[The Writing Class Sucks: Why You Should Never Sleep Before Praying]
by YBLalat

Alone and listless, I walked back from my writing class, heading homeward with a stuffed head and weak legs, thinking of how things have gone way out of hand, way out of control. I watched for cracks and holes on the pavement tar whilst keeping my fingers from the cold wind of night inside my pockets. The jeans were heavy because it won’t fit my waist anymore; my head was heavy because it couldn’t fit my worries anymore. The slightest breeze made me shudder. The smallest issue made me stiff. Along the way to Dinkytown, I was losing myself gradually.

I thought that this summer would be the best summer. The writing class turns out to be a chore; it didn’t make me happy. The task is menial but not captivating. Lisa Simpson’s face keeps popping up every moment I endure the minutes of the class. She is far luckier than I am; she lives in a wacky cartoon series while I live in an all-familiar rerun. I remember now why I hated English classes so much. The essays they ask you to write are so mundane and straightforward, it feels like we are writing road signs. I am not that kind of a person, remember? I talk and write like Yoda.

My first paper was handed back to me with numerous scars of red and black. One is for flagging grammar errors while the other is for comments. They were scattered throughout the paper, slanting and enchanting, at every nook and cranny. From a distance, the paper looked like a painting of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Kim the instructor took a lot of effort to go through it, I believe, because her handwriting was far neater at first, then morphed into worm-like sometimes, before completely transforming into Xs and circles. From the way she wrote her last comment, I knew that she must have been either drunk or just too bored with my errors to continue on.

She even berated the title that I chose. I know it may sound catchy for a narrative paper, it worked before, but to an academic English audience, "You need to be exact and descriptive". In other words, warn your readers of a possible narcoleptic attack. Maybe there is truth to that. I have not written anything in such a manner that the reader would understand the central theme of the essay, where the thesis statement is located (if any existed) and what is the writer’s concern on the issue he stresses. In my self-absorbed essays, I tend to leave the readers high and dry, wanting for an answer, begging for their wasted time. These disappointments make me smile. They put me in a condition where I could sit back and enjoy confusion plaguing their faces slowly and stealthily.

However, writing my way will not put a huge 'A' on the transcript. The strategy behind taking just one class and not working this summer is to get just that; so that I could bounce back my CGPA from the danger zone. I could easily juggle a job and several classes at a time if I wanted to (Yeah, right.) My roommates are skilled at such a circus feat; they have been doing that for a while now. So talented are they that they could add a love life and a travelling plan to the whole juggling thing. Thus, I am further convinced that they are of a circus freak gene pool, with an exception on Mamat who cooks dishes never before recorded in history of mankind. His case may be of an extra-terrestrial significance (Just look at his hair.)

I was so down when I read the comments on the returned paper that I nearly cried like a small girl. Thank God there were female Malaysian students in class, I could have thrown a fit of tears and wails in front of the other international students. I didn’t care if they would feel disgusted at the sight of a grown man crying; they were strangers to me anyway. I decided to poke my eyes with the back end of the pen instead. The effect was different though; blood came out gushing and I had to rush for the restroom. All was well again in the urinals. (Hey, this reminds me of somebody crying on the girls’ toilet seat one time. What was her reason then? Definitely not as traumatic as mine.)

I slept early that night because Che Wan was talking so much. He kept on babbling about his rough workplace and his white roommates and stopped midway to laugh at bread commercials for kids on TV and then continued talking about George Bush’s tongue slips and the near end of the universe. I just couldn’t escape him; he was sitting on the couch in the living room with a Time on one hand and a dinner plate at the other while enjoying a talk show on TV and listening to himself singing songs only he knows who the singers were. Talk about multi-tasking, huh? Afterwards when I retrieved to my chamber, he felt left alone and ignored and walked home sometime near midnight. There is no better cure for worn out hospitality than a cold shoulder.

In the middle of the night, I woke up to the sound of a speeding car passing by the bar next to my apartment. I nearly forgot to do my night prayer. I did just that and sat on the prayer mat in the darkness of the room and stared at the hanging pink monkey on my table. I call it the Suicide Bear although it’s obviously not a bear. A roll of seaman’s rope is put around its neck to mimic the suicide rope. The bear smiled at me in a funny way. I smiled back but immediately stopped after noting how foolish it was to smile at a doll. All this creepy smiling is making the hair at the back of my neck standing up like tall grasses of Africa. So let me move to a new paragraph.

From the eyes of the toy bear, I sensed how much I miss my kid brothers. I miss their trash talk and swearing. I miss their first step on the stairs of the school hall, receiving their first prize gifts from the principal because they got first place in an exam. Sometimes I jump on my bed like my kid brothers do to my bed all the time. I miss having them stain my shirt with the curry gravy at weddings of relatives. I miss carrying them to bed from in front of the TV because they fell asleep watching wrestling tapes with Dad. I miss cleaning up their mess when they eat in front of the PC while watching a VCD. I miss their crying and kicking for Mom whenever they found out that she has slip out of the house to go to the grocery shop. They always torture her there; forcing her to buy crappy toys inside those junk food boxes. I was not there when they finished reading the Koran for the first time. I was in a place they thought only existed in cartoons: the snowy and Santa Claus-visited America.

Sigh. I regret canceling my plan to go back to Malaysia. I felt I had betrayed them. I felt I had cheated them. But I don’t have the cash to do that. With another ten days before a possible government shutdown in Minnesota, how could I find a job at the U? Would they even hire me with a state budget still not passed by the divided House? Why must these magazine companies keep bugging me? I have asked them to terminate my subscription account repeatedly since few months ago, stressing on unavoidable personal financial problems. What other possible explanations do they need to stay away from dialing my phone number? I don’t believe I would be the same person I was to my kid brothers after years of being so far away. For another two years in this shit-hole life, they will grow up without me witnessing the fun of it all. By then, I would be a stranger.

I just hope they still remember how I look like. It has been a while since I last phoned home and hear their squeaky voices. Maybe it’s about time to do that.