A Year Of Hope

Bartholomew quickly chose me to be his person.

Every morning I would take him out and feed him, and every night before bed I would feed him and take him out once more at night and then he would sleep in my room. If Jane decided to sleep in my room, he would sleep in the dog bed I bought him, otherwise he would sleep in my bed. During the day, if I didn't have work, Bartholomew was almost always with me going on walks, playing fetch in the field, or lounging with me on the couch.

Only two days after the snow fall, almost all the snow around town had melted. On New Years Eve, Sam, Jane, and I stayed up late after work, and got drunk, and watched the ball drop, and then a week and a half later, we all started classes.

I would soon realize a liberal arts college was very different than community college. Community college, at least my experience with it, resembled a lot of high school. Formal textbooks, formal lectures, and formal exams often having homework due a minimum of once a week. Just by looking at the syllabi, I could see that most classes only had at most 6 assignments due, almost none of them had formal exams, and the classes either had no textbooks, or the required texts were books written by either themselves or another professor friend, or for my literature and English classes, we simply had novels, books of poems, or collections of short stories for the required reading.

"Yup," Jane had said when I voiced this to her. "Welcome to university, dude!"

Jane and Sam had gifted me a hoodie and t-shirt from our college the day before classes started, and I decided to wear them on the first day of school.

"You're adorable," Sam said when I stepped out of my room dressed in my hoodie. "Here, let me style your hair with he hair pomade Jane gave you."

I didn't even know the first thing about styling hair, I typically just left my shaggy hair however it dried, so I allowed her to style my hair. Jane eventually popped in and began helping her.

"Okay, take a look!" Jane said. "You look fucking adorable."

I looked in the mirror, and I I saw they had given me a sort of façon hairstyle, with the hair on the sides of my head slicked back, and the hair on top slightly pushed up and too the side, looking purposely messy. I smiled at myself, thinking I perhaps looked half way decent.

"I think I may need to do my hair like this more often," I said.

"It's hot right?" Sam said.

"I guess you could say that," I said as I felt my face burn hot.

"Oh so modest, Mordecai," Jane said. "Now come on, let's go."

We had decided that we would take turns driving to school, however, Jane and I had conveniently aligned our schedules so that we only had classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but Sam had to go everyday. So we decided Jane and I would drive on the days all of us went to class, and Sam would simply drive herself the other days. Today was my turn to drive. I said bye to Bartholomew, and we all left to school.

Jane's and my first class was Intro to Education, in which an instead of going over the syllabus, the professor, who was an eccentric elderly man, stated, "This class will teach the qualities of an ideal educator." And then he proceeded to tell stories about his years as a middle school teacher. In one story, a female student grabbed another girl by her pony tail and slammed her head into the desk. And in another  story he talked about a principal he worked under who hired a Harvard graduate with a PhD to teach science, and how he ended up being the worst teacher ever because he wasn't interested in actually teaching, but simply just spewing his knowledge. So while some students listened intently, the rest of the class would some go wild, and eventually he was fired.