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Final Exam before/after Had my final exam today, finished it in twenty minutes. 20 percent of my grade. Indeed, 20. Let numbers stand tall amongst my sentences, numbers are so important to the world. As I handed in my exam and shook my professor's hand (sometime old habit, sometime sincere...look your prof in the eye, say thanks, I imagine it helps, or maybe says something good. I appreciate learning, despite the dawning revelation that I know nothing, and perhaps from a philosophical standpoint, that there is nothing to know. Or rather everything is already known, and knowing that is knowing that there is nothing here.) I shuffled off, pausing to look at the class and the room. I truly had a good time learning, and playing around with these people. Exams are thrilling and diminishing. Thrilling in the sense of risk and reward. Almost like gambling. Diminishing in the sense that it seems most exams I've taken in my life, after the hurrah and bravado, after the performance, the deal is sealed and the paper handed in, we all shuffle off by ourselves, feeling a little drained, even if you had been contemporaries the whole semester, usually there's nothing you can do. Your paper is handed in, and you must go. Even when I took classes with a friend, it felt so. Or waited for the "group" to finish. I lingered in the cafeteria, thinking about arguing for more points from a quiz on which I got one wrong. I decided to let it go. And one by one, the class finished and filed out of the room, coming towards me. We gathered in a circled and talked. I hugged a girl I said had been giving me good luck all semester. In that manner, I felt less diminished. I think we all did. I'm at a loss to explain why, as I've done this thing many times in the past. (Of course followed by getting quite loaded shortly thereafter...saying in celebration but really to avoid that nagging sense of diminishment, that fateful sense of motion, that nothing will ever be the same again and the idyll that perhaps I knew at on point in time is now in the present forever gone.) But for whatever reason, I felt good about it.
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