I am a tourist from Idaho. You are all my husband. We stand before the foreign monument of my cold. As with every illness I have dragged you to see, I am fascinated, enthralled, hooked by the rarity. I think it is plumb cute, is what. “Hon,” I say, “would you look at those clogged sinuses? In the book here it says them sinuses haven’t been this clogged in years.”

“Uh huh,” you say, eyeing your watch.

Using a handy broken pillar which is Cement Horizon, I set up our digital camera which is this blog and capture you and me for all time, standing awkwardly, married too long, with the tower of my cold slightly blurred in the background.

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.

I enrolled for classes the first minute I was allowed to do it, but still my Syntax class was already full. However, I was first on the waitlist and I am a graduating senior. My enrollment was a shoe-in.

Weirdly the ten thousand other people packing into the classroom on Tuesday night seemed to think the same thing about their own eventual enrollment. The class was so full that I and several others actually had to stand out in the hall, where by craning my neck at an impossible angle I could just manage to hear the professor say that he refused to add anyone.

Understand, this is unheard-of in any class I’ve ever seen. All professors understand that State is over-populated and under-classed (in all senses, really), and that people drop out midway through the first month in droves. Professors always add at least graduating seniors off the waitlist. Always.

Not this guy, though.

Basically, I arrived for battle, Una glowing adoringly at me in the background, and the dragon wouldn’t even unwrap himself from around the castle. He just gave me the finger and went back to smoking his tree-sized cigarette. Curse you, nemesis, and your absolute indifference to me!

I’m trying to work this out with the professor, and also talking to my advisor to see what can be done, but I suspect the end result will be me stuck at State for yet another semester after this one to finish battling my foe for good and all. Benefits? I would actually be able to participate in the graduation ceremony in May with a straight face. Drawbacks? The ceremony is so enormous that no one actually walks across stage, thus sort of invalidating the whole tradition surrounding the stupid thing. Also, another semester at State will cost me another $1000, which hurts the hell out of my bargain-loving soul. What I am saying is: triple poop.

My cell rings. I glance at my caller ID, see that it is my friend from work, and answer thusly: “Idiot.”

[Stunned silence.]

“This way,” I explain, “the conversation can only get better from here.”

I bought my books for my fall classes today, so now I’m a little nervous. For half of my swan song at State I’ll be taking “The Structure of Language,” a course the English department chairman actually warned me away from. “It’s a syntax course,” he said doubtfully. What, do I have a big neon sign on me saying SYNTAX IS MY KRYPTONITE, IF YOU SEE ME WITH SYNTAX PLEASE ALERT THE MOMS? It’s true that the last time I took it it caused me to drop out of college and is basically the reason I still have not graduated at 25, but THERE WERE MITIGATING CIRCUMSTANCES, PEOPLE. I was nineteen. That is a mitigating circumstance if ever I saw one.

I faced the dragon Errours once and only barely escaped with my life. Now I must face the dragon Sin(tax) and probably I will have to die and be reborn to get through it. So if you don’t see me much in the fall, it will be because I am dead.

As if facing my deadliest rival weren’t enough, I’m also taking the pompously-titled “Literature and Psychology.” There’s a whole lotta Freud on this menu. I’ve never read Freud and never wanted to, contenting myself with making fun of his ideas as best I misunderstand them, so I’m not looking forward to getting a big old ladlefull shoved down my throat. Also, I see I will be forced to read Orlando again, which I think will finish me off even if I survive everything else.

What I am saying is: poop.