My mother told me she found a notebook of mine in her apartment, and has had it stashed in her basement for several months.
Today, in a fit of curiousity and excitement, I called her and demanded that she find it and read me the contents of the first page so that I could determine what notebook she was actually talking about. Why would I leave a notebook at her apartment, anyway?
She read the first sentence, and then I commanded her to stop reading, close it, and not peer into it again.
My English Composition notebook, from college!
...Believe me, these are no ordinary English notes...
I spent the vast majority of that class writing erotic fiction in that notebook. Well, some of it was fiction.
I'm a fairly good English student. If a preposition sat down next to me at a bar, I'd know it was a preposition. If an independent clause sat down next to me at a bar, I'd ask it what its sign was to determine if we were compatible. I know the difference between "which" and "that." Sort of. Anyway, I didn't need to spend much time actually studying English composition. Instead, I spent my time... uh... composing.
And DAMN, the things I composed! I mean, this stuff was pretty pornographic, from what I remember. Amazingly, I could sit there in that class with a boy who looked like a monkey sitting on my right, and a boy who looked like a poster boy for a Trekkie convention sitting on my left, and I could sit writing these fabulous sex stories and no one was the wiser. After all, I simply looked like an ordinary note-taker. A DILIGENT note-taker, but merely a note-taker.
For some reason, it was a sex-charged room. I wrote a narrative essay -- which I turned in -- about a girl who failed English class because she was busy lusting her life away while the teacher was talking. Actually, it was a bit more involved than that, I suppose -- involved enough to inspire my English teacher to politely ask if I needed to switch seats.
I didn't switch seats. I think I would have learned less, discovered less if you will, had I switched seats.
Bad Helena.
I cannot wait to see this notebook again. To reread all my silly fantasies of that semester. Journal entries of nothing but sex and lust, interspersed with the occasional comment about some grammatical thing... Oh yes, and Brian's Word of the Day. Brian survived English Composition by thinking up a word of the day: a little mantra. I survived by writing down the word of the day, and then writing erotic stories. Oh, and by drawing pictures. There are drawings in that notebook of the kid who looked like a monkey. There's a drawing of Brian's hat. There's a drawing of the gap in the English instructor's teeth. There's a drawing of some flowers, I think, and some stars and planets and things... More important are the stories, the endless stories, written on warm, endless New Mexico evenings... Gahd, that class was one of the best parts of my entire time at college. I LOVED that class. Didn't learn a damned thing about English Composition, but...
...I did get an A...
Love,
~Helena*