What Grad School Does to You...

This afternoon, I was waiting for my class to start, and I listened in on the conversation between a student and the professor. This class was my early American literature course, and we were discussing a novel by a guy named Charles Brockden Brown, so the professor was this early American lit person. The student was a girl who's kind of the smart ditz.

Anyway, she was being really sociable, and she told him that she was excited because she was going caving this weekend. He asked her what exactly she was going to do, and she (very chipperly) launched into a description of being lowered by a rope down fifty feet into a cave. And then she talked about going diving in caves. They were some really adventuresome and exciting stories, especially in her telling of them. But then the professor said a thing that only a person who had gone through graduate school in an English department would have said: "Since you like caving, and if you like Charles Brockden Brown, you should read his novel from 1799, Edgar Huntly. It's about a killer, and he sometimes goes in caves."

This professor's a pretty nice guy, but that was the worst conversation killer I've ever heard. I recommend a lot of books to people, but I hope I never do it like that.