Elaine's Diary, aka Ducks in a River

wednesday, september 7

9:55am

                My Oobies kept my hands quite toasty warm during the night. I’m growing a little fond of them, although it was very difficult to turn my alarm off with my Oobie-hands.

                I wonder why more people don’t wear Oobies to keep warm?

10:07am

                Oh, wait. They do. That’s what mittens are.

10:12am

                I’m still on my fever deathbed, okay, so if I say something stupid it’s not my fault.

1:27pm

in the school library

                Just me and my fever, hanging out in the WIH-ZUR section of the school library. All the books in this aisle look like crap, it’s like the marketing editors said, “Well nobody is gonna come back to the Z section anyways, so why waste time on cover art?”

1:31pm

                Oh, I see. This is where they keep the Chinese authors. All the Woos and Yangs and Zhangs are in this aisle. Isn’t that a bit racist, sticking the Chinese off in the back of the library?

1:32pm

                How sad, bigotry in a public institution. No wonder American education is free, it’s filled with erroneous race beliefs. Like if a cheese man gave you a pound of Swiss cheese for free, and you said thank you, but when you took it home and unwrapped it, there was more holes than actual cheese.

Uh, or something.

two seconds later

                I am going to protest this blatant racism by never reading again.

1:35pm

                And the first book I am not going to read is Heart of Darkness. I am four pages in and Joseph Conrad has been babbling on for roughly ten years about flames gliding down the river Thames. First of all, a flame cannot glide down a river because it would get put out. Perhaps he means to say that there are ducks gliding down the river, but he doesn’t know the word for ‘duck’ because he’s not English, so he just stuck any old noun in its place. Nice try, J.Con. I’m watching you.

1:45pm

               Now he’s talking about city traffic in the river. Goodness, J.Con, you can’t just stick whatever you like in a river and call it literature.

Literature!

1:47pm

                I’ve gone to the SHO-TUN section and got another, more palatable book. It’s called A Bad Boy Can Be Good For A Girl.

1:50pm

                Oh my goodness I cannot read this book anymore, it is too dirty. I think I've been deflowered.

1:54pm

                So basically I have got the gist of public education and it is this:

1.       They stick the Chinese authors in the back of the library. I bet they also supported the Chinese Exclusion Act way back in America’s gold-mining days.

2.       The so-called classics are filled with errors (see: Heart of Darkness and J.Con’s conviction that a duck is a flame).

3.       The school system invests money in sex books and not in Sparknotes for the aforementioned Unreadable Classics.

5:00pm

                I have decided to become J.Con’s copyeditor, since nobody else is up to the task (probably because nobody, including me, can understand what the heck he’s saying).  Stay tuned.