Five years ago, I went to see the Academy Is.  After hearing them at Warped, I was looking forward to a night of energetic pop songs to dance and sing along to.  It was one of those nights where I started to feel how old I was getting because there were a lot of young teenage girls around me, screaming for the lead singer to marry them.  I didn’t even know what the name of the lead singer was!  But pretty soon, I paid them little attention since I was too busy enjoying myself.  At one point, during one of my beloved song (Down and Out), the lead singer forgot the lyrics and I was the only one who shout/sang out the ending to “Bookends, Blue, and Clarity / to the Wall and Grace / Darkside, Wish AND A TOAST TO THE LATE FIGURE 8”.  I still remember the sheepish look the lead singer gave me, but graciously grinned and carried on with the song.

Then something amazing happens at the end of the show.  The drummer steps up as his band mates trot off stage and I see him scan the crowd.  I don’t think much of it, drumsticks, set lists, guitar picks get thrown out to the crowd on a regular basis.  They never come near me, anyway.  So he hurls a stick out to the crowd, and it goes to the far left of me.  So far left, that the girls who were around me running towards it would never have had a chance to even graze it.  I wasn’t an idiot… I’m not going to go running towards a used drumstick!!!  But the heart of the young does strange things to people, and the girls run towards to the elusive drumstick that has been touched by a guy with a pretty good beat.  As the area around me has thinned, the drummer makes eye contact with me, nods, and throws it out… and it’s coming straight towards me.  This whole commotion was probably spanning less than thirty seconds, but I was watching the drumstick come towards me like it was in slow motion, and I still vividly remember thinking “No freakin’ way.  Did he *really* meant for me to catch this?  What the hell, might as well stick my hand up and see what happens.” And there was was… smack dab, square right in the palm of my hand and IT’S MINE.  What a memory to be commemorated with a photograph.

I remember university to be a bit of a blur.  I might have learned a few things.  There was one absolutely dangerous lesson I somehow learned about underage drinking.  There was one night that a couple of friends wanted to see some local bands and luckily, it was at an all ages venue that served drinks if you could prove you were over 19.  So, we went, we had a few drinks, I was a lightweight then, being in my first year, and it didn’t take much for me to get hammered.  I made it home, slept it off, and woke up the next day pondering whether I should blow off my calculus class.  Aside from a vague fuzzy feeling, I was feeling fine… energetic, even.  (My seventeen year old self is such a bitch for having the energy of a seventeen year old.)  So, I headed to campus… I’d paid my tuition, might as well occupy a seat.

Upon my arrival the lecture hall, a few minutes early even, I begin to notice that my classmates had a sort of panicked look amongst them, and they were furtively looking at their notes.  I didn’t have much time to process it before we were let into the room.  I was still a little curious about their obsessiveness, but I had a good night so I shrug and daydream about it.  Then, the professor comes in with a stack of papers in his arms and says “I hope you’re all prepared for this midterm.”

MIDTERM?!?!?!?!  WHAT MIDTERM?!  Well, it was too late to fake being sick, as I’m sitting there and all.  So, what is a girl to do than take a big breath and just do the best she can do from what she remembered about previous lectures?  And that was all I could really do.  I go through it, do the calculus questions as best as I could, breath a sigh of relief as I reached the end and got to leave the disastrous experience behind.

I put it out of my mind for a week, and then the dreaded time came when the professor comes back with the same stack of papers, but marked this time.  I reluctantly shuffled to the front and went digging for my name, preparing for the worst.  And then I see my name, and then next to my name on the top of the exam paper:

97%

What the hell was that?!  I checked, and I checked, and I checked… to make sure I didn’t grab someone else’s paper, that those were the actual numbers, and that the marks were given for my answers and not because the professor was absentmindedly marking the answers right when they weren’t.  But it all came down to one conclusion… after a night of drinking and staying out way too late to be called responsible, forgetting that I had a math midterm, definitely not studying for it, I ended up getting a better grade than I would have if I had been a diligent student.  Oh yes, that really set the course for pretty much the rest my university days.  Fun times.