Next week is Finals Week—or Sweeps Week, as I like to call it—and for a lot of people that means three things: studying, studying and studying! Personally, however, I’ve never been hip to this whole studying tactic. Instead, I always opt to come to class on the day of the final completely unprepared and then—and only then—do I break out my patented secret: a panel of four of the most renowned guessers who live inside my head. I read a multiple-choice question and then the four of them interpret the tricky double meanings each answer possesses, analyze the merit of each choice based solely on wording and then, finally, compute the statistical probability of whether an ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ ‘D’ or the tricky ‘E’ is most likely to be the correct response based on previous guesses (“Sir, we’ve just answered ‘B’ twice in a row—there’s no way they’re hitting us up for a third ‘B’). For the first few questions, this method usually works fine. However, by around the 6th or 7th question, a split decision almost always arises—it’s either two vs. two or, in some rare cases, 1 vs. 1 vs. 1 vs. 1. These split decisions are usually followed by a ten-minute battle of internal fisticuffs, after which many panelists are too injured to continue guessing. I then must recruit some Spanish-speaking expert guessers, which always leads me down the path to confusion, as I don’t speak Spanish, and neither do any of the other panelists. They’ll say, “Did you say the answer is ‘C’ or ‘Si’? And quit using complex verbs, Carlos. We can’t understand you.” Having Spanish-speaking panelists is probably the reason approximately one third of my write-in answers are written in Spanish. More importantly, it’s probably the reason I usually do poorly on tests. I mean, how can I consult a guessing expert who lives inside my head if he can’t speak my language? Give me a break. So, basically, I’m either going to have to start studying like everybody else or simply learn Spanish.

I won’t be sure if this post makes any sense or not until tomorrow, because I haven’t gotten any sleep in the last 30 cubic hours. (Scholar’s Note: One cubic hour equals time * the Residence Interval (RI) of floods in Arizona * the % hypertextuality—which is almost always 100.) Fortunately, in only 218.7 cubic hours, I will be done with Sweeps Week. That’s a relief, because Sweeps Week is awful waffle.