Now. No, Now…Okay, Now.

This is dumb, all I have to do is stand up and leave.

I stay seated.

My fellow students, at some point in your academic career chances are that you’ll have to leave a classroom mid-lecture. This is always an awful experience, bound to inflict permanent emotional scars and leave you slightly shell-shocked. An English lecture is at its best when it is an amorphous blob of ideas shaped only by the jello mold that is the prof’s knowledge. Piercing this fugue of thought without offending anyone takes skill, takes finesse, and mainly: takes patience. My enemies of the day are the clogs. A clog is a student who tends to preface any comment that they make with some particular strand of arcane knowledge that they are eager to show off, (“Well, I know from my deep reading of Nietzsche’s grocery lists that…”) and who finds the value of any comment to be directly proportional to the time it takes to deliver said opinion. A clog gets its name in part from the way they clog up an argument but also because they like to dance around their point. If I sound bitter I apologize, I have been a clog, and no doubt – when the mood strikes me – I will be a clog again. I’m only identifying the breed, not calling for their extinction. Still on this particular day the clogs were in my way.

You see, it was the first day of the English faculty’s Full-Stop Fridays and for blogging purposes I felt I should be there. Eventually, I scrounged up what little shreds of courage I own and slipped out while a clog was inhaling deeply. So Full-Stop Fridays is a kind of social event meant for English majors to gather together and collectively unwind. Usually the thought of meeting so many new people at once would give me the sweats in a way that’s really nobody’s business, but luckily Reliable Roommate had promised to come with me. Reliable Roommate is punctual and friendly and great at filling conversational pot-holes of awkward silence – basically just exactly the type of guy you’d want with you at an event like this. Arriving at Olliver’s I started walking to the back of the bar, where I stood still and realized, with not a small amount of horror, that I had no idea what the people I’m meeting looked like. Now, if it’s true what Woody Allen said that 80% of success is showing up, I’d like to add that 80% of showing up is knowing where you’re supposed to meet. And at this point I didn’t have any idea if we had a set table, or if we were supposed to meet up at another location first. On top of this, Reliable Roommate was nowhere to be found – very out of character. A moment before panic set in a troupe of profs that I recognized entered the bar surrounded by students. We grabbed a table and got to talking. Reliable Roommate showed up and took the seat next to me. We group-laughed at the tropes of English major culture, and tisk-tisked that we don’t collectively hangout more often, and during the group conversations I was introduced to the prof of the American Culture class I was dying to get into. Good news! She could let me into the class even though it was full. And as if I wasn’t already fully satisfied the waiters then brought us free food.
I’ll admit there is a motive behind this blog post. There is (gasp!) a moral to this story. Basically I know that as a group we English majors tend to be shy and averse to group activities, but these events can be a lot of fun and rewarding, if for no other reason than that they usually feed you. So even if your main motivation is just hunger, I’d encourage you to show up next time.