NTKOG #15: The kind of student who hangs back after class, bright-eyed, asking professors eager questions in a brown-nosed attempt to lap up every last drop of educational insight. (The title sounds salacious. I don’t mean it that way. At least, mostly.)
I am: absolutely silent in classes unless I have something to say that I know will make at least three-quarters of the assembled audience laugh aloud. Yeah, I just referred to my fellow knowledge-seekers as my audience. Deal with it.
I am not: that great at paying attention, honestly, sometimes. The vast majority of the time, discussions in the humanities strike me as obtuse and pretentious to the point of parody. I get most of the value of a course out of the assignments and workshops.
The Scene: Tonight, after lecture in one of my creative writing classes, another girl and I hung back to ask the professor for help with a problem logging into the class website. After he fixed her account, she scuttled off, leaving me alone to chitchat idly with the professor. Fun fact: chitchatting is the thing in the world I am worst at, with the possible exception of ice-skating. But I politely asked about his novel and his eyes went limpid with self-narrating delight as he told me all about the semi-autobiographical epic he’s writing, based on an experience he had after undergrad. It has taken him nearly a decade to write. I find this — like him — sweet in a vague, wearing-socks-to-bed kind of way.
We fix the problem with the computer and at this point I would usually wave a quick goodbye, mutter something about catching a bus, and sprint downstairs before the laptop is resheathed. But tonight, not so! I waited for him to pack up and asked him questions about finding agents, his revision proces, thoughts about publications.
I was surprised to find that the conversation didn’t have an office-hours pedigogical feel: it flowed more like a conversation. He was refreshingly free of that tenure-track god complex one so often sees (especially in the humanities where, forgive me, the stakes are so small), and his advice felt fresh and interested — writer to writer, which made me feel like a fraud in all the most flattering ways.
Once we walked through the main paths of the campus green, I tried to politely edge myself to the exit in order to manufacture a breaking point, but he asked where I was going, and I said to the T, and he told me the gate I was heading toward was locked, but we could walk together through the side exit. And so we did, chatting about Northern California (where his wife — boo) used to live, and his next novel, and whether it is psychologically traumatizing to glue googly eyes on Roombas*. He walked me to the escalators in the T entrance and I told him it was lovely chatting, expecting an awkward moment of him also going to the T and my having to get on an Outbound train to avoid continuing the conversation.
BUT NOT SO! He said goodbye and doubled back the way we had come, to walk to a parking lot. He walked out of his way to escort me to the T, so enchanting was my conversation!
The Verdict: Huh. I’m still not an office hours kind of girl, and I think this chat was so nice primarily because he gave me lots of useful publishing insider input without pulling out the professor card. Still, I’m going to call this one a net victory, if only because … um … dude … professor.
Good thing nothing like this ever happened in my crazy undergrad days, or else I would definitely have done some serious scheming. (And, needless to say: too bad nothing like this ever happened in my crazy undergrad days. Or else I would have done some serious scheming.)
* (a brilliant and whimsical bit of mad scientistry slash socio-robonomic commentary I unrepentantly stole from Brain Doctor)
Not That Kind of Girl 