Tonight I came home from my English classes after a long day of reading, writing, and note taking. I was exhausted. In between lectures, I can often be found pouring over textbooks in some dimly lit corner of the prison university, trying to get a handle on all the literature I’m required to know—not for that day’s classes, but for next week’s. Because in this business, if you’re not ahead…you’re behind.
[At a thousand bucks a pop, there’s no way I’m letting myself fall behind. What a waste of money that would be.]
Anyway, I was home, I was tired, and I was famished. I sat down to a plate of chips and homemade salsa (thanks to my Aunt Jenni who divulged her secret recipe, which I can pretty much duplicate now), reveling in every delicious bite. I reached for a copy of the local newspaper, and flipped through its pages until I found an article that interested me. It was all about how Mayberry’s town council thinks we should get real garbage bins and a real garbage truck [a motion I totally second, by the way], and I was completely enthralled…
…until I became uncomfortable. Something seemed a little…weird. I couldn’t quite place it; the verbiage in the article was grammatically correct. The proper nouns were capitalised. What was wrong?
Suddenly it struck me like a gangster with brass knuckles:
I wasn’t holding a pen in my hand!
That’s right; I can no longer read any form of printed literature—be it a newspaper article, a library book, or a weekly sales ad—without a ballpoint pen on guard, ready to underscore any main point I find.
I got to the point where I was underlining so much, my marks became completely void of any emphatic value, so I resorted to layering over the ultra-important passages with orange hi-lighter.
I’m pretty sure I won’t even try to sell my books back at the end of this semester…
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is either called brainwashing, or a very bad case of too much dadgum school.
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