Krista Lauren

It’s about time for another embarrassing story, right?

Since I haven’t been on an awkward first date in months I haven’t collected as many new funny Krista stories. This is good for the little pride I have left, but bad for my blog. “Luckily,” life just loves to tease me, and my newest story comes from one of my grad school classes.

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I am getting my Master’s in English right now. I never planned to go back to school, but since I got POTS and couldn’t work I decided I might as well do something productive while I recover.

My undergraduate degree was in Communication and Journalism, so although I loved my English requirements as well, I never took extensive English classes — just the three everyone else took. I am honestly not a huge fan of classic literature and do not remember most of what I learned studying lit in high school.

Everyone else in my grad classes has a background in English. They all studied some sort of English for their Bachelor’s; I made the mistake of referring to Frankenstein as the monster instead of the scientist once and immediately regretted it, as the entire class angrily corrected me in unison. I’m pretty sure they wished that they had a dunce cap they could bestow upon me for the rest of the semester.

Anyway, needless to say I was less than thrilled when my professor told us to all think of some books we could write about for an in-class exercise. I quietly offered The Grapes of Wrath as a suggestion, as that was a novel I enjoyed reading in high school — though I did not remember the majority of the book.

Other books the class mentioned included Wuthering Heights, Fahrenheit 451, Great Expectations, 1984, and Twilight, which got a tremendous amount of laughter as it was written on the board.

We then had to mention different events in history. I might sound a bit like a moron, but memorizing dates is not my strong suit. I was afraid of being wrong about events in history as our professor called out different dates and we matched several events during that time period. Some of the events listed included: The Peloponnesian War, The Battle of The Bulge, The JFK Assassination, and several other things I vaguely remembered learning about, but couldn’t seem to think of many specific details from. At the last minute someone added the OJ Simpson trial to the list.

Our task was to connect a novel from the list on the board with one of those events in history, as well as add a personal experience into the mix.

Great, I thought. The only book I truly remembered the gruesome details from was Twilight, and sadly I couldn’t remember enough details fast enough in the “real” historical events to write about them, so by default had to choose the OJ trial.

Twilight and the OJ trial. I was writing a paper about vampires and a real-life monster. Got it.

I ended up forcing that as my main connection, and adding a story of a close friend who was in a difficult relationship as the personal context. Needless to say everyone died laughing when I mumbled that I had picked Twilight as my novel, and the laughter continued as they heard I connected Edward Cullen to OJ Simpson. This was easily the least favorite class assignment I have ever done.

Today’s lesson: You do learn useful information in high school. I think they are preparing you to not be embarrassed when you fail to know simple facts in graduate school.