Thursday, November 06, 2003

I got me copies of Citizen Kane, The Adventures of Robin Hood (with Errol Flynn), and Holiday (with Kathryn Hepburn and Cary Grant). Oh yeah.

I also took a test yesterday. The school kind. And yet, also, at the same time, it was the moral and spiritual kind. That sort of crossroads where you ask yourself, "Oh, what is the fucking point, anyway?!"

I'd skipped this class on Monday in order to hang out with Trisa (which I do not regret as hanging out with Trisa is more important than school), so I didn't actually know about to-day's test until Mr. Ding (that's his name!) started writing questions on the board.

They were all about Twelfth Night which we would have studied last week if there hadn't been fire all over the place. Instead, I guess he expected us all to have independently done our work, merely because he'd had it all written down in the syllabus . . . Okay, not an unreasonable thing to expect of students. But I was busy smouldering under my own cloud of inner drama so I could hardly concentrate (wish I could say that inner drama was worry for our firefighters but it wasn't. It was Shirley McClaine saying, "Why do people fall in love with people?"). This was pretty much the reason I'd dropped the class the first time and I'd re-taken it now. When I signed up for classes, I didn't think I was gonna have much else to think about (ya'll get what I'm saying, right?).

So, yes, I'd read Twelfth Night once, a very long time ago, which was a fact I wasn't even aware of until I started frantically (while trying to look casual) skimming over the text (thankfully, this test was open book).

In the middle of all this hoopla, though, I couldn't help thinking, "Is this how I wanna read Twelfth Night? 'cause this kinna sucks." But no, it must be this way to placate the gods of acedemia. That glorious realm of their's where one should not learn unless it does not get in the way of memorising. Unfortunately, it often does.

I finally caved in and wrote one of my patently bullshitted essays. Like Trisa says, being things for all people . . .

"We had such wishful beginnings . . ." -David Bowie

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