July 10, 2016

The teacher was giving a lecture on living with compassion and how there was more to life than working for 64 hours a day. He shared an anecdote about walking beneath the “Understood tree” by the bridge and finding his purpose in life. Someone in the audience was spamming the powerpoint presentation with Discord notifications that were only visible to other users.

The half of the class that won the competition had the honor of presenting the material we had covered over the semester to another group of students. As I was not a part of this half, we got to watch their rehearsal which started with some dancing and singing. They quickly admitted that they had nothing else to show which was met with obvious frustration from the teacher. “You won this shit” he said. “Well I made the text purple [on the GoogleDoc]” someone defended.

The teacher looked at me and asked if I “[wanted] to be a hero”. Someone slipped me a piece of paper with “Thanks Clark” written in pen. I had taken meticulous notes for the class throughout the course but I didn’t know what to do with any of it. We reviewed the various themes of the texts we covered such as backpacks, death, and resistance to artificial intelligence. When I opened my notebook, I was met with intricate landscapes portraying the scenes and characters of the stories we had read about.