Jubb, talking in his sleep early this morning, said something that sounded like "honorable things in a racist way." But that's not the craziest thing I've heard today.

The Feminist showed up for my Contemporary American Lit class today, something she deigns to do every week or so. She's busy. Single-mother, etc.

Naturally she had sat in someone else's spot, starting a chain reaction that ended up with me sitting in the patriarch position across the long table from Prof. Hoffmann, next to the Feminist herself.

"It figures everyone would come on the one day I'm feeling uncomfortable," muttered the Feminist.

Fond of justifying her opinions with autobiographical details, the Feminist soon noted that her dad was in the Special Forces during the Vietnam War, the subject of Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried."

O'Brien's book is unusual in that it's a fictionalization of the author's own experiences. The main character is an author and ex-vet named Tim O'Brien, and like the other Tim, he had difficulty deciding whether to go to war or to Canada.

In the book Tim O'Brien travels up to the Canadian-American border and stays with an old man at a fishing lodge. The old man gives him everything he needs and doesn't pressure Tim either way about the choice he has to make. After a few days of deliberation Tim decides to go to Vietnam.

In real life, there was no lodge, no long drive up north. It's a fictionalization.

Beside the point, though. I think that the rest of the book could function as autobiography, given the author's emphasis on the relativity of truth in wartime. But the invented trip seems out of place. Why, I asked, would he fabricate something so mundane?

Sometimes I wonder what it's like in the Feminist's head. Cold and certain, like a dentist's office? Or hot and balmy, frantic with life like a primeval swamp?

The Feminist, appalled: "You thought that part was mundane?"
Our Bold Hero: "Yeah."
The Feminist, with disdain: "That must be a man thing."
Our Bold Hero: "He's fishing. There are no explosions, there's no killing. It's not like the rest of the novel."
The Feminist, flabbergasted: "But what about the psychic torment? Maybe it's because I'm an author — Dintenfass is my advisor — but I thought that part was really great…" etc.

I won't insert snappy comebacks that weren't there. I will note that to my knowledge the Feminist can't really claim to be an "author" quite yet.

So if I'm arguing with someone and I can't get them to understand what I'm talking about (e.g. my recent argument with Frisbee Matt that 20/16 vision is better than 20/20) I usually feel disappointed and frustrated afterwards.

But somehow I still feel great whenever the Feminist browbeats me, mainly because she has a knack for making herself look ridiculous in the process, and I know she takes herself much more seriously than I do Our Bold Hero.

(See, for example, her over-the-top reaction to my tough-in-cheek WNBA joke back when we had Freshman Studies together.)

It's even better disagreeing with the Feminist when the subject is English. She was right: I don't know anything about the WNBA, outside of what I've heard on Futurama, so if I'd been serious I should have shut up.

With English I have the twin pleasures of both knowing and meaning what I say. So when the Feminist says something like:

"I think it's a mixture of essay, short story, and novel, combining all of them without being any of them."

I can dismiss it as the sort of fence-straddling claptrap you hear in English classes all the time. Give an English major a choice, and she'll split it right down the middle. Louise Erdrich wrote Love Medicine, clearly a novel-in-short-stories; the divisions we have here are what most people would call "chapters."

In this case I let more tactful students make the point for me, though I was disappointed by their restraint.

I hope the Feminist starts coming more often.