I spend the morning reading the classifieds today, History observing from his couch haven. Classified always seemed like a strange phrase. It makes sense, with the definition of "arranged or distributed according to class", but that definition seems to miss the point somewhat. And classified ads certainly don’t fall under the definition of “secretive” or “known only to an elite few”. If it’s your intention to keep information under wraps, printing it in the local paper is not the best way to go about it.

History proceeded to hop onto the table and stretch out over the paper, fulfilling the long legacy of his race of getting in the way of anything you were actually paying attention to, out of some primal jealousy or an innate pain-in-the-**** gene. His incongruously heavy form covered most of the paper, leaving only one square visible, a small blurb asking for proofreaders for a law firm.

I read the law firm name with interest, hoping for some amusing pun of the “Dewey, Cheatum and Howe” variety, but was disappointed. Proofreading isn’t really a terrible gig though, since it can easily be accomplished while watching TV and/or eating. Since I went the liberal arts route before setting off for med school, I picked up a decent amount of grammatical awareness, just enough to get mad at restaurants that can’t figure out whether they belong to Joe or just contain multiple Joes.

Most of that came from Sarah, to give credit where it’s due. “Gender Norms in Contemporary American Writing”, sophomore writing seminar. It was the first English course I took in college, since I learned to avoid like the plague any that could have had Ulysses or The Odyssey as required reading. Sarah was the kind of woman who preferred to be called a womyn, and would have been angry with me for naming History something so offensively patriarchal. Good study partner though, and the kind of person you miss once you leave academia and the eccentric people are no longer appreciated as often as they are locked up.

History, (who’s a boy, so who cares if it’s patriarchal anyway?) stood up and went back under the couch, evidently peeved that I had stopped being irritated by his presence. His absence revealed the rest of the classifieds, but I’d lost interest. Worst come to worst, I’d pawn the security cameras, since History seems to laugh in the face of technology. The trouble with History is that eventually everything gets obsolete.