Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Add It Up

As many of you know, I am currently taking a math class to prepare for a test which will (presumably) prepare me for admission to an institution which will (again presumably) prepare me for a yet to-be-determined future. And, despite my reluctance to return to academia (even just for night classes), all of this preparation seems to be paying off. No, I still haven’t figured out how to string a series of numbers and letters into a cohesive quadratic equation, but I have brushed up on my long dormant classroom people watching skills.

Its amazing how much you can learn about a person from silently stawlking them across a blackboard. Unlike my previous academic settings: college (which drew a heady mix of prep-school hippies, offbeat artistic types and out of the box pseudo-intellectuals, plus a few D3 athletes) and high-school (which drew a very unheady selection of hockey players, young republicans and kids who took the SATS in seventh grade, plus, um, me), my Kaplan class features a nice cross-section of twenty something New Yorkers. In no particular order, we have a suit-clad I-banker, a brownnoser, a heroin-sheik artistic type, an Indian math wiz, a New York urbane Amazon women, a Russian who could likely beat me up, an EMT (to protect me from both the Russian and the Amazon woman), a bubbly female with a selection of hip hats, and, of course, a generic, blonde shiksa. Though I can’t see myself in the third person, I imagine I fill the room's disheveled, introspective hippie void.

On a completely unrelated, but still somewhat scholastic note, I encourage everyone to checkout www.theheadbook.com. I’m not sure if it’s the second coming, but it is a good way to catch up with any tour pals you lost track of since leaving the lot

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