Slacker Prompt

Ever since I read about the aforementioned “slacker prompt,” I’ve had an irritating non-urge to post to the blog. Although I’ve now found the motivation to sit still long enough to write something semi-understandable, my thoughts remain scattered. At the moment, I’m trying to simultaneously type this post, extract the deeper allegorical meaning of the “Faerie Queene”—my bête noire of late—and monitor my curry on the stove.

Like everyone else, I’ve been tightroping between school, work, and an on-again off-again social life. My existence is pretty ascetic during the semester, but I’ve come to believe strongly in Henry David Thoreau’s advice to, every day, take a little time to do something that I want to do. An English major by profession and confession, I usually keep my sanity in the midst of scholastic rigor by reading books not required for my lit classes.

Currently, I’m in the middle of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe, a book that has completely changed my approach to gender issues in literature and the “real world.” Mme de Beauvoir’s ideas have gotten me into a little trouble, however, particularly when a certain passer-by heard only part of a discussion on how western society’s pedestalization of females tends to kindle narcissism in adolescents girls. But that’s a story, I suppose, for another blog post.

If nothing else, Mme de Beauvoir has helped me realize how polemical I tend to be. For a couple years, I worked as a political columnist in both printed and new media, and although I’ve since laid aside my diatribes and more creative epithets, I’m still drawn to controversy like a moth to flame. And yes, more often than not, I get burned. I like to challenge people. As a result, when I tutor, I like to ask a lot of questions.

Question asking, however, needs to be special-fitted to each tutee; I’ve had some students who, I think, had genuine learning experiences by justifying their own writing, but at least one student I can think of was, well, miffed. Yet, as I’ve followed the older tutors’ advice and really watched a tutee’s body language, I think I’ve done better at custom-tailoring my sessions.

Overall, I love tutoring. The paycheck isn’t going to land me a flat in Trump Tower, but I always look forward to my weekly shifts. I enjoy the writing center, I enjoy the other tutors, I enjoy the tutees, and I enjoy learning from my mistakes.

Uh-oh. I smell curry.