Eng. Maj.

The bricks are all different colours.

That bothers me. There’s no reason it should, but it does. More than bothered. Upset. I frown up at the bricks, head tilted, neck craned.

I click my thumbnails on the buttons of my shirt. click click click

click click

click click click click

My brain falls into easy patterns as I start walking again. The sun is hot against my legs in dark pants, the air smells of grass and leaves and maybe even flowers? Surely not flowers. It’s October. But I can still smell them.

I want to write. I want to put the words in my head down by hand. I want to write!

But I don’t want to write.

Being a Liberal Arts Major is bullshit. We sit around in vast halls, talking trash about style and form, kicking hegemony and society and culture in the balls, we disabuse each other of long-taught norms, free ourselves from the shackles of stereotypes.

The old man at the table in front of us says “don’t raise your hand. speak up. when you talk you should be heard.” and we try to unlearn our own habits and politeness.

We succeed, to some degree. Unlock our inner radicals, why wanted to create and write and speak our truths in the first place, we argue and agree and commentate and feel and speak.

All of us together laugh at convention, at pretension, at canon.

We write for ourselves!

But the reading log is still due at 5.

I want to run out into the sun and throw away my textbooks. I want to write and live and think and be, not to go back to class, a lecture of an hour, an hour and a half, two hours.

School is overrated.

The bed is too small and the chairs are too hard, the wifi sucks balls and there’s too much homework. The teacher drives to me to the verge of tears when he raises his voice. I never have enough time to write.

But I want to stick around, just to see how it ends.

Differently coloured bricks and all.