That mysterious noise I heard
The other night, I was awoken to the sound of my larger cat (17 pounds) vomiting...and I mean vomiting. It sounded like she might be dying.
But when I woke up to see where the mess was for me to clean up, I could not find it. This is really the joy of cats as far as I'm concerned: the little eccentricities that surround their various bodily effusions. Like when my little cat decided that the bathtub was a pretty good catbox. Not on a regular basis, mind you, but once every other month. The bathroom would just reak like death and then you'd pull back the sliding shower door, and there would be Jasmine's leavings.
Okay, so back to the vomit. I'm sitting here, grading papers, minding my own, and I look over and there, behind the cat box, nearly hidden from view, is the vomit. I then get up to clean up the vomit. This is not the point of my story.
The point of my story is that I was reading this woman's paper. I asked the class to write about why they have come back to school and this woman wrote about how the world is unfair, and blah, blah, blah...and in any case, there's this job that she knows she could do, but they won't let her do because she doesn't have a college education...and of course, the implication is that this education that she needs to get, according to the powers that be, is completely useless and she's really only doing it because she has to....you get the drift.
Now, how bad is this essay? Well, I could point out that the grammar is atrocious and that the job this woman wants requires a strong ability with writing. She misspells, writes in incomplete sentences, rambles belligerently, etc..
However, I think that the most telling thing about this essay is that I stopped, mid-reading, to clean up cat vomit. I can't think of no more accurate way to describe its quality.
But when I woke up to see where the mess was for me to clean up, I could not find it. This is really the joy of cats as far as I'm concerned: the little eccentricities that surround their various bodily effusions. Like when my little cat decided that the bathtub was a pretty good catbox. Not on a regular basis, mind you, but once every other month. The bathroom would just reak like death and then you'd pull back the sliding shower door, and there would be Jasmine's leavings.
Okay, so back to the vomit. I'm sitting here, grading papers, minding my own, and I look over and there, behind the cat box, nearly hidden from view, is the vomit. I then get up to clean up the vomit. This is not the point of my story.
The point of my story is that I was reading this woman's paper. I asked the class to write about why they have come back to school and this woman wrote about how the world is unfair, and blah, blah, blah...and in any case, there's this job that she knows she could do, but they won't let her do because she doesn't have a college education...and of course, the implication is that this education that she needs to get, according to the powers that be, is completely useless and she's really only doing it because she has to....you get the drift.
Now, how bad is this essay? Well, I could point out that the grammar is atrocious and that the job this woman wants requires a strong ability with writing. She misspells, writes in incomplete sentences, rambles belligerently, etc..
However, I think that the most telling thing about this essay is that I stopped, mid-reading, to clean up cat vomit. I can't think of no more accurate way to describe its quality.
posted by Monstro D. Whale | 1:08 PM
1 Comments:
That reminds me... I had a creative writing teacher once who was infamous for his brutal honesty. I don't recall much of the class, but once he looked right at a girl and said, "My initial reaction upon reading your poem was to stick my finger down my throat and vomit." I'm sure she switched majors PDQ.
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