Think pink

Yesterday I called my advisor about possible ways to enroll me in this here recalcitrant Syntax.*

“Just go to the next lecture tonight,” she said, “and ask the professor to enroll you. Try being really sweet.”

“Ok, I can do that,” I said. There was a worried pause.

“I know you can do irony,” she said at last. “You’ll want to focus on sweet here.”

“Gotcha,” I said.

“Avoid any jokes that might come to your mind,” she said, “and just be nice.”

“O-KAY,” I said. “I get it. Jeez.”

Accordingly, I swathed myself in the pinkest fabrics I could find before leaving for class. Even my shoes were pink. I looked like a giant cotton candy. Well, those are sweet, I reasoned.

I spent the half hour before lecture with every muscle tensed, trying to fight the urge to give up my seat to someone who was rightfully enrolled. Finally the lecture started. I spent the next three hours in a blind, adoring panic, alternating between thinking This is so great! I love this so much! and remembering but I don’t understand a GODDAMN THING going on right now.

After the lecture I adjusted my draperies and swished pinkly up to the professor. “I’m a graduating senior,” I said, blowing my wad all at once, “and I really really need this class, and–”

“Why didn’t you ask me last week?” he said irritably, peeling an add sticker off his paperwork and handing it to me. I blinked.

Because you told everyone not enrolled to leave the room immediately and never come back, I didn’t say.

Because I didn’t think you would start off the semester by telling a big lie, I didn’t say.

Because I suck at poker, I didn’t say.

“Because I have been powned,” I said sadly. But anyhow, I’m enrolled, making this really and truly my actual very last semester of all at State.

Unless I fail.

*I don’t think Syntax should really get a capital letter. Still, I’m remembering a camping trip the Lad and I took one time. We drove past some big beast, an elk or something of that nature, and I begged him to slow down the car but he wouldn’t. “With an animal of that size,” he said, “you give him some room.” Likewise, with a class of this impossibility, I give it some capitals.