Yesterday my literature professor announced an upcoming activity: Theater Detectives. Wait, am I in kindergarten? Deep down, I think it'll be a lot of fun. But here's the thing. I don't want to mooooooove.
Then we returned to group presentations, which I guess I had overly high hopes for because so far I've been giving people pretty "eh" grades. One after another, they read their outlines word for word and underwhelm with their skits. I want to be wowed, or at least not to feel like I've walked into a cesspool of half-assery. (Speaking of half-assery, have some blurry photos from the Classic Film Festival.)
As I placed my evaluation sheet up front, I noticed everyone else had given near-perfect scores. What. I love evaluations and editing papers. I love the feeling of the blood red ink seeping in the paper, seeing the marks all over the page. There's often this disparity between my standards and everyone else's, but unlike other things (body image, restaurant orders, what is and isn't offensive), I am unwavering in my critique. I was not too harsh - your presentation sucked. And everyone else is too easy. I suppose I am the token grumpy British man of peer reviews.
Let me tell you about something that happened in anthropology the other day. Oh, anthro - the stories I could tell if I gave guided tours of my notebooks. They're lined with snarky notes. One day I will make a coat lined with snark and flash people when they are idiotic.
My professor, who is a nice guy and eager to make sure his students understand by constantly asking "does that make sense?" and writing each statement out on the board (forget short hand!) after rewording it several times (so we can cover all the learning styles!), wrote that Tchambuli men were expected to go to market.
This followed: "...and when I say market, you guys know what I mean, right? They obviously don't have Ralph's in New Guinea. I mean like a place where they sell produce in stalls, that sort of thing." He proceeded to place "market" in quotations. As though not being a Ralph's made you a quasi-market. Which came first, Ralph's or fruit stalls? Not good enough, Guinean "markets"- or should I say places of trade? Step up your game!
Now I have to go to linguistics, where my professor name-drops "Doctor Who" as a synonym of British.
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