I told myself at the beginning of the semester I would keep track of how many times dudes mentioned Hemingway in my fiction workshop but I have already lost count. Tonight my professor quoted Jonathan Franzen and I imagined myself jumping over the table and running out of the room. My stories are up for discussion next week. Everyone in this class has been really nice, and I have been really nice, but I’ve been faking it some of the time as I am actually very surly. I’ve wondered if everyone’s been faking it but tonight I heard some people talking about how surprised they were that none of the stories so far have been horrible. I thought, what, really? Then I thought, they probably haven’t read my stories yet.
Right now, at this very moment, I should be writing a paper on The Empire Strikes Back and the ’80s and Reaganism. (Once again I have to wonder what it is, exactly, that’s going on. Is this real? What am I doing here?) It’s due tomorrow and I haven’t even managed to watch the entire movie yet. I’ve tried three times but I keep getting distracted and wandering away from my television.
My geoscience professor talked about the world’s largest rivers for over an hour today. There’s just not room in my head for lists of rivers and their volumes and lengths. That space is taken up by facts about ’90s cult television shows and somehow I feel that’s actually more useful.
My folklore class was a mistake. Let’s just pretend it isn’t happening.
