Small Highlight from 2 Days Ago
This is my kind of humor.
Two days ago, my professor handed out sheets of 8.5″ x 11″ paper, filled with about half a page of text, big blockish letters at about 12 pt. size font.
I actually don’t understand this trend in the English department: this need to print out whole sheets of paper for everyone when you could easily conserve space (and that tree outside) with slight changes of the margins, lowering of the font size, a pair of scissors, and did I mention stop using that ugly typeface? Perhaps it’s to give the appearance of what you say being meaningful. Like compensating for something. Well, you know.
Besides, of all the departments to waste paper, I’d least expect it to be the English department–you’d think that they’d have dealt with enough paper, ink, and every possible method of fudging margins, columns, and leading to know perfectly well how to micromanage every last word on a page. Just saying.
So on with the story.
In its ominous, blockish, 12 pt. type (with a bajillion points of leading–okay, I’m probably exaggerating), the paragraph read:
In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don’t see them until they’re over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She’s one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She’d been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.
If you already know where this is from, stop. Stretch your imagination for a little bit, and bear with me. If you don’t, ignore the comment. I might tell you later.
My professor then asked us to write the next sentence–the first sentence of the second paragraph–some writing exercise to get us thinking.
Long story short, some people had some very nice things to say. Poetic things too. And then there was me. And, by some luck, I read my sentence aloud in class, and on my paper, I had scrawled:
“But in walked those three girls, and if this witch was going to give me hell for it, well, fuck her.”
Well, I found it kind of funny.