Written by Michael Claxton
Here you go again. At 8:04 you crawl into American Studies 200, still pulling your eyelids open with tweezers. Your breath made it to class 40 seconds earlier and has already started taking notes. The styro cup barely gripped in your pinky finger has one-third latte, one-third Red Bull and one-third English mustard. It still hasn’t kicked in.Neither your hoodie nor your bang overhang can hide that swollen face, that I-woke-up-at-8:01-talk-to-me-at-your-own-risk puffiness that spreads from cheek left to cheek right. The weight of your book bag is the only thing keeping you vertical. That weight is mostly your World Lit book. And a pack of Rango Silly Bandz. For your niece.Nothing you are wearing has seen a coat hanger since sophomore year. Even your Tom’s shoes look tired and worn out. Oh, wait. Never mind. Duh.You make a deal with gravity that if it helps you into a chair, you won’t ever bungee jump again. You only hope you are facing forward when you get there.He’s already talking about “Madame Bovary.” He says, “We’re on page 1075.” That was meant for you. You know your book landed somewhere, and you stop to wonder if it’s legal for books to have more than a thousand pages. Surely that’s a violation of the Geneva Something. Small children can be hurt by heavy books. Obama was supposed to fix that.Not. Ready. For this. Too. Early. You’ve started using lots of periods for emphasis. Or was it so you wouldn’t have to worry about semicolons? Either way it makes your tweets awesome.”Madame Bovary is a dreamer,” he says. “An unfulfilled Romantic. Her fantasy is dancing all night at elegant balls with sophisticated people who are witty. Yet her husband is content with simple things. He loves playing dominoes and thinks that is the height of freedom. Playing dominoes gives him a rush. Reach for the stars, Charles.”The people on both sides of you chuckle. “That must have been a joke,” you think. You know it’s too late for a courtesy laugh, but you give one anyway so no one will know 60 percent of your body is still in REM sleep. “Who makes jokes this early?” you wonder. Maybe his latte is two-thirds mustard.It’s been like this all semester. Too much. Stuff. To remember. Candide got kicked out of a castle after he made a deal with Mephistopheles to walk in beauty like the night of cloudless climes and daffodils. You assume they decided all this was literature before the Second Amendment gave 18-year-olds the right to vote on it.What can people possibly learn this early? You’re pretty sure Ulysses finished cultivating his garden and said, “To strive, to seek, to find, or not to be. That is the question.” Or was it Dante who rode the Trojan horse into Birnam Wood during the winter of our discontent? You think all that happened after Hedda Gabler shot herself with a golden apple while she was waiting for Godot.Things Fall Apart. Like your quiz average. And your Toms.IHOP now has chicken and waffles. How wrong is that? You try to say, “How wrong is that?” at least as often per day as you say, “Love it.”Fifteen class days until summer break. That doesn’t make it better. As Tolstoy said, “Whan that April is the cruelest month.” You say, “What fools these mortals be.”MICHAEL CLAXTON is a guest contributor for the Buffalo. He may be contacted at mclaxto1@ harding.edu
