Theories of Insanity

28 | G'day, Mate

February

28 | G'day, Mate

Thursday, February 1, 2018

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Insanity:

Inviting someone along with you and then getting angry with them for...accepting the invitation?

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            Creative Writing was slowly becoming one of my favorite classes. And not just because I had stopped sitting in the front row after the first day of class and had taken up permanent residence in the very back. In the very back with me was a—ridiculously good-looking, if we're being honest—guy that I was slowly forcing to be friends with me.

            Legered was an enormous university with over 30,000 students, and thus most of the classes took place in giant lecture halls where you sat next to someone different every day, depending on what time you go to class. (1) But Creative Writing had eighteen students in it total, and honestly if anyone had sat down in my seat in the back row I would have been deeply offended.

            In the back corner of the room sat Neil Bitner, a guy who didn't seem very interested in making conversation with anyone. On the second day of classes, I had gone back and sat directly next to him, since I was definitely not a front-row type of person and I wanted to know why he had been glaring at me on the first day. I was also terrible at keeping my comments to myself during class, and the number of inappropriate things I said under my breath when other people in the class talked had finally seemed to convince Neil that I was worth getting to know. (2)

            Now, if you're sitting there thinking, "Ah, so this is the guy she ends up dating this semester," you'd be sorely mistaken. As attractive as the kid was, my Instagram stalking had been sufficient enough to show that he had a girlfriend, and I wasn't about to get in on that.

            Friends it was. (3)

            So, I looked forward to Creative Writing. I looked forward to seeing what bizarre outfit this one blonde girl would wear to class every single day—I called them 'costumes' one time and Neil yelled at me. I started taking pictures of the girl's outfit every day to send to Ashley, since she always had the best reactions to everything I sent her. Neil yelled at me for that too, calling it an 'invasion of privacy.' I called it hilarious and totally worth almost getting caught by her multiple times. (4)

            I looked forward to being able to write without feeling weird about it. Everyone in the class loved writing like I did, and it wasn't a 'different' thing to do. When we had free time in the class, after a quiz or something, I would pull up my Word doc and keep working on the latest novel that I had forced myself to start: in February 2018, it happened to be the sequel to another book I had already finished—a book that had done pretty well when I posted it online, if I did say so myself. (5)

            I'm not sure exactly why I feel the need to describe Creative Writing so intently. The class was a major part of my semester, and not just because I found someone who liked Taylor Swift's music as much as I did. (6)

            In all honesty, I didn't even have Creative Writing on Thursdays, which is the day that this chapter takes place on.

            Let's get on with that.

***

            Paige had been getting all of us excited for the entire week over her friend visiting from Australia. Paige had lived pretty much everywhere before her family settled in Utah and she decided to go to college here—she had lived in Australia for part of her high school experience, and there she had met Yara.