Billygean.co.uk

Monday, November 20, 2006

Fabulously Gay Tutor and the Scratch Perverts

I walk across campus from my 9 o'clock EU and contract lectures. I am not happy. It's cold. My eyes ache from the bright autumn sun.

I walk past some people handing out flyers and idly take one. I shuffle into the law building all the way up to floor three. It's time to go see Fabulously Gay Tutor and be embarrassed whilst he tells me why I'm worth 54%.

"Hello," I say, poking my head around the door. I hate that moment; when they realise you're the one who hiccoughs in lectures (yep) and you realise they're the one who wrote scornful marks all over your introduction.

"Take a seat," he says, sweeping a pile of papers onto the floor. He's reading Noam Chomsky. I so desperately want to ask him what he thinks.

"Gillian..." he says. "Gillian Gillian..."

I am nervous now.

He leans forward and looks me dead in the eye. "Have you received irratic marks in the past?"

I make a sort of snorting sound, a culmination of amusement and being full of snot. Sorry, but I am.

"Errr yes," I say.

"I thought so." He leans back in his chair and rubs his stubble. "What went wrong here," he says, "is that you did it backwards."

Oh God, here it comes. The "I think you're a circular thinker" argument. The "you're either a D or an A" speech I have heard so much.

"Ah" I say.

"Your essay was too advanced," he says. "You needed to do the basics."

"What are they?"

He tells me. I think this was obvious. We weren't allowed to use the lectures in English.

"This could have got 70," he says. "A shame really." He looks at me a moment. "What was your first degree?"

"English."

"English! You would have thought you'd be able to write an essay."

"Yes..." I say. What?

"You can tell, actually. Was it literature?" I nod. "Yeah you can tell. You're treating the judges' speech as a text. You're deconstructing them. It's very good. A little Derrida."

I smile ruefully. It's ironic really. As soon as I ever got physics I left it. Same with English. Same with law, one day.

"You know," he says, ruining my world, "maybe you should have stuck to English."

I try to laugh, really I do. I know it was only a joke. Only it comes out as another sort of grunt.

We look at my essay for a bit. He points out my poor legal grammar. We talk about the Human Rights Act. He calls me a liberal. Damn right, I think. He tells me a liberal woman in a law firm doesn't stand a chance. Great. I stand to leave once he's given me all those sentence-trailing-off signals.

"Bye, thanks for the help," I say.

"No problem. And nice postcard."

What? I stand outside his room for a moment and look at my hand. I'm still clutching that fucking flyer. All it's got written on it in fat, black letters is "Scratch Perverts."

Great, what a weirdo I looked.

Labels: embarrassing, NaBloPoMo

by billygean.co.uk at 11:35 PM |