Will sing for extra credit

I have begun to wonder, lately, about that peculiar coterie of people called educators. Actually, I have just been considering careers and stuff in general and was thinking about my past and present teachers and I often arrive at the conclusion that there really are those particular professions that just seem to lend themselves extremely well to the employment of damaged people (i.e. art, writing, acting, anything within the psychological/psychiatric realm, etc.), and though I have never really previously considered teachers to be in that mix, I'm now beginning to rethink that assessment.

I think back to all the horrible projects that have been foisted upon me over the years:

grade 3 -- All About Koalas
grade 4 -- Santa Fe Trail diary
grade 6 -- Who Am I? (a fantastic question to ask an 11-year-old to answer)
grade 7 -- make-your-own-country
grade 8 -- "farewell, St. Bernard's!" skit
grade 9 -- Jane Eyre, round 1
grade 10 -- "Plutocracy for all, come and have a ball!"
grade 11 -- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest pop-up book
grade 12 -- The Livermore Tales
college, freshman year -- Jane Eyre, round 2 (not really a project per se, but painful enough just in itself)
college, sophomore year -- paper on Thomas Hooker's "A True Sight of Sin" (if you've never written a paper on a Puritan sermon before, let's just say you're really missing out on life)

And those are just the ones that immediately come to mind. I know there were many more that I can't even recall right now. Repression: it's a good thing.

But really, it's the cycle of abuse, marching onward. Educators must have been somehow intellectually marred at some point in their own schooling and thus feel the need to inflict it again upon a new generation.

I think my whole point, really, is that I am now selling my soul to my professor for my Latin grade.

It is the only way. It is either this or attempt to somehow learn everything that I have been slacking on this entire year and cram it into a span of a little more than a week before the final. Now, all of that, by my estimate, is about a hundred million more verb conjugations and declensions and principle parts and translations than my head can actually contain.

And see, now, that just sounds awfully unpleasant. And I'm trying out this new life theory that begins as of right now in which I avoid unpleasant things. I'm thinking, if it works out, I can develop it into some kind of multi-step plan, make little pyramid charts about it, market it as some kind of new self-help miracle cure, write some books about it, and thusly receive the endorsement of a powerful female talk show host that will eventually lead to me becoming very, very rich and obtaining my own nightly prime time television talk show in which I tell people how to live their lives ("oh, you're a drug addict? Well, this is an easy one. Stop doing drugs! #7 on my Path-To-A-Better-Self Plan is self-control. So go get some!" And then I would would dust off my hands, grab my spouse from their perch in my audience and we would walk off into the glow of my having just saved a poor, distressing soul from the deep and terrible hollows of their misery).

I might even get myself a Texan accent, shave my head, and grow a beard.

So, yeah, all that is in the works. Forget literature. Forget linguistics. Who needs syntax trees and Joyce when you can just get rich fast?

Anyway. What was I saying?

Oh, about selling my soul. Well, not really selling my soul, more like singing my soul.

In a most wonderful display of educational sadism, my Latin professor has offered us the opportunity to sing at the annual Classics Department Picnic, for extra credit.

Now, I realize I often talk to people about dropping out of college to go pursue my American Idol dreams, but, you know, sometimes people just say things like that in moments of personal desperation, no? Well, karma apparently can't take a joke. Either that or it wants me to take my education more seriously.

In any case, my vocal debut is now (woefully) not going to be in front of millions of Americans and Paula Abdul's overly-medicated hilarity, but rather, it is going to be before a large group of classically-inclined nerds who read Horace for the heck of it and greet each other in the halls with, "quid fit?" I, of course, only say that so bitterly because I myself have become one of them this year and I am trying to make a last-ditch attempt at preserving some kind of dignity in all of this.

But then my eyes wander to the Clone Wars poster on my bedroom door and I realize that I really lost all dignity a very long time ago. Probably at the time of my realization that I was born in the wrong galaxy and era. I'm pretty thoroughly convinced that there was a blip somewhere in space and time and I really am actually a Jedi Master who has effectively saved all beings from total galactic upheaval while simultaneously overtaking Mace Windu in my skill level with a lightsaber and earning the highest praises of Yoda himself ("Mmm, the Force is strong in you, young one. Great things, I foresee, in your future. Greeeeaaat things.").

I think my point in all of that is that, in comparison to complex fantasies about Star Wars, a bit of Latin geekage doesn't really seem all that bad.

So, I think I am sort of coming to some kind of point? I really ought to think this stuff through more thoroughly before I write because when I don't I inevitably come back to relating everything in life to a sci-fi fandom.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that I totally would have sang "Un-Break My Heart" for my American Idol audition, but now my vocal debut has been relegated to "Tempus Adest Floridum," or, "It is Time for Flowering," a joyous little ditty praising the gods for the coming of spring.

You can get a taste of it here, but I think it necessary to say that this version uses church pronunciation instead of classical, and I also think it rather lacks the particular flair that our little group is going to bring to it, and also, I have absolutely no idea what is going on in this video and why it has anything to do with these two hikers, but hey, whatever floats your Latinate boat, I guess.



And I guess I should also say that, ultimately, despite all of my joking about it, I have really kind of enjoyed the whole singing thing. Sort of like how I actually really kind of enjoy High School Musical.

But that's probably a topic for another time.