[...] I'm 99 per cent sure that I took just one Intro Accounting class during all this time, and did all right in it until we hit depreciation schedules, as in the straight-line method vs. accelerated depreciation schedules, and the combination of difficulty and sheer boredom of the depreciation schedules broke my initiative, especially after i'd missed a couple of the classes and fallen behind, which with depreciation is fatal--

[...] I remember not getting Camus's The Fall read in time, for instance, and having to totally bullshit my way through the Literature of Alienation midterm--in other words, I was cheating, at least by implication--but not feeling much about it one way or the other, that I can recall, except a sort of cynical, disgusted relief when the prof's grader wrote something like 'Interesting in places!' under the B. Meaning a meaningless bullshit response to meaningless bullshit. [...]

[...] It's not unlike the religious confidence that one is 'loved unconditionally' by God--as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn't seem to really have anything to do with you, so it's hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God. [...]

[...] the CBS daytime network announcer's voice would say ,'You're watching As the World Turns,' which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time--'You're watching As the World Turns,' until the tone began to seem almost incredulous--'You're watching As the World Turns'--until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement. I don't mean any sort of humanities-type ironic metaphor, but the literal thing he was saying, the simple surface level. [...] The truth is I was not even aware of the obvious double entendre of 'You're watching As the World Turns' until three days later--the show's almost terrifying pun about the passive waste of time of sitting there watching something whose reception through the hanger didn't even come in very well, while all the while real things in the world were going on and people with direction and initiative were taking care of business in a brisk, no-nonsense way [...]

[...] when I came in and said I was ready for advanced processing, and gave him the forms from the homework I'd plowed through, looked from me to the forms and back again, giving me the exact kind of smile of someone who, on Christmas morning has just unwrapped an expensive present he already owns.