Prima Classe, Non Cosi di Classe

I love me some learnin'...  I just cannot find it within myself to love the institutions in which we learn.  I was not one of those people who hated school, but then I wasn't there for most of it.  Carrie and I were off doing lord knows what...probably sitting at my dad's house listening to Catherine Wheel while everyone was stuck in 5th and 6th period.  I'd say it's a miracle I graduated, but really I owe it all to Mr. Mays for convincing my other teachers that I really wasn't an idiot and they should at least give me passing grades...just barely.  I should count myself lucky that I never got the chance to piss off any of the teachers I had senior year, just their predecessors.  And it wasn't just the instinct to buck authority, it was the backtalking that really got them.  Hey, if you haven't ever actually read Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, perhaps you shouldn't try to give a lecture on it.  I'm just sayin.  It was like that teacher read the Cliff Notes...of the wrong play.


Tonight I returned to school yet again.  I returned with the same fears I always have: Oh lord, please don't make me talk to anyone.  Oh lord, please don't let the teacher call on me.  Oh lord, please don't put me in a room with a bunch of teenagers.  Well, I wasn't called on, at least I've got that.  Still, it wasn't all bad.  I didn't learn anything new, but it was only the first day and I did get to practice pronunciation.  The teacher isn't bad and she sure has a lot of energy (which will be marvelous when I attend class after a nine hour shift at work).  The homework is minimal, though I will have to do about an hour of lab every week (between work and the class on Wednesdays, it looks like).  Eventually I will to do a presentation on a topic of my choosing.  Maybe I'll do it on Italian bureaucracy.  All those trips to the Questura will have finally paid off. 

The only other news I have of late follows:
     I have been having trouble getting to sleep, so I've been reading Billy Collins' Sailing Alone Around the Room out loud every night (and I'm almost done with it).  Sometimes I pace at the foot of my bed and gesture a lot.  Sometimes I lay on the coverlet at odd angles and stick my legs up in the air while I read aloud.  I find immense satisfaction in it, but it is simply not boring enough to knock me out.  I have a book on etiquette.  I bet that would do the trick.  Ooo, I think I have a book on prisons somewhere...hm...cancel that, I'd probably get even freakier dreams than I already do.  Whatever the case may be, I need to figure out how to go to bed on time because I've just switched my schedule again (I have got to stop doing that), so I'm off Swingshift and back on Dayshift. 
     Working Days means getting up really early to get the writing and the stretching and the bathing and the eating and the preparing done.  This also means going to bed at a reasonable hour, as in not four in the morning.  The advantage of Swing was sleeping in.  I have never been a morning person, but as I get older I realize that there is nothing to do at night anymore.  It was great working late shifts at WFM back when we'd meet up after checking out and go play Midnight Soccer (where the only rules were that there were no rules and there were many smoke breaks) on one of the barely-lit fields at Cal.  How I miss going head to head with David and Jennifer's cries of "Sacrilege!" and "Blasphemy!" whenever someone scored a goal against her team (which was often followed by her tackling someone, though sometimes it happened first).  Them were the days.
     Oh, how could I forget - My cat, Ricochet (a.k.a ManKitty, Richard, Pig, etc) took a very strange interest in my friend Megan's thigh the other night.  He was sitting quietly on her lap, she was gently petting him, and suddenly he bit her.  Hard.  On the thigh.  Meg yelped and looked up at me in surprise.  Then Rick did it again.  I am at a loss as to what could have caused my sweet, slutty cat to go psycho on my friend's leg like that, but he's never done it before, nor since.  Although he did spend the rest of the night following her around and trying to get back in her lap.  Poor Meg.  Do not wear those black pants over here again.  They must have tuna sewn into the seams.