Ramona Quimby, Age 23.

Let me be the first to say what everyone is thinking anyway: what is it about literature that attracts such weirdos? Depending on your focus you typically will find the students and professors suffer from certain affectations associated with reading tiny print in dimly-lit university classrooms. I've really studied all over the place as far eras, movements, and what not go, but it's a definite fact that the older the works, the stranger the readers. Perhaps it all stems from some sort of latent necrophilia. I blame Freud (though let's be honest, A Rose for Emily didn't really help anything either.)

While my first week of class has me thoroughly convinced that my undergraduate courses left me woefully under prepared (ex: professor makes assumption that class has read a number of Hawthorne's works I've never so much of heard of and entire class nods along while I think back to my dover-thrift edition of the Scarlett Letter I once pulled apart to get the grill going. How was I supposed to know people actually liked Hawthorne?) I will admit that getting your masters in Lit has a few unlikely perks:

1. Classes last for 3 hours, but as Lit profs tend to follow rabbit trails in their lectures one can easily zone out for a solid 15 minutes and upon their return discover that she has still not answered whatever question was posed to her in the first place.

2. Classes are small, which means we'll get to have actual discussions. I don't care what the brochures say, if you go to a university that averages 30 in its 'small' classes just forget it. The odds that you will have more than one excessively obdurate and opinionated student are far too high. You will not enjoy classroom discussions. Get used to this fact.


Obligatory Emerson quote? Predictable, but necessary. I like quotations, I feel they validate my thoughts:

'I cannot sell my liberty and my power to save their sensibility.' - Emerson

How you like them apples, Republican Party*?

*I am actually a registered member of the Republican Party. Please don't tell anyone.