Musings from English Class

Not that today's English class was particularly thought-provoking, but I did get a chance to let my mind wander for a bit while the rest of the class (all ten of them) sat and did pretty much nothing, effectively making our professor re-think her strategy of not calling on anyone. There were several short stories that were assigned to be read (as I wasn't there, I didn't get them, though they sounded interesting), and I would have loved to have commented, but I had no idea what was going on, and so I sat and doodled counting machines with the number 01134 printed out an infinite amount of times on very long ribbons of paper. This is, of course, something for the first page of Shade, but it seemed applicable here.
For the most part, the class seems to be a great environment for me to temporarily escape into Shade's world, if only for a brief moment; a little nonsense is good when you're being forced to analyze other people. I know they say you're analyzing their writing; their thought process, but it's a sham. You're delving into whatever it is that they've written, and you're picking that person apart bit by bit until you know exactly what makes them tick, and then you've got your right answer. This is similar to taking apart a beetle (in my head it is, anyway). You start with the obvious parts: the outer shell, the wings, the legs, thus assuring that your unwilling subject won't be able to even attempt escape. Then you begin picking it apart with whatever you have handy: toothpicks, pushpins, screwdrivers, twigs... anything that can effectively poke a hole in the thing. And after you've managed to slowly torture the thing to death, made a large mess, and overly grossed out any onlookers not intrigued by this sort of thing, you realise that you have no idea what it is that you're looking for. Amidst all that grey and pus-coloured mess is the answer you seek, but you've no idea what it is; you haven't the slightest idea what made that beetle tick, and you never will, because you exhausted its life before you could reach what it was that was allowing it to be in the first place. I view over-analyzing literature in much the same fashion; I understand that the premise of the class is to give us a better understanding of the English language as a whole, but how do analytical and argumentative essays play into this? Is the English language only here to pick things apart and prove your point? Who the hell gives a damn why they decided to make the characters jacket blue instead of orange and green plaid? Words are a beautiful thing, and yet they get trampled on and made into something unpleasant in the name of education.
This is not, however, one of my musings from English class. As I sat there, amidst the mostly disinterested looking ranks of fellow students, my mind off somewhere where teeth can fly and what you perceive something as means nothing at all, the droning of the professor brought me back into attention long enough to get some people observing in. People observing is not the same as people watching; I'm not really sure of all the differences, suffice to say that they are there, and I'm sure they're darned effective when they're known. My English professor has a rather sing-song way of talking, a kind of up and down and up and down that makes it difficult to really want to grasp the gist of what she's saying. This is often neutralized by the incredibly monotone voice of a girl who (for reasons far too obvious to even mention here) sits by herself at a desk towards the front of the class. This girl has the uncanny ability to recall, verbatim, almost any useless fact on anything the professor says; today it was birds, and I felt as though some very, very boring computer voice was reading some book on the care of birds to me. And then she switches it up and talks about something else that she really doesn't need to be talking about. You wonder how long this has gone on in her life. This is apparently what having a military family that constantly moves around does to you. At some point in her life, mindless recitation will prove to be enough of a hindrance that she'll actually only say one sentence, and maybe in varying tones, until then, I'm probably going to wish I had the ability to yank people's eyeballs out of their sockets with my mind every time she opens her mouth.
In other, more pleasant news, I begin my new job tonight (there will undoubtably be a blog about how it went after I wake up tomorrow), and I'm rather enthusiastic to start. Nervous, yes, but still enthusiastic. Now, I'm off to nap before headin' out for the first night of the rest of my life.