Some stupid American’s t-shirt is hanging out of the washing machine because they weren’t paying attention when the closed the door and now there’s water all over the floor at the Laundrette… oh wait, that was me. (Yeah, they call it a Laundrette.)
As if prompted, the moment I start writing about this, some friendly maintenance man comes and unlocks the washer, gets my wayward shirt pushed back into where it belongs and resets the machine for me.
Apparently no one here is worried about their clothes getting stolen. At UofA I’d walk into the laundry room in our dorm to find 3 girls sitting on top of three washing machines, as if ready to attack from above anyone coming to steal their clothing.
Things disappeared from my wash from time to time, but I was 85% certain I had probably just lost it, and 99% certain that if I were getting paid minimum wage, the amount of time I’d spend guarding 1 potentially stealable t-shirt, I could earn that money back and buy two more.
People are definitely hanging out in here. It’s like an internet café except for the fact that it smells like soap, and do to my darling contribution there’s water everywhere. There is a row of girls sitting on the other side, reading magazines, texting and chatting amongst each other. All they need is those big hair drying cones and you’d have a totally different scenario!
If my theory stands correct that important things are inexpensive and crap is expensive, laundry is crap as my two loads plus 15 minutes of dryer time have already racked up an impressive $8.81. But, these dryers are like the ones we had at the gym I worked at. Not only could I fit inside them, but I could fit inside them with all of my laundry and still be comfortable. 15 minutes of drying time could do the trick… thank God dryers cannot leak.
Today I decided it’s time I stop worrying about not looking like… an American from “Death Valley.” (Apparently Brit’s aren’t impressed by the Grand Canyon. Of everyone that I’ve told I’m from Arizona, they’ve all asked “Oh, in Death Valley? Cool!”) I’ve been wearing my jacket everywhere but I’ve been leaving the scarf, hat, and gloves at home from time to time because I’m clearly the only one wearing them.
I guess I owe an apology to all of the Arizonans who I’ve been making fun of since the moment we moved here, who wear mittens and scarves when it drops below 85*. Note: I said I probably owe them an apology… but they’re still not getting one – losers!
I’ve officially had two weeks of classes. (As I’m done for classes today, and I don’t have class on Friday.) Shakespeare is exactly what I was expecting: A lot of reading, discussing what we’re reading, with the added bonus of a hot discussion group leader. Our lecturer, Peter Womack, is also my “The Politics of Language” instructor. That class sounds boring, and it sure is. We’ll spend the first two weeks discussing the history of the dictionary. For Tuesday, he’s asked that we spend “at least six hours becoming friendly with the Oxford English Dictionary.” I’m really not sure how one becomes friendly with a dictionary… I’ve always found them to be curt, and full of themselves, but who knows. Things are very different here in England.
Sadly, the entirety of my previous paragraph is true… we really are suppose to do this.
My creative writing class is an interesting group of students with a pretty badass instrutor named Henry Sutton (author of “Thong Nation” and “The Exhibitionist” and “Kids Stuff.”)
There is a lot of ego in the world of creative writing. I hope it doesn’t make me arrogant simply by saying this, but a lot of young writers are already writing their Pulitzer acceptance speeches already. We have yet arrived at the point in the semester where I have had an opportunity to read the work of any of my peers, and will not publicly criticize anyone’s work at that point, but I can already tell who THINKS they’re hot shit.
One girl in the class, an American (unfortunately) who, if she’s not from one of the Ivies, she sure wishes she was, is in that group. She also clearly wants to make sure everyone in the room can hear her voice booms like John Maddens.
There are “elements of fiction” which are taught to us in every single creative writing class I have taken. They’re pretty standard. Roughly they are, character, plot, issue, setting, imagery, language, dialogue… stuff like that. So, Dr. Sutton asks us to list, in order, our top five. American girl asks “What if I have more than 5?” He tells her “Just your TOP 5.” We go around, everyone up to her lists 5 that are actually ON the list.
It gets to her turn to say what her top five are, “Transcendence, Universality, (I forget the next two) and Conclusiveness.” Everyone in the class gives her that thoughtful look that translates to “What the bloody hell are you talking about?” and our professor kind of moves on.
(By the way, Laundry has officially crossed the $10 mark.)
At the end of that session, he requests that for next week we have an original 300-word excerpt showing how we use our #1 element. (Mine is character, by the way. I could care less what’s happening if I don’t care about who it’s happening to, which has been my primary struggle with Shakespeare.)
So, beginning of our next session, it’s time to read our excerpts. American-Girl’s turn rolls around. I’m assuming she’s picked something other than transcendence, assuming she’d be satisfied by proving to all of us that she’s much smarter than we are… but no!
She reads her little excerpt and Sutton, as he has done for all of us, asks “How do you feel this reflects (chosen element.)” He asks her this, and she gives a REALLY esoteric answer which included the immoral copout “Well this is actually true” (and thus, not fiction… in a fiction workshop) Someone in the class (not me, but I wanted to) interrupts her and asks “what are you taking transcendence to mean?” And so the game begins, can she tell us what it means without using the word? Well no, she didn’t, I believe she said it twice. It was something along the lines of “for it to transcend a greater form of grandeur,” except not nearly concise.
There’s always one or two people like this in a creative writing class. Unfortunately for all of us, in my poetry workshop at UofA, that person just happened to be our TA.
Anyway, this was all a long transition into saying why I like Sutton (The professor.) This is a short story class, he’s made that very clear. He’s put this in the most respectful, yet “I’m not kidding” way I’ve ever heard a professor say it. “I realize many of you are already well into the process of developing longer projects, primarily novels, which is fantastic, but this is not the venue for stories of such length. Everything you turn in MUST both start and finish within the page limit.”
That’s why I like him, cause he doesn’t take our crap.
For fairnesses sake, if someone had said this to me when I was in high school, convinced I was already writing the great American novel, I would have had a fit… I had not yet learned how critically important the ability to write short, concise stories is. No one who cannot write a good short story will ever be able to write a long, compelling novel. Unfortunately, the market for short stories is not a moneymaker but look at it this way.
Each minor league baseball team is owned by a major league club. The minors lose a huge amount of money for the majors, because since not very many people care what happens 'on the farm,' and tickets are dirt cheap, they're unable to bring in any revenue. But the majors wouldn’t be what they are without the farm teams, a stepping stone for good players to become great. The same is true for fiction. Short stories, and the small-money market that exits for them is a stepping stone for good writers to become great, and most importantly, to be heard of.
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