play by play: class on june 19th; written june 19th on the porch while consuming iced coffee

words come in and out like sounds flashing by an open car window at 80 miles per hour on I-40. she takes a moment to wonder how rude it would really be to put in her headphones.

he babbles on about geography and timing and this or that translation.
she traces around her hand, palm-down, then makes smiley faces within each empty finger space.

he changes the slide to another black and white striped with several bulleted points stated with careful rhetoric. her hand slips and a finger-face frowns back lopsidedly.

"this is an important revelation because it reveals a point about..."her face is screwed up into a look of intense concentration as she holds her notebook on her lap and draws several ecstatic clowns. they juggle and smile widely. she struggles to get one atop a unicycle when a five-minute break is called.

all she can do, seated at the front of the room, is write AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! in the margins to convey her mounting frustration and boredom to her neighbor, who giggles to show amusement.

back in the squeaking, felt-covered chair, sipping 7-UP from a dented Styrofoam cup, only 3 more hours to go and just 3 behind her. she starts the hour with her water bottle modeling, imitating it carefully, looking discreetly from bottle to notebook so as not to reveal where her attention truly lies.

he noticeably clears his throat in response, as he can obviously see her drawing from his perch at the podium. she quickly looks up in interest and copies from the slide:

"*The Message
*The Match
*The Marvel"

astounding alliteration. she doodles a picture next to each point to help "associate meaning." the super-hero's cape next to the last point trails off and becomes the stem of a cartoon flower with spots in the middle. soon there is a garden and a bee dances on one of the petals of a smiling daisy.

"and what do we know about this?" ah, another rhetorical question beaks through the invisible dome allowing her to ignore him. a voice behind her, the only other male tone in the classroom, responds smartly. the same voice that's been snickering at the teacher's corny jokes all day.

floppy ears emerge on her paper, joined soon by a long snout and mouth with buck teeth, open wide in a long , loud HEE-HAW!

"Here are some visual representations. As you can see..."

the home stretch. she draws a gigantic clock in the center of the page and scribbles out new hands every time they move forward. underneath, she adds a picture timeline of what happens each minute: a stick figure points to a projector screen; another, face-down on a desk, surrounded by Z's.

he finally moves between the desks and she puts her finishing touches on a scaled-down sketch of the desk sand chairs before her. she flips her notebook over and smiles innocently as she receives her seminar evaluation form.

she connects a row of 1's down the right side of the page like a gigantic arrow that points to a grinning smiley face under the word, in black, capital letters:

COMMENTS.