*gloat gloat gloat*

I need to take a moment to gloat.

Today, we got back the draft of our group project in World Geography. This was our paper about petroleum. My part was to do the beginning -- basic stuff, and maybe add in some info about the U.S. and petroleum or something like that. Well, I did my part, and, not surprisingly, I wrote more than the 5 pages I had to write. I had it done like two weeks early, and I gave it to my group. The one guy compiled the three parts and we turned in our draft. Today we got it back with corrections. My part needed very little editing.*gloat gloat gloat*

The professor didn't like the way the guy had formatted it, and honestly, I can't blame him. Not to be arrogant, but I probably could have formatted it better. The professor also said we should have edited better. Well, I'm a gringa. I'm not supposed to have perfect grammar, so I'm off the hook as far as I'm concerned on that point. Yeah, my part had more grammatical errors than theirs, but not by as much as I would have thought. Then the professor had a lot of things that my group-mates could add more to or fix or clean up. My part basically only had word or language errors. WHO'S STUCK WITH THE STUPID GRINGA NOW, HUH PUNKS? HUH?

Okay, okay, that was really unfair. My groupmates are really nice, and they've done a good job explaining things to me when I don't understand. But boy oh boy does it feel good to prove that perhaps I'm not as stupid as I seem. Remember when I said that it's bad when you have to correct all the stupid errors your group makes, but it's worse when you're the one making those mistakes? Here's an addition to that: It's FANTASTIC when you can prove that even though you're making those mistakes, you're really not a complete and total idiot.

After we all looked through the paper in class, we talked about how we wanted to do corrections. We dithered about it for a while, and then we decided to go downstairs to the photocopier and make copies. Then we were standing in line, and my group mates were dithering about it because it might just be better to divide it, and because it was "expensive" to copy it. Expensive? Really? It's like, 2o pages. I bet that's like, $1.50 to copy. If that. I really wanted a copy, (a) so that I could see where I messed up, and (b) admire all the things I DIDN'T have to fix, but I didn't want to come of as the rich American by buying an "expensive" copy, so I kept my mouth shut. I offered to scan it, but eventually we decided not to do that. In the end, the guy kept the paper and the girl went off with him (I guess they'll figure it out) and they told me not to worry about it because it would be easy for them to fix my grammatical errors. I still want a copy, but I guess I can't argue with that.

Karma, I am sure, will soon be making its rounds, and it will thoroughly punish me for my complete lack of humility. As such, I'm going to gloat my pants off while I still can.

So, where could Karma possibly rear its ugly head? Well, any one of the tests I haven't gotten back yet is a good place to start. Today we had our Cartography test. I am amazed at how much work my teacher managed to squeeze into two measly pages. That really takes skill. I don't think I did great on the test, but I probably did well enough to get ... maybe a B? B-? That's good enough for me at this point. Some of my definitions were pretty weak (for "vector" I think I seriously wrote "a type of line") and some I probably invented, but other parts of the test I thought I did well on. The most notable part of the test was the last part. She had copied a little square off the Poas topographical map and wanted us to locate 10 things on it. I actually knew what about 6 of them were. Of those, I could locate maybe 3 or 4 on the map. Everything else I just guessed on, with the guesses becoming less and less educated the further down the list I got. I have excuses for myself, though. I'm from Kansas. Kansas is a flat state. At least two of the items I'm supposed to find were some sort of "pendiente." Now, I'm pretty sure that "pendiente" is some sort of slope. We don't have slopes in Kansas. I should not be required to know this question. Second, the hoja Poas (map sheet) is utterly ridiculous. I'm sure some of you have seen my pictures from Poas. Do you have any idea what a topographical map of that looks like? It looks like someone spilled their coffee on a sheet of paper and decided to call it a map. The lines are so close together and all jumbled up that you have to get about an inch away from the paper before you can see that they're not just one giant brown stain. I repeat: ridiculous. All I'm gonna say is thank goodness those last questions were only worth one point each.