Midterms on my terms

Don't you love how communications have sped everything up? I've been studying for my German History midterm (which is tomorrow morning), and thinking about all the "Ages" and "Eras". You know -- Romanticism, Beidermeier, The Renaissance... People used to stick to the same ideas for decades. Some of these movements took up the better part of a freaking century! Nowadays, we've got fads that last less than a year. I mean -- what's with that? I'm pretty sure fads didn't even exist way back in the day, or at least if they did, they were too fucking slow to be recognized for what they were. What would it have been like if everyone had had cell phones back in the 18th century, to speed things up a bit? I'm sure that, rather than going through a whole century of the Age of Enlightenment, by the mid-1700s people would have simply been exchanging remarks on "that whole fad of reason that everyone was going on about for a year or two". Then they would have gone back to playing POG.

And what if the reverse were true? What if ideas and concepts still moved and changed so slowly? Well, then we'd have things like the "Age of Pokemon" or "The Chuck Norrisment".

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Also, I had a midterm this morning. Julia and Pete stayed over and we crammed all night. Though I absorbed a bunch of info through the whole ordeal, the main thing I've learned is that if I condition my mind and body, I can force it to write a good test. But when I say "condition", I don't mean in the new-age-healthy-diet-positive-thinking way. The key is to engage in increasingly destuctive behavior -- cookies and donuts for supper, 3 large cups of coffee throughout a sleepless night, and a swig of Bailey's in the morning on the way out the door. That way, your mind recognizes the frightening trend and, in hopes of salvaging its only means of conveyance, it will put on a good show and ace the test.

So I must commend my brain on its decision to do well. It's a good thing it didn't make the mistake of trying to call my bluff, because I would have hated taking that shot of Drain-O after getting back home...