I had to go to school today but I didn’t have to like it.

Gods, I love what that pandemic has done to the entire education system. Purely for selfish reasons. A mostly remote and asynchronous class schedule happens to work incredibly well for my brain.

“Go and read this book.” “Have you read the book?” “Yes? Can you write us a paragraph about it?” “Excellent, thank you. Goodbye.”

This semester, I don’t have to sit through two hour lectures with my feet up on the desk, knitting, doodling, crying internally, barely keeping several different anxiety spirals under control, trying miserably to concentrate… mostly drifting off into space.

I had incredibly patient differential equations professor but that is beside the point.

Now I can pause the pre-recorded lecture every seven minutes to get up and move around, scroll through Instagram’s limited collection of Johnlock memes, make a sandwich, plan a trip to Tibet, work on my elaborate but stylish plot to overthrow the government, feel the upset of the world in the pit of my stomach … et cetera, it goes on.

This morning I listened to a humanities lecture about Aristotle’s ethics at a playback speak of 1.5, though the crappy little speakers on my phone, while walking up the hill through an absolutely gorgeous cemetery.

The other night I watched a lecture about Indian cosmology under the duvet at 3AM.

You get the idea.

But Elementary German is still very much in person. Classical music plays through the speakers before class. My professor’s voice sounds like a distinctly western NY Santa Claus. In order to practice the spoken language, we have to scream across six or twelve or eighteen feet of room to other classmates. I can only see the top halves of their faces, so I can’t see their lips to catch the shapes they make when the sounds come out.

It’s like I’m living in a dream.

This afternoon, towards the end of German class, I think I worked out what it means to split an infinitive. I’d spent years of my life not knowing what an infinitive was, and pretending to know so as not to look like an idiot, while also forgetting to ever actually fucking get around to googling the damned things. But today, for some reason… today was the day when it all began to, finally, make sense.

The increasingly potent sensation is one of grief for an irretrievably lost innocence. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, until today, and now that I know what I didn’t know I can never truly go back.

It’s fascinating how you learn things when you go to school.

Anyway, I – folks, I should get offline tonight. There’ll be coffee in the morning, and that’s enough of a reason to carry on.

I hope it’s been an excellent Tuesday.