How did I get here?

Sometimes I ask the question philosophically, pondering the purpose of my own life and fate. Sometimes I use it to retrace the actions leading to a mistake to understand and prevent a future recurrence. Sometimes, today, I ask the question out of pure flabberghastery.

This morning I had some ideas that I wanted to record, and I have zillions of notebooks here leftover from high school days. As I looked for the most empty one, I found an old paper I'd written as a sophomore in Ancient World History. It's a fictional narrative of someone's life in Athens, Greece. My teacher for that class was a dumb jock, fresh out of college, whose ego was greater than his grasp of any intellectual concept. We did not get along. Memories of him came flooding back to me.

One morning before class, he had written "You're tests are graded" on the blackboard. I was in class first so I corrected his grammar. He told me to keep it to myself because it was none of my business if he wanted to write things incorrectly. Later in the semester, after I had neglected to do his busywork homework bullshit for the 50th day in a row, he threw a stapler on my desk in outrage. Honestly, it probably is annoying if your students blatantly reject your pedantry as pointless wastes of time, but it's also annoying to be the 16 year old victim of a grammar gimp.

A Ramble Through Athens is a five page, double-spaced, piece of junk final project that I probably spat out in about an hour one night after schmoozing on the phone with my boyfriend for two hours. I do not attest to the overall quality of the essay; my grade indicates that I got a 42/45. There are no comments on the entire essay besides this one. I wrote,

"The agora is a busy, crowded place in the morning, especially when public discussions are being held there. It teems with life, the smells of food, and shouts of vendors with their produce."

He crossed out the 'e' in teems and wrote an 'a' above it.

HOW DID I GET INTO COLLEGE HAVING EDUCATORS LIKE THIS!? I had a lot of good ones to make up for it, apparently. Thanks to Mrs B, Ms J, Mr M, Mrs D, and Mrs K.