On blogging

Now, since I have prefaced the title of this post with an ambiguous "On blogging," I am now at liberty to take it wherever my heart so desires. What does my heart desire, you ask? (If you didn't ask that question then you have my permission to stop reading this now, no really, stop.)

In my creative writing, non-fiction class yesterday, we spent most of class just talking and since I'm pretty sure I have the most hilarious professor in the world, I had a brilliant time.
Things we discussed:

• How there is a romance novel called Bachelor on the Prowl in which there is a character called Colin Rafferty, yes that is my professor's name. Then, the best part is that a middle aged female classmate of mine piped up with a "oh I thought your name sounded familiar!"
• We watched a Spanish voice-over of the sham-wow commercial and that launched us into a discussion about the economy. Colin, the eternal optimist, said that he thinks the economy is getting better because he found spare change on the road again. "Who picks up pennies? Me and a bunch of seventy-year-old's."
• We also watched a Fragglerock you-tube video with some random song playing; I think it was "Who Let the Dogs Out." Because Muppets (or whatever these things are called) can only form the vowel sounds, we project whatever other sounds that we hear onto them. Yes, I know, brilliant! The male classmates to my left were astonished to find out that I never watched Fragglerock (or whatever) as a child. I lived in a box.
• Somehow, we launched into a discussion about spam e-mails from Nigerian princes and how (those this fact is unverified) there is money set aside in the national budget for this scam. All I could think about was that line from 30Rock where Tracy Jordan says, "Now that we've helped those Nigerian princes..." It comes really quickly but if you catch it, it's hilarious!
  
• Then, logically, we discussed identity theft. Colin told us how he had his credit card number stolen when he stayed at a DaysInn in Charlotte, NC ("the armpit of the south," he was kidding.) He got the bill and after the charge for the hotel, there were hundreds of dollars of ChinaStar charges. Yikes.
• Somewhere in this conversation, we also discussed his contract renewal which decides if he gets to teach at UMW in the future. For his sake as well as the sake of future students, I hope it gets renewed.

So, you may be asking yourself, what the crap? Why would they waste all that class time? Well, whenever we have a class that is set up in that way, there is always a point. He was literally illustrating the concept of the personal essay which can be about whatever we want it to be about, as long as it's interesting. Everything in an essay of this nature must be correlated; hence the conversation we had in class. It seemed very random but in reality, it was all connected somehow.

Every subject that was brought up was connected in some way to the subject before it. I titled this post, "On blogging" to show an example of a title of a personal essay. It could be "On noses" or "On women's basketball." I shall end with a sigh and an expressed wish to have Colin Rafferty as my professor, well, forever!