Ran two important errands in town today: first, I dropped off a resume at the Appleton Post-Crescent in the hopes that I can work there soon. They've already hired their interns for the summer, but given the relative scarcity of copy-editing interns and the general awesomeness of my high-powered resume — my list of duties at The Lawrentian is impressive — I think I might have a chance.

I also mailed out my tax forms, which I completed with Turbotax while I was home a few weekends ago. I'm getting a modest refund, like most of you.

Unlike most of you, I qualify for a tax break because I'm legally blind. My vision has dropped off rather precipitously since I matriculated, and it's now worse than 20/200, the cutoff for blindness in America.

This will probably continue to be a problem, as prettymuch everything I do is bad for my eyes. On the plus side, maybe I could turn nearsightedness to my literary advantage, like Milton in Book Three:

but thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that rowl in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veiled.

Probably too late for that. I'd have to be blind and black and Irish and orphaned to be interesting nowadays. White males are so out.

Not that it's an issue, anyways. While my Lawrentian coworker Layout is already at work on his second story, I'm still trying to get my character to the phone.

That's a good class, by the way. With the exception of my philosophy class, which being a required course is basically a "Who's Who" of philosophy majors, all my classes are full of students who really care about the material.

Contemporary Critical Theory is full of what I like to think of as Theory People. You've seen them: mussed hair, slightly eccentric dress, a faint smell of chai tea. I hesitate to call them hipsters because the theory people's posturing seems accidental. Maybe that means they're just really good at being hipsters. Anyways, it's amusing to hear someone use the word "hermeneutic" unselfconsciously.

"The English Language" is similar. Even the Politician's freshman year roommate, usually a dunce and an ass, seems to be on his best behavior. It's stuffed with linguistics majors, the kind of people who titter at the word "Frisian."

Would that I were one of them. But it's too late now.

Which brings me back to Advanced Fiction Writing, a breath of fresh air after listening to Prof. Ryckman's soft-spoken droning for two hours.

Everyone there, with the exception of fellow graduating senior Cinnamon, has taken a Fiction Writing class before, and we're all there to do work. Some of these people can't stop writing. One guy, an insightful critic dubbed Tracer Bullet, had a 360-page detective story ready for us on the first day of class.

Of course, after that the flow stopped. We've read two stories since then, and both of them could have used some more TLC. Layout surprised me by writing a Lovecraftian romance, but I was the only one who seemed to have guessed his intensions, and I wound up hurling the word "neo-phantastisch" at Prof. Dintenfass, who wanted either a realistic story or a completely fantastic one.

My writing is going unnervingly slow. I either don't have the time or, when I do, I take too long to say everything just how I want to say it. I've got about half a page right now, and I like it, but at this rate I won't finish before the term ends.