Spring?

I met another person today who has the same writing instructor as I do and harbors the same feelings of ultrarage about her airheaded midwestern-soccer mom demeanor, I'm hoping I could eventually organize enough people to launch a formal complaint against the school's writing program and its respective worthlessness.

I lamented to my mother about this several times. She told me not to be too hard on the course, because she teaches the same stuff and knows how students tend to approach the tedium of such required classes. Then I told her that the instructor required us to write a full 10 page draft of an essay without a thesis, and achieved maximum persuasion.

It's weird that I look back on having my dad as an English teacher as a sort of academic golden age, it's also weird that my final research project in that class was about a writer whose books are largely concerned with golden ages and the characters who experience their aftermath.

Oh damn, I suddenly love my Rhetoric class, though. It's the only class I have where the papers are graded on your ability to make a good argument and not on your ability to regurgitate the fact-rodents that were puked into your gullet by the institutional mamabird.

I think my sudden love for intensely biological metaphors (like the one above) are a side-effect of reading Lara Glenum's poetry, which is one of my favorite things right now.

The Intergroup Dialogue class continues to speed along at maximum tedium, but it's given me some creative ideas. I'm going to write a parody of some of the readings they've been giving us, amongst other things.

I'm trying fiction again after a long poetry-filled break from it, I'm also trying to re-enforce my fiction voice with some of the syntactical learnings I picked up from writing/reading an assload of poetry. It's hard. I feel like I'm having trouble “breathing life” into my fiction, I always think it sounds empty and bland, and that there's no intrigue or anything to support it.

Here's an excerpt from a little something-something that I started in the airport as I was flying home for spring break:

I needed to climb out of my seat, but my co-passenger was still slumbering. We were the last ones on the plane, so I figured I should wake him up. I said, “Hey,” then shook his shoulder a little. Then I raised my voice.

“Did we pass it already?” he said.

“Did we pass what?”

“The landscape,” he said. I couldn't tell whether his tone was serious or not.

“Yep,” I said. “It's pretty much all behind us now.” I inner-cringed at my own pun, but he didn't make any sneers, mental or otherwise.

“Fuck!” he said. Several flight attendants looked over at us. “Fuck!” He actually yelled this time. The loudness was scary but somehow refreshing.

“What, were you eager to see it or something?”

“I had to see it,” he yelled, turning red and giving off some fresh dectectable agitation. “There's a fuckin', fuck, see, you can see the outline of a neighborhood on the ground from this flight route that looks like a cock. I was supposed to get a picture of it. I'm a photographer. Fuck. Magazine photography.”

“I saw it!” I said, my words came out too excitedly for me not to hate myself for sounding that way. “I remember specifically when we flew over it.”

“Shit! Why didn't you wake me up?”

“I didn't know it was so important to you! How many random strangers would take kindly to me saying, 'Hey, that neighborhood down their kind of looks like the outline of a dick, doesn't it?' How was I supposed to know?” My response was probably over-explained and it was. But it seemed important to talk longer so not to appear meek.

He paused, then unbuckled his seatbelt. “You should've assumed it anyway.” He promptly got up and grabbed his bags.On the side of one bag, a sticker read “PROPERTY OF THE UNIVERSE: Scorch Magazine” At that time I wished I had owned a cigarette lighter and that he had grown a beard so I could have set it on fire. His walk down the aisle was brief and I could taste the arrogance, and I imagined the least decrepit flight attendants in the fuselage assaulting him and tackling him to the floor like so many women had probably done to him in their minds.