I went directly home and slept for 34 consecutive hours, attempting to shake off the throbbing pain I had developed in my neck from propping myself up with books and trying to piece together the moments of the previous eleven days that were forever erased from my memory.
