Getting back to good

Well, a stressful two or three week period is finally coming to a close, and I can return to my comfortable slacker existence. Last week, I had two midterm exams. This week, I had to help deliver a two hour presentation and turn in the rough draft of a group paper in another class.

All in all, it went ok. The midterms weren’t as miserable as I thought they might be, and the paper and presentation came together pretty well. In fact, it ended up being highly entertaining during the first half, when we performed a skit recreating the events surrounding the deal we were analyzing. Everything would have been perfect were it not for the absolutely asinine questions with which we were interrupted every couple minutes. There were two girls who were particularly irritating, with constant questions about the internal motivations of the parties. These are things we don’t know, and we made this pretty clear. But that was too much for them to comprehend, as they gave us bitchy looks for failing to answer their questions to our satisfaction.

Despite the relatively positive conclusion to our work together, our group of eight people has been the real pain in my life. Of course, with any group of this size, there will be good members and bad members. We ended up, I think, with a pretty standard bell-curve distribution of quality.

I have to admit that I felt guilty because I didn’t feel like I was pulling my share of the weight in the project, especially early on. I was distracted by my midterms, and sick – not to mention unmotivated. So I was generally dodging work and not being nearly as reliable as I would like to be. It’s not that I want to be the group superstar, it’s just that I’ve been in enough groups with people who are flakes, and it’s no fun. Fortunately, at the end, I was able to make some major contributions, so I felt better.

The real problem was this dude named Jesus. Now I know it may be inappropriate, but I love people named Jesus. It’s just so great – it’s like you’re named after god. In fact, you kind of are. Besides, it gives rise to lots of good jokes. fn1. Anyway, the guy is a total flake. He never gave us any of the work he was supposed to do.

He also never showed up at group meetings. This past weekend (when we were doing the bulk of the work of assembling the paper and writing the presentation), he supposedly had a family situation to take care of. Now I understand that things come up, but when you’ve consistently been unreliable, it’s hard to cut any slack.

So what I really wanted to do was write a post called either “Waiting for Jesus” or “Is Jesus going to come?” It just seemed to perfectly encapsulate what was going on, with a nice degree of humor too. But I didn’t write the posts, fearing that it would be slightly sacrilegious.

Oh, one final note about Jesus. He signs all his emails “Jesus!”, as if the exclamation point makes the fact that he’s going to miss yet another meeting not quite so bad.

1. I realize that Jesus is a name primarily used in Spanish-speaking cultures. However, I can’t really see it as racially insensitive to get a kick out of it. After all, Jesus means the same thing in Spanish as it does in English. Just because it’s more common for Spanish-speakers to name their kids after the Son of God doesn’t mean that I can’t find it humorous. Now, on the other hand, if I were taking a foreign name that happens to sound like an English word with a different meaning, then that would be insensitive.