Good news, and showing up
Yay, got news a friend is expecting. Two bundles of joy in one year (my sister is also). Whee.
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For some reason this is on my mind today. I bet I’ve told this story before, but here it is again. I think it’s the layoff atmosphere (business: dismal) that brings it up.
In second year university I got really, really sick. But I also never really recovered my academic game even when my body recovered. I had taken attendence with a bit of a grain of a salt prior to getting sick, but after I got back to university I really became That Student. I pulled things off in most of my classes but only because I could structure an essay with decent ideas and because I tend to get good ideas under pressure (i.e., exams). But had I been in say, biology, where a spark of an idea combined with a good memory of text and a persuasive manner won’t get you bupkiss, I would have been sunk.
Anyways, one of my classes that year was an advanced creative writing seminar, into which I had talked my way. The class mark was simple: 50 per cent participation, 50 per cent based on one’s portfolio at the end. This was not a semester system school so this went from Sept-April.
The first month or two were spent reading and analysing actual good literature, so by the time I got sick at the end of October I had only turned in two things. One has been lost, probably luckily, to memory. But the other one was a poem. The first assignment for this class was this poem and it was “write a poem about a dead bird.” So of course we got a lot of lost innocence on the beach poems and a phoenix rising environmental fable poem. And a couple of other ones. Mine though (hello Lynn) was a former boyfriend walking past his former girlfriend’s house on garbage day and seeing the stiff body of the parakeet he had given her in a plastic bag out on the curb.
Anyways, I never went back to the class after Christmas, which is a pretty damn bad idea.
So I got a B-, or a C. I forget; let’s call it a C+ then. So I went in to tell the prof that he had gotten it wrong. He was retiring and packing up his office. He gave me a two-volume Norton Anthology of Literature and said I was the only writer in the class, but since I had only handed in one poem the mark couldn’t be any higher.
Today I kind of have that feeling; I am not showing up for class.
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