Quiet Saturday

It's been a quiet day in the cave. Sorry to say, I have followed my natural inclination, which is to say, waking up late, reading and napping. Every so often, I've gone online to see if there's anybody there I wanted to chat with, but apparently, they all have something constructive to do. I have something constructive to do also, and even something destructive, which would be much more fun. Alas, the inclination just isn't there. It has been just about exactly a year since the other fish was finally persuaded to leave the cave, and things have not gone from the messy transitional state to a nice, settled, stripped-down state yet. One might say that the sand is still stirred up. The cave needs a lot of work. A lot of rocks need to be picked up and spit out onto the ocean floor.

That was a nice comment, thank you. You may continue stroking my ego, along with everything else.

Writing this reminds me of my English class in my senior year of high school. For some reason, all my friends were put into the college-prep class, and I was not. It wasn't formally designated as a college-prep class, because at that time, all classes were officially the same. Some parents had, apparently, at some point, been offended that their children were put with other children of a similar academic proficiency. They thought they were being labeled as retarded. After this, for years, any attempts at categorizing students was verboten. I was placed into a class with a bunch of underperformers who couldn't read. That's not an exaggeration. One day we were studying Shakespeare - by the time-honored educational method of taking turns reading from the textbook - when the teacher asked a lanky lout in the back of the room to take the next turn. He declined, on the basis that he couldn't read. He was excused, because she believed him.

The leader of this educational expedition was a frail blonde not much older than we were. I remember she suffered from severe personal problems which kept her out of the classroom for months, and prevented her from actually teaching the class for most of the rest of the year. Her favorite teaching-avoiding tactic was assigning the class to "write something" at the beginning of the hour, then scribbling frantically at her personal papers, reading something that had nothing to do with English literature, or disappearing altogether. For a period of time, she made the writing assignment every day. She never specified any subject matter or style; just "write something." I started out racking my brain for interesting subject matter, stunning metaphors, charming descriptions and heart-wrenching emotion. As time went by, and the writing assignments weren't returned and weren't commented on, and certainly weren't graded, and I quickly ran out of serious, poetic essays, I came to the conclusion that this busywork wasn't even being read. After all, when would Frail Blonde have time, aside from anything else? She was certainly too busy with other things to hold class. I began to write silly things. I wrote sillier things. Still no reaction, still no sign that anything was being graded, read, or pausing on its way straight to the Dumpster. Finally, when I wrote the story involving talking rolls of toilet paper, I got her attention. Most of the circumstances surrounding this incident, along with the rest of high school, have been erased from my memory. But I seem to remember she had me stand and read the story to the class because she thought it was so hilarious. NOW she pays attention. Typical of my entire academic career, and, by extension, my life.