Wednesday, October 29

Oh...It's Youuuuuu.

Ho. Lee. Shit.

I am in shock right now. Absolute shock!

I came to campus to do a little studying before my class. I had to pick up my critique on my school observations. I actually didn't have to pick them up. I wrote to the teacher asking her for her input on them and she said she'd reread them and leave comments and I could pick them up today in her office. That makes me sound like a big nontraditional student brown-nosing loser, but she did tell us on the last day of that class we could write to her and ask for additional input. So I did. I really just wanted what I had written. I wanted to keep it and reread the forms.

Which brings me to what just happened to me. I stopped in the bookstore and wandered around aimlessly for a while. Then I went to buy a bottle of water in Starbuck's. On the way in to the Student Union, I saw a table outside with Obama paraphernalia. I told y'all I wanted to buy a bumper sticker. So, on the way out I stopped at the table and checked out the shirts and stickers and buttons and such. The man said, "It's a two dollar donation for the stickers and a ten dollar donation for the tee shirts." I said, "I'll take a sticker." I got two dollars out of my wallet and handed the money to him. He said, "Thank you." And then the craziest thing happened. He said, "Take off your sunglasses." I had just started to look up at him, because I actually hadn't looked at him once during our entire interaction, when he said, "Are you Jennifer?" We made eye contact and I said, "Yes. (jaw drops) Hi." He said, "I think I had you in class." I said that yes, he had...ELEVEN YEARS AGO. I said, "Wow. You're good." He said, "Even with the sunglasses on." I asked if he was still teaching here, even though I know he isn't. He said, "No. I have my own business," and gave me one of his cards. It is currently burning a giant hole in my pocket.

Holy shit.

Holy double shit.

I had this man for Creative Writing II my junior year and Poetry Writing my senior year. I kept the same journal for both of his classes. I consider the writings in that journal to be some of the best writing I've ever done in my life. It may be, in fact, some of the best writing that has ever been done in the history of the free world.

He told the class on the last day that we could come up over the summer and pick up our journals if we wanted them. A few weeks after graduation, I called him to ask when would be a good time to come and pick up my journal. He said, "Oh. You're too late. I threw them all away last week."

WUT???

I could've killed him. I ran in to a girl from my class a few weeks after that at the grocery. She commented how she needed to pick up her journal. She was in all my writing classes and nearly all my journalism classes. I think she was a journalism major and an English minor. I did a writing minor. I had to break the news to her there in frozen foods. She actually let out the most blood curdling scream. Scared the living bejeesus out of me and everyone in a four aisle radius.

I have cursed that man's name numerous times in the last eleven years. I have wished horrible things would happen to his computer. Then I heard he got fired. He should've been fired when I had him the first time; handing out his own poems for us to critique. Green beans and their greenessity do not a good poem make!

And here he is. His office is down the street from my apartment. And after all these years he can recognize me even with my sunglasses on. Either I look just as good as I did when I graduated years ago, or this man has taken all my writings, passed them off as his own and is now pretending to be me.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm thinking the latter. What a shit!

Mike Bailey said...

a few comments.

1. i wonder how much of the world's best writing has been thrown away by a lazy prof? probably most of it.

2. your writing on this post was quite good and almost worthy to be thrown away with your other journal writings. ;~)

3. yes, he probably stole the writings. i have no idea what you look like, so i'm going to assume that he remembered you on account of your history-topping writing. but...you never know. it's virtually impossible to overestimate how shallow men can be.

4. i feel for you. i do. and i enjoyed the post.

Chrisy said...

I love "Ho. Lee. Shit." - I'm stealing that...

It's so bizarre when things like that happen. There's a story in that guy's head, involving YOU.