Feb. 4: "Of Tests and UFAs'''

Well, it’s Friday evening and a fog has descended on Starkville.

I stumbled out to the big trash bin and threw in my bag and some sort of animal flew out. Not sure what it was. Probably a cat. Coulda been a raccoon, though.

Years ago, when I lived on the Coast a family of raccoons practically lived in the trash bin. If you took the trash out at night, you would see all these little glowing eyes staring at you as you approached. It seemed to me as if they were waiting to see what else was going to be for supper that night.

But the combination of dark and fog made it difficult to distinguish what sort of animal came flying out of my trash bin tonight. Like I said, it was probably a cat. For now, it's just classified as a UFA (Unidentified Flying Animal).

Thus ends my week, not with a whimper, but with an animal flying out of the trash bin.

It was a pretty grueling week and a terrible weather week, too. We got rain, we got sleet, and we got cold.

This week, I had three tests, turned in a semi-major project and attended Career Day.

I made a perfect score on two of the tests (Public Speaking and Mass Media Law), but was shocked, stunned, stupefied to find that I made only an 88 (out of possible 94) on my World Geography test. The professor let us look at our graded tests for a few minutes before taking them back up. (I suspect she uses the same test year after year, so taking them back puts a serious crimp in the Black Market test industry, I am guessing).

I discovered that, of the four incorrect answers, two of them came because I didn’t read the stupid question correctly. Very frustrating, as you might imagine.

The semi-major project was a Current Event paper for my Journalism Ethics class. It was more of a nuisance than it was a challenge, to be honest. I won’t know what kind of grade I got on that until next week, but I suspect I will do OK.

I passed out about 50 copies of my resume’ at Career Day and got a call from one company already. They want me to interview with them on Tuesday in Tupelo, so I’ll go see what that’s about. It’s a sales job, though, and I’m not all that jazzed about pestering people to buy insurance.

Still, it was nice to get a response and I’m looking forward to having an interview. We’ll see where that goes.

From the “I’m Out of the Loop’’ Department: In Mass Media Law class, the professor was lecturing on Obscenity Law. It’s pretty rare that obscenity cases are argued and extremely rare when something is actually ruled obscene.

The professor said he could think of only one recent case where someone was found guilty of obscenity.

“There was a video this guy did and he was convicted,’’ the professor said. “The video was called Two Girls and One Cup,’’

The class erupted in groans and laughter.

Obviously, I was the only person in class who was not all too familiar with this video.

So ends another week in the life of a hard-working college kid, a week that started with tests and ended with an unidentified animal leaping out of a trash bin and scaring the be-jeebers outa me.

But it was a good week, I reckon.