avant-garde freshman comp

My class was doing peer response today, which means they wrote the whole time and I sat there. This felt very much like "exam time," which crowned me tyrant, enlaboring them with no shot at entertainment salvation. All semester I've promised and forgotten to bring "background music." Oops. Today I thought this: "what's more entertaining for disaffected middle class American youth than me?" I didn't actually think this sentence. It was more abstract. I was a "vessel for the greater good," much like a Baptist choir or the guy in charge of the Dr. Pepper recipe. I decided ("elected") to think entertaining thoughts and record them. Those of you who know me will recognize that I think about the same fifteen things over and over again, which you've always suspected but which (until now) you've never been able to prove at my arraignment. After peer response was over, I read these thoughts out loud. My students giggled. Problem solved. Hands washed. Eat your dodgeball. Don't talk to captives.

THINGS I THOUGHT ABOUT WHILE YOU DID PEER REVIEW

Ugg boots, bourgeois canteens, Dimitri Nabokov, Vitamin C pills, productive eye contact, imitation RayBan's, anxiety plus or minus codeine, fashionable Yeti, I want to reincarnate as a terrible song by Bright Eyes; the same people will like me or not like me, Tao Lin throwing a banana at Kendra Grant Malone, the ethics of the in-joke, a hitchhiking bee, the bus driver who wanted to be God, what if Tom Waits were my grandfather, how sure I am that I can't be friends with anyone who doesn't know who Tom Waits is and how that makes me sad but only a little sad, less sad than an old man in a NASCAR cap, more sad than a stale muffin, less sad than the Pacific Ocean, more sad than a drunk 3AM IM from my ex-girlfriend in a tiny Dutch town in Washington, the Dutch invasion of Washington, vintage cardigans, the troubling amount of times I suddenly remember that the author of Fight Club is actually gay, a soccer match between neutral facial expressions and the so-called "shit eating grin," the three maps of the Planet Earth in this classroom which you hadn't thought about until now (*points*), why tonic water is so "important," how I feel about scales of 1-10 on a scale of 1-10, Minnie Driver, Kurt Russell, Usher, signs of prohibition ("NO SMOKING," "DON'T FEED THE CHILDREN") versus signs of ambivalence ("NOTE: DUCKS PRESENT. YEAH. WHATEVER.") this quote from Andy Warhol: "I'm bored after I do it once unless I do it every day," and life as a vehicle for one task, such as designing the employee uniforms of a local doughnut store with franchise ambitions.