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Showing posts from May, 2012

You Just Hit The Wrong Nerve

The other day, in my English literature class, the teacher asked us to enumerate for her a few classics of the language, and while everyone came up with the works of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and Bernard Shaw and the Bronte sisters, the answer that stood out the most was that of a girl sitting right behind me, who raised her hand sweetly, and came up with the absurdest thing I'd heard.'Ma'am, authors like Nicolas Sparks, they write so well, why don't we call those books classics?' The teacher was stumped. Honestly, so were most of the others in the class. Not at the 'unconventional' question, but at her sheer brainless audacity. A few heads banged down, there were a few exhasperated sighs, and some giggles, and some genuinely chafed whispers wondering what she was doing in a literature class anyway, all in some not-so-polite words. And for that one minute, I felt like I'd found my place in the world. I fit in perfectly with this obnoxiously