The Task at Hand

Well, I’m a little bit overwhelmed by the task at hand. I’m supposed to write a 5 or 6 page literary analysis of up to three short stories. We handed in our rough drafts last week, and I think every one of the class was dismayed to find we were supposed to have written it with "audience awareness." Come to find out, audience awareness is writing with the assumption that your audience has read the story in question. Well, there goes half the paper, because you can’t re-tell your details. We were all disheartened.

So here I am, having to start over from scratch. I don’t care much about literature to start with, and then for me to have to "invent" a meaning just to fulfill the requirements of the paper is very disgruntling. I mean... just tell me what it means, and let’s get on with it. I jotted some things down, then just couldn’t keep going So I decided to take a shower to give me some time to mull over it. So that’s what I’m doing now... mulling. Have you ever thought about the word ‘mull’? There’s something curious about it. It almost looks like a word that has been made up.

As if my paper isn’t bad enough, I now have to work on my first speech. When I got out of my car last night before going to my speech class, I was scrounging around in my trunk when I heard, "I see you’re still taking night classes." I looked up, and there was Henry from my first semester English 100 class. It was so good to see a familiar face. We caught up on the way in to the Fine Arts building. He also has a speech class on Monday nights. He’s convinced me to take an Art Appreciation class instead of Music Appreciation.

We finally got our communications tests back from two weeks ago. This was the test with seven essay questions on it that took sooo long to complete. I really did not have a good feeling about the essay part of it, because I had to bluff through some of it due to memory failure. Before our class commenced, I commented to Ms. B about how hard that test was. "But you did so well!" she said. Do what?? She had the tests graded but not scored. She said she was quite weary of grading 135 essays, and she’ll see if she can’t do something a little different on the next test. It turns out that there were 119 points possible on the test, and from what I could see, I didn’t get docked for anything. So plumb! I’ve got a 119 on the test I was expecting a low A on. She said she really didn’t grade very hard on the essays. She was just so tickled at the level of effort she saw. "And I’ll grade on the Bell Curve," she said brightly. If the highest grade is a 92, I’ll adjust everyone’s grades up. Suh-weet!

Speech...paper... paper....speech... Ok, ok... No more procrastinating... Back to the paper on... (drum roll, please)... The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.