Is it worth it? Hell yes!

There are 3 main ways in which I can get to school each morning. Each of them is rather different and is appealing in its own way:

1. Take the 61 (which is a bus) directly from front of my house to the front of school (Duration of journey: 45-50 mins with traffic)
2. Take the 54 (another bus) for about 5 stops, then take the metro (aka the underground or the subway in most normal countries) for 3 stops and then take the 50 (another bus) directly to school (Duration of journey: 40-45 mins with traffic)
3. Take the 54 for 5 stops, then take the metro for the whole way and then the 95 (another bus) for 3 stops directly to school (Duration of journey: 30-35 mins)

Now for the advantages and the disadvantages of each route. From the above description surely route 1 seems like the most viable option for most people and it was the same to me for the last 3 years). But I have realized that as people get older, they become more and more complacent and it is those 5 mins that make the biggest difference between getting to school on time or getting a black cross in the late register (Btw, the rule is that if you have more than 2 unjustified lates you're supposed to be in detention but exceptions are made for us nerds where teachers turn a blind eye to our forged notes with feeble excuses that say 'My daughter is late because she was not feeling well and got up later than usual')

So route 1 became out of question this year when I realized that my nerd status has certain limitations to the amount of time one can use the same excuse. The next most viable option definitely is route 3, in fact it is much better than route 1 because it really gets you to school on time with hardly any traffic. One of the only disadvantages of this route apart from changing public transport 3 times is that the 95 is the MOST unreliable form of public transport one can ever come across. Trudging early in the morning from the metro station to school is definitely out of question because of my laziness.

That brings me to route 2. I love route 2. I know, it sounds rather weird because the time taken for me to get to school is hardly any different from route 1. But its those vital 5 mins that make a difference everyday. Its just 3 stops by the metro, and then the 50. I think the 50 is the only reason why I love route 2. I get to sit in the bus most of the times and the 50 passes throughout the old city centre of Milan. Whatever qualms I have against Italy and Milan in general, one thing I have agree is that it has a beautiful, old city centre. This bus even passes across some of the big, ancient churches in the city. The buildings are so old, European and just beautiful. I always love to see the juxtaposition between the old buildings and the modern shops with neon lights like Nike, Footlocker, Benetton or even McDonald's. Its not just Milan actually, most of the European cities are exactly like this. Some people find it rather ugly how globalisation has encroached upon the European culture and ruined the beauty of the old buildings there. I like to think that both neon lights and old buildings coexist harmoniouly alongside each other, each with its own allure. But that's just my poetic self I guess, I even think skyscrapers are imposing and beautiful rather than blocks of concrete as most people think of them. But, as usual I digress.

So therefore, I think that route 2 is the most favourable option even if it involves me getting to school almost late but not that late everyday. Its totally worth it!

Signs, Garbage Bins and Incessant Photography

Last summer, I had gone to England with my friends: TPF, Harry, Micky and Marry for a umm..lets call it a holiday for about 5 days and I absolutely loved it. Thank god for the creation of the digital camera because I have the unhealthy habit of taking the weirdest pictures like funny signs or garbage boxes. I have no idea why, but I'm just obsessed with them. My incessant photography did get on everybody's nerves and I have nobody apart from myself and TPF to appreciate these pictures. Since I have a blog, I might as well post them here:

Alright, in the picture below I'm not really sure what this sign means, but it sure is weird and it was just posted on the window of a big music shop. Isn't it cool?

This one's plain funny, I'm not even bothering to explain this:

I would have thought they would have named something bigger like a street, boulevard or a square after such a great and important man but a lane was something I just didn't expect.

I'm obsessed with these, no idea why actually (the weird thing is that they're all from the same town). They're colourful and have messages written on them. Its also very embarrassing to stop on the street and take pictures of garbage bins. People around you keep looking at you as if you were doing something scandalous. So I hope the people reading this post appreciate the effort that it took me to actually take these pictures.

Well, if they actually told us where the ticket office was, instead of telling us where it wasn't, it would have been a bit more useful and then right above this sign they post the next one. The national express people really need to win the prize for making the funniest signs:

Is this some sort of a weird joke that nobody but my pervy mind gets? Seriously, it was a name of a chapel...What was the perv who named this chapel thinking?

The sign on the Trackball machine was hilarious. It sounds as if it was written for me! I should put something like that in front of Quincy (my computer), to remind me to keep my cool when he decides not to work or just be slow for no reason at all.

And then there are signs like these that are supposed to be serious but make me laugh for absolutely no reason at all. I like the idea of the responsible adult doing the accompanying. It definitely wouldn't be me. BTW, I also love the Post Script message about the bees that the sign gives.

