Best of Week

I'll tell you what the best thing this week was: Me getting better. All of those awful cold symptoms finally starting to fade away. I tell you, i thought i was never going to get better. I had missed 2 days of school and been sick for 5 days total.

But anyways, on to the real stuff. Perhaps the second best thing this week was getting that darned AP test over with. Sickness had me cramming all my study time into 3 days before the test. It was a tough situation. I had to be thorough and efficient. Skipping over little details would have probably meant lower scores on the multiple choice section, but i couldn't go to deep either because I simply didn't have enough time to review the entire course and it's details.

My solution therefore was to single out WHERE i needed reviewing the most. Medieval Europe. Byzantium. The Dar-al Islam. China's various dynasties. The Mongol Empires. Mercantalism. All of those needed reviewing- so i made reminders to go over those topics.

My plans for review also changed quite a bit through the course of time. First, it was making PERSIA's for everything. Big, extensive documents and charts. Tons of details- and I did this because i was paranoid about forgetting the information. Very paranoid.

Alot of people tell me they remember things better when they write it down. Now the same goes for me too, but i REALLY have to write it. Even if i'm just scribbling stuff out on the textbook pages and not looking at it again.

So i had to make these extensive study guides, but as i ran out of time, i realized i couldn't do that. I had to simply look over the content. No more wasting time. I had to be efficient. I wrote less and less detail, skimmed more sections, and reviewed things in much less of a chronological order.

I remembered it, though. And for that reason, i believe i succeeded on the AP Test. It felt SOOOOOOOO good to get that out of the way!

But this method, however, proved unhelpful after awhile.

Birding the theater of the ABSURD

Well, ok. Perhaps this is a bit of a far-flung connection, but I personally believe it rings true.

It was something I thought of just yesterday as I strolled through the woods- out on my own- enjoying nature and whatever birds I happened to stumble across.

So yeah, you've probably guessed that I'm going to talk about birds. You're right about that. But i've noticed some funny things about them recently. Perhaps these are the kinds of things that you notice only after you've been birding for several years and you THINK you know every bird there is to know.

Yesterday, for example, I was out in the woods when a certain bird caught my attention. Its thick noisy wingbeats filled the air as it flapped through the trees and landed on a thick branch- a huge, poofy gray behemoth of a bird- all by itself- in the middle of the woods. What could it possibly have been? It was something even I did not recognize, so i quickly put my binocs on it.

It was a pigeon. A feral rock pigeon. Like, what the hell? What was a pigeon doing in the middle of a forest- away from civilization? Was it lost? Or had it just decided to come here like me to get away from the city?

So you see, this pigeon was just one example of a bird not doing what it's supposed to do- and birds, surprisingly do that quite often. They don't follow the rules. They don't follow logic-and if they did, it's probably no better than the logic birders follow. The whole world of birding is simply illogical. Like, who else but birdwatchers will miss their cousin's wedding, drop what they're doing, and trudge through a mosquito-filled swamp just to see some paltry little feathered creature? Who else would you find snooping around a sewage treatment plant at 7 in the morning looking for a rare species of duck? I mean, doesn't it seem kind of silly what we birders do? I believe so, and that's part of why i do it. I believe in absurdity.

Oh yeah, and i forgot to mention Murphy's Law. That's perhaps the ONLY law that exists for birdwatching.