Do and Don't.

What I simultaneously do and don't miss about being an English student:
1. Writing about I.B. Singer until my eyes blurred with sleepiness or saltwater. (Mostly I miss it. This new stuff doesn't exercise my brain in the same way at all--now I simply read a textbook and regurgitate what I've memorized back into a test. It's a really sad way to educate future teachers; I think they're trying to make us docile enough for The System. It won't work with me, I tell you... I won't be institutionalized again. I'll kick and scream and teach David Sedaris and Jonathan Safran Foer! I'll recite wildly sexual Anne Sexton and Allen Ginsberg poems, and I'll bring the entire acid-tripping works of Ken Kesey into the classroom, because that's the stuff life's about, damnit! I'll teach kids to love writing, or at least I'll teach them to write really excellent, scathing satires! I'll teach media analysis skills and give free karate classes, and there'll be no stopping me!*
And now back to the list...)
2. Reading flowery, verbose ballads from the 1500s that stretched on and on for 150 pages. Spenser, I'm talking to you, baby.
3. Being so challenged by a professor or a text that I could feel my brain physically stretching with stress and new ideas. A feeling reminiscent of those 80's commercials for "Stretch Armstrong" dolls, if you recall.
4. The Oxford English Dictionary (which becomes so familiar to English majors that the acronym OED is no longer an acronym, but a word in itself: oeedee; like see-threepio). Ah, the OED. It is both friend and foe--a revealer of divine light or a sardonic sphinx of the reference section, depending on the day. It helped me understand Shakespeare on a whole new level. (Look up 'will' and 'wit' before you memorize all the sonnets; I learned well from Freinkel...)
5. The hideous 1970s steel-and-brick monstrosity that is Prince Lucien Campbell hall, or PLC. I had a great many undergraduate classes in that hall with people who were more or less equally obsessed with words as I am. It was a windowless hall full of recycled air, and it made us all a little lethargic... but now, for the most part, I miss it. I wish I were still breathing the recycled air of my People.
I'm not so confident that I belong in education, but I think that education should belong to people like me.
We need to shake it up. I know at least a few people in my cohort who will, and that, at least, is encouraging.

Another tangent in a different direction:
At night, I've noticed, Eugene starts to smell a bit skunky. Either all of the citizens of the Eug are coming out en masse and smoking weed in some covert corner, or we've got some sort of gnarly chemical factory upwind that's releasing pungent toxins into the air in the dead of the night.
It's really rather creepy.
If I suddenly grow a half-shell and don a bandana, you'll know why.


*I always write these things in hope that nobody from my department will happen to stumble upon them, but in case anyone does, I have to admit, they're all true. We all know it's the radical teachers who inspire us and get us to grow, and I won't settle for less than that. I feel no need to apologize.