Mid-October

I’ve meant to write about my classes in some detail; but as it happens the most salient thing I could tell you about any of them is that they are the reason I haven’t been able to write about them yet. So that’s sort of neat, in a stupid way.

(By the way—I’ve rediscovered the word “stupid” in an attempt to re-establish an elastic vocabulary—purely as a resource for the fiction I’m writing, obviously!—and, you know, it’s great to feel eight again. “Stupid” is a really elastic word. Everything can be stupid. Everything is in a varying, fluctuating state of stupidness. But the way that you employ the word can relay a precision in degree of insult. It’s great. The world is bright and once again full of possibility.

Actually, when I was eight, my third-grade teacher had to lecture the class about the impact of verbal slurs—it was a small private school and most of us had been together since Kindergarten, and you know, kids are kind of mean, and at this age just discovering that insults are a beautiful way to employ creative intelligence—think of “thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog!,” that beautiful slur delivered by Queen Anne in Richard III— and I remember this teacher telling us that the definition of “stupid” was “worthless” and how could we call any of our classmates worthless? Honestly—pretty easily. We were eight. Also, this is the same lady who took me to the beach once and made me eat the crust on my packed turkey sandwich, claiming that little girls who ate the crust of the bread would have beautiful nails and hair. Naturally, anything she said should have been taken into extremely careful consideration, but I was eight. Now, I know better, by actual fact. Bread crust and nails/hair have nothing to do with each other and I was duped, shamelessly.)

I’ll just give you the bare bones:

• MWF: Logic & Philosophy of Science, 09:00
• TuTh: Asian American Autobiographies, 11:00 // Literature of True Crime, 12:30

Reading for my TuTh classes is heavy. My professor for True Crime is this sort of old guy who, when he looks at you and points vaguely in your direction if he’s calling on you to participate in class, is always maddeningly imprecise with his gaze—maybe it’s his glasses, but I can absolutely never tell when he’s calling on me because he’s looking two rows behind me. Also when he’s looking at other people, he’s never actually looking at them. Maybe it’s a side effect of having seen too many bodies or other horrible things during his years riding along with the LAPD Homicide unit. I just don’t know. But I bring him up because he makes the excuse for so much reading by saying that we’d want to read the books he assigns anyway, even if we weren’t in his class. Stupid! You don’t know anything about me!

My professor for Asian American Autobiographies is someone I’d like to be friends with outside of class. He seems like a plentiful resource for his subjects—English and Asian American Studies—and I trust his class discussions. I posted a homework assignment on our class site and he emailed me later to tell me I’d done a good job. He’s also always smiling at lame jokes that kids make in class as if it’s the first time he’d ever heard them, which is impossible because he’s way older than me and I’d heard of them….This is the main thing that makes me question my vague aspirations to be a professor, myself, one day—how do I make kids think they’re not being stupid when they are? Should I suffer fools? I just don’t know. Anyway, the reading for this class is really emotional for me—I have a sort of hypersensitivity to the memories that the writers relay, and I’m not sure why. Certainly I have lived a very wonderbread, white-American existence, not without awareness of and appreciation for other cultures as they brushed up against mine or infiltrated it briefly….It’d be a nightmare of mine to have to teach any class where your choices range from the pedantic and the politically-correct, to the absolute stereotype. Today’s language hasn’t adapted as quickly in terms of culture to the nuances of the Asian American experience—I think—so we, college students, daft and somewhat unimaginative, already have crude tools to work with. I come out of each class feeling like it’s a miracle that we’re not insulting each other left and right out of ignorance. Instead people just say really lame things. There are a couple people in the class whose opinions I find interesting, but other than that I’d rather have a permanent office-hour one-on-one with Jim (professor who won’t be called professor…) twice a week. I think. At least, at this point, that’s true. We’ll see how the rest of the quarter goes.

My professor for LPS is smart and enthusiastic and funny. He suffers no fools. When someone in the lecture—which is large, almost 200 students, but small for an LPS introductory course—asks a stupid question, he’ll point up to the lecture slide where the answer is stated plainly and he’ll say something like, “clearly, yes” or “clearly not.” He also wears the same outfit to class every day. It’s a black v-neck t-shirt and a pair of black trousers. Everything is sort of merged into what could be mistaken as a jumpsuit by a thick black belt under his belly. He has really short gray hair and a big curly dark beard. What’s weird about his clothes is not just that he’s always wearing the same thing, but that, once, I saw him before class and he was wearing tan cargo shorts and what I think was a bright purple t-shirt. In lecture that day he was in his lecture suit. I don’t know what’s going on. 

On top of classes, I’m also working on stories to compile, at the end of the year, my senior thesis for the Campuswide Honors Program. I’m working with Ron Carlson, who is a real character. If I was set on getting to be a really good writer I think I’d make him a permanent project and not quit at writing until I’d gotten him onto the page. 

I’ve been reading Verses on Bird: Selected Poems by Zhang Er—

Poetry, my future, the blurred future of you and me

Pitch black. You already can’t see the hand in front of your face

At daybreak, you catch up with you

I’m hoping a daybreak comes for me, soon.