Hard core emo

The email stayed anchored to the lining of my pocket. Today was not the day to send ripples across the bay of learning. The bay was already being battered by a force 9 gale.

By process of elimination I find myself in an Emotional Literacy class. Process of elimination is of course politespeak for 'university cutbacks'. Emotional Literacy, hard core EMO. It is the worst case of the Emperor's clothes I have ever encountered.The last session involved a large sheet of white paper and a crayon with which one mapped out significant events from birth, to date. My piece of paper was acres too small. My life has been a magnificent catalogue of trauma and accidents, adventure and angst. For the other students wet behind the ears from their experiences at school, passing their driving test seemed to be the most onerous task so far.

Getting these young people to engage seems a step too far for the long suffering lecturer. He lost the plot, this man of reason, instructing a particularly irritating teenager, with the most amazing medusa mop and mascara-ed lashes, to 'piss off out of his lesson'. Hard core emo indeed. She was particularly grating, but this episode now completes a run of tantrums from each of my university tutors.

What is happening? Who is to blame, the students suffering from amnesiac blanks of learning, discipline and motivation, or the tutors; overwhelmed by their new roles as babysitters for children entirely unsuited to university life?

And what do I care, tomorrow I see my adonis, the youngest of my harem, and strictly between you and I, my current favourite. We met in the law library, he had just celebrated his 21st birthday, his affrontery won him a date. I asked him whether I was his 'Mrs Robinson fantasy'?
'Who's Mrs Robinson' was his whispered response! Reader I married him...

Let's start at the very beginning...

I have been dying to do this for ever. What could be more indulgent than delving deep into one's psyche and then hanging it out to dry in front of potentially zillions of fellow egoists? Had this been invented centuries ago the need for Confession would be obsolete. The worry of course is the theory of 'me me me', if there are so many people participating and tap-tapping away, who is actually reading this stuff?

Who cares? And anyhow, I have an excuse. My Lecturer told me to. Oh Captain! My Captain! He will be known from now on as Mr Keating. Mr Keating is a sweetheart, and bears no resemblance at all to Mrs Doubtfire. Mr Keating is my Miss Jean Brodie, without the menace. He is the reason I am reading for a degree, and quite possibly following recent events the only reason I am still hanging by a thread from the ivory towers of a suburban concrete campus. This daily account will log my journey on the Big Dipper of Academe, whooshing through the next three years of study, the highs, the lows, the absurd and the mundane, the profound and the puerile. What larks privileged reader, what larks.

Already deep into our second semester, I found myself relieved to be returning today after a reading week that melted into a blob of procrastination and long lie-ins. I strode across the park, heading for my first lecture, a little spring in my step, 'nil desperandum', my mantra. In my pocket, an email, creased into four. This slip of paper the key to the future of me. Sent to me by the Course Director, its content acutely personal, a loaded weapon or a paper plane. Time for the only Mature Student in The Village to make a decision....