Word: backed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...University Health Services, a nurse told me I had to take the exam anyway and sent me back to Stoughton. By now I was really desperate. I would fail my exams and all that frantic studying would be as useless as the entire first semester. After shivering by myself for an hour, I finally gave in and woke up a friend across the hall who sent me to stand, shaking, under the shower until the exam. I took it in a complete stupor, barely aware of what I was writing. I begged my section leader for mercy, staggered home, slept...
...BACK AT THE ROOM, things went from bad to worse. Ellen had grown increasingly resentful of my large group of old cronies and had developed a habit of throwing the telephone at me and snarling, "It's for you." I wasn't getting any sleep because she plodded around so early in the morning. When I came in late, she would wake up and make me feel guilty. Ellen best expressed her hostility at the one and only party I threw, when, dressed in the orange pajamas, she sat outside our door glaring at everyone who entered...
...returned reluctantly to my first reading period, arguably the most terrifying weeks of freshman year. My neglected coursework loomed before me, and my classmates' all too evident paranoia drove me from the Union. I never went back--it was too loud and the food sucked. I drank soup in my room, worked and fended off an inexplicable herd of admirers who had suddenly materialized when I didn't want to be bothered. As a maniacally drew up my schedules for studying, I discovered to my horror that I had three exams in three days. Had I read the catalogue more...
Spring term reading period came, and I didn't panic too much. I had at least twice the amount of work to do, but ended up doing twice as well. My exams over, I walked back to Stoughton to pack, ecstatic at the thought of leaving the dorm that symbolized for me all the horrors of the year. No more Campfire Girls parties, with shrieking women and very drunk jocks; no more science nerds scuttling around nervously; no more of Chuck's inanities. No more freshman year, with that painful sense of being different...
...elite universities" were one big Finals Club, enjoying "comfortable, if snobbish, intimacy" and "benign" parietal rules, all blond hair and blue eyes and a sure guarantee of The Big Coin after graduation. About a third of the way through it hits you: you flip to the picture on the back jacket and, with his brow ridge and prognathous jaw and small cranial capacity--that's where you've seen him before! National Geographic...