Reading:
critical guides to Twelfth Night

1) I've noticed, in the months being here, that I talk differently. I speak more emphatically. Nothing is just "cool" anymore. Things are "awesome", "amazing", "wicked". I cannot account for it, really, because I never spoke like this back at home. I sound like a surfer most of the time, and I hate it. Yesterday, while over at a classmate's house, I actually told her that the pasta she made was "stellar". Who talks like this? Not me, normally. But I can't seem to stop it.

Ugh. Stellar. What was I thinking? See, this is why I'm a print person rather than an oral one. In print, you can look over what you've just said and go back and fix it before anyone else sees it. You can't so much do that out loud.

2) The pants I am currently wearing, my black pinstriped pants, are far too long and too big. They fall off my hips, they drag along the floor, and they force me to walk on my toes to avoid tripping. But they're so nice to sit it, and I'll be doing a fair bit of sitting today what with all the work to be done. Come to think of it, I do a fair amount of sitting every day. Anyway, the worrying bit is the walking on my toes part. I knew this kid at camp one summer who used to walk on tip-toe when he was little and his muscles just grew in such a way that it was natural for him to walk like that all the time. We had to tell him, "Anthony! Sur les talons, s'il vous plait!" to get him to walk properly. Poor kid. He ran really fast, though. I suppose there's not much of a risk that I could warp my legs from wearing these pants, but that's the kind of thing onto which my brain latches to deflect from greater worries.

3) Tomorrow, I have this presentation to give in History. I haven't given a presentation since first year, and I wasn't terribly successful then, either. I have to talk about Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in historical terms. How, how will I do this? I'm dealing with the sources section of the presentation, which is fine, but I also have to talk about how it's tragic in some sense, and how renaissance self-fashioning fits in. Themes, see. How do I talk about themes? I haven't discussed themes since grade five. I'm used to just hinting at them in class now, since every English student gets right away what you mean when you do that. But now I have to spell it out to a bunch of fountain pen using, file folder carrying History students? Ack!

It's not that I think I'm smarter than them. I mean, that's how I've been explaining it to everyone this week, but that's not really it. It's that these History kids think differently from me. They think in terms of facts, of data that they can write down, of everything they need to understand complex ideas being reduced to a page of notes, in terms of politics and events and things happening. It's just hard to figure out what they want to know when I'm no longer used to thinking like that. I'll have to figure it out for tomorrow, though. So I should probably get back to working on that.

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