I know I’m lame

I held the last session of my class last week, so I didn’t have to teach this morning. Plus, I feel a cold coming on, and it is too cold and wet to bother going to the Mardi Gras parade, so without further ado, here is something from my notebook, written last Friday:

When I finish this course today (on break!), I’ll have spent 15 hours (minus breaks) learning what to expect from my master’s thesis and exams. The class has been useful, if redundant; everything is covered twice—once for the literature people and once for the linguistics people. But I’ve learned something every session, so it hasn’t been a complete waste of time.

Most of the other students are pretty sharp (you’d hope they would be by this point) and ask pertinent questions, but there are a few that make me wonder how they get their pants on in the morning without help. (And somebody smells like corn! I hope it isn’t me, since I am generally well groomed and haven’t eaten corn in ages...)

During one of the breaks, I braved the coffee machine. I know—I swore it off a while back, but I only had 45 cents, which is just enough to buy a cup of crappy coffee out of the machine. But check it out: I put in 45 cents and got a cup of crappy coffee and 40 cents back. Wh--? Then when I went to put my cup in the recycling machine for the 10-cent refund, I found that the last person didn’t take their 10 cents out. So basically, someone *paid me* 15 cents to drink a cup of crappy instant coffee. I won against the machine!