The beginning of the school year is a sad time for those of us who have school-age chums yet are not school age ourselves. We have free time; they do not. We have "Friends" and "Law & Order"; they have Chaucer and Calculus. We have the wisdom of the ages; they have the intelligence of a school of salmon, digested1. Et alia.
Oh, how I miss you, dearest school!
And that, that is why I have started another in a series of short-lived serieses at Prinsiana City. In this series, titled "Matthew does other people's homework," I will do other people's homework. It's symbiotically apt, methinks: They have too much of the homework, and I have too little of the homework, and so here is a chance for amenable mutualism.
I will start today with an assignment Devon received on her first day of English class2. The assignment, as Devon relayed it to me, was as follows: "Write a paragraph on your name." Von slipped me the fiver after choir, as is required -- she bargained me down from $153 -- and now, here, is Dev's English assignment:
It is disingenuous to consider the nature of one’s name, as names are merely unfathomable oddities forced upon us by society’s status-quo requisite need to “identify” and “classify” all substances and thus by definition persons. I am not my name; I am not this “Devon Gray”; I am not this flesh and blood machine, the accidents my true substance uses to navigate this world; I am nothing except Who I Am, and that Who I Am cannot be cataloged for the sole reason that my Who I Am is unclassifiable, as is your Who I Am. Nonetheless, there is a sense of irony in my last name as that name, Gray, epitomizes a perception of moral ambiguity, an awareness that good and evil are tangled in a yin yang figure, that capital-T Truth is unknowable, that complexity does not beget simplicity, that there is morality in ever heinous act, that there is heinousness in ever moral act. And thus it is ironic that Gray is my last name because I am the one who came up with the main theories behind the current study of moral ambiguity in a past life as a philosophy professor at Oxford in the late 1800s (much of my drudgery is lost to the ages, alas), and so I do speculate that the Conscious of the Universe had a superior and hearty laugh when he made my father a Mr. Gray. (I will query the CotU on this matter and provide you an riposte by Monday.)
One A-plus-plus coming up, Dev.
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1 By an orca, of course.
2 I will no doubt continue on to Paul's European history, Erika Lynn's earth science, Deli's fourth-grade mathematics, and Isabella's preschool art.
3 Hi. If you are Devon's English teacher, I would like to take this opportunity to inform you that Devon is not paying me to do her homework, which I know would be a violation of your school policy. No, no, no. I'm doing it for free4.
4 Ha! That's just another one of my funny jokes! Of course she has to pay me the five dollars per.
oh so lovingly written by
Matthew |
i sincerely do not know what you are doing here. are you lost? were you
looking for your delicate calico cat, and did you follow her up two flights of stairs
to this room? she is not here. she was here, yes. we gave her a warm bowl of milk, we talked with her about campaign finance reform for a time, and then she bid us good day. i believe she was
going to the post office two blocks down, but i don't quite recall.
for surely you did
not find your way from prinsiana, the least traveled site on
the internet. if you did, though, perhaps you are looking for humor. perhaps you are looking for profundity. perhaps you are looking for answers.
i'm sorry, but you shall go naught-for-three.
