Political economy

Julie's a fighter, but today she gave up. "My hand will never be the same," she said to me during the break. "We've got to start doing stretches before class or something." After that, she surprised me by not taking any notes at all for the rest of the lecture.

I, for one, tried my best to look interested in what I was listening to. Once in a while I smiled as if our prof had just told a joke, which I suppose I shouldn't have done, because it could easily have been interpereted as me laughing at his poor English. He didn't seem to notice or mind. I was just another happy student in his eyes. Yet for the whole two hours the contents of my brain were as follows:

hand arm hurts stop. must get out stop. can't read writing stop. slides flipping too fast stop. must escape stop. escape stop. please send reinforcements...

running in a constant string of dots and dashes, out on a wire to God knows where.

Then somehow my thoughts floated somewhere else to a time and place where I was middle-aged, widowed and driving an Audi through a foreign land...

And all of a sudden, the prof was talking about what sounded like MadonELL sweatshops. "Have you any worked MadonELL sweatshop?" he asked, "Come on, is no embarassment. Work is work," he continued when no one in the lecture hall raised their hand, probably because no one understood what the hell he was talking about. Then it suddenly dawned on me that he was probably talking about McDonalds.

The next think I knew, the prof was talking about Kinsey. Or at least that's how he pronounced it. What the hell does Kinsey have to do with economics? I have no idea. Perhaps he was actually talking about John Maynard Keynes instead.

"He's such a nice man, but I can't understand him," Julie said as we walked out. I agree.

Before class, a lady came and talked to us about going on academic exchanges. It's actually an idea that I've been toying around with in my mind for a while now. I've been talked out of it a couple of times already. I think I'll just apply for the hell of it and not tell anyone until I go. Or at least, that's the way that I usually do these things...