The little red writing that you cant read in the picture actually says: 'In Emergency Phone - '. Now when I'm dying of electrocution, I'm definitely going to take my phone out and start reading the number and calling them up and telling them that I'm dying.

Just when you have some hope in the world, you see signs like these randomly put up on a watch shop of all the places and wonder what they actually mean.

Now let me leave you all with a close-up of an albino pigeon, Dorothy, who was kind enough to pose for this beautiful award winning photograph and give me all the rights to this image:

And there is the one of a rainbow, which is not funny at all but just pretty. I love rainbows, you never got to see them in Bombay where I grew up for some reason, so I'm extra fond of them:

This is the last one I promise, it is a photograph of Lyra's bench in the Oxford botanical gardens. Hopefully at least some of you will know what I'm talking about.

PS: I have another amazing pictue of a fossilized band-aid but for some reason I cant upload it onto this post. Anyways its not hard to imagine what a fossilized band-aid looks like. Ah, the things one can find if one just looks carefully around.

On Publishers and Covers

I have shamelessly copied the idea for the post below from this post by Aishwarya and I hope she doesn't mind. I love pretty book covers, however shallow that sounds.

I'm obsessive with the publishers of the books I am reading. Most of the time when I'm buying books I'm forced to buy the worst one in the store because the worst editions do also happen to be the cheapest. So as a result, I have a whole collection of Penguin Popular Classics at home. I hate these editions so much. Seriously, the paper is bad, the words are so close to one another and so small that your eyes get blurry after a while, but I still continue buying them because its really hard to get a book cheaper than 2.50 euro. Anyways, if anyone does not have an idea of what I'm talking about, here's a picture of my Wuthering Heights edition. However much I dislike them, I have to admit it that sometimes they have good cover paintings like the Great Expectations one.

My favourite publisher is the black Penguin Classics. I love them. They're so expensive but beautiful. The picture on the cover is glossy and the lower black part of the cover is black. My Our Mutual Friend edition is worth dying for. Its a book of epic proportions (one of Dickens' longest I think) and so beautiful that I need to periodically cuddle it. That reminds me, yesterday my dad enters my room and finds my cuddling and sniffing my Our Mutual Friend and I think I managed to traumatize him for life with that creepy image. Its even got a great cover picture of the Thames. I love it. I don't like the green Penguin Classics (Twentieth Century) but love the silver ones. My Lolita cover is the green Penguin Twentieth Century Classics one and is the only green one that I love because when I went to the New York Metropolitan Museum last summer, I actually saw the real painting used for the cover picture. Seriously, I was so amazed that it was there that I think I spent 10 minutes just standing there with my mouth open in front of it (I bet loads of people around me thought that I was a lesbian perv drooling over a picture of a half naked child)

My favourite cover of all times if the one I have for Swann's Way. Its the gray Penguin's Classics edition. Its so simple and beautiful and sums up the entire book in a picture. I adore it. Look at it, its just lovely and you can't even make out whether the man is walking towards you or away from you. Oh, also The Clockwork Orange silver edition is also beautiful, I don't own it so I'm not putting a picture of it here but its one of my favourites too. It shows an almost full/empty glass of milk against a grayish white background. On an completely unrelated note, I hate the green Wordsworth Classics however cheap they may be and refuse to buy them even if I'm rolling in the depths of poverty, but I don't mind the blue Wordsworth ones, they're alright.

Another thing I really like about the black Penguin Classics is the white paper and great font, direct quote from TPF "its so white that you have to stop sometimes in the middle of reading the book to admire its whiteness" unquote. Actually I quite like the Black Swan font too, but I doubt most people even know Black Swan, the publishing company, so it doesn't really matter.

I do realize I sound like an obsessive, maniac in the above post and most people don't even think of the publishers or the font before buying a book. If you think this was weird then someone should ask TPF my Half Blood Prince edition story. One day when I'm old and rich, instead of buying myself a Ferrari like most normal people, I'm definitely going to buy the entire black Penguin Classics collection with nice smelling white paper and then the Ferrari (obviously).

My Favourite Vice

Of my innumerable vices, my favourite one is eavesdropping. I just love eavesdropping on people. I'm a very curious person and its just really interesting to know what random people on the street are talking about. That is one of the main reasons I disliked Italy when I first came here 4 years ago. I didn't know a word of Italian, which meant that I couldn't understand a word of what people were talking about.

In Bombay, I hardly ever got an opportunity to indulge in this hobby mainly because I used to go to school and everywhere else by bicycle. That really doesn't give you much of an opportunity to listen to what other people are saying, does it? But in Italy, travelling alone by public transport 45 minutes to school and back each day gave me ample chance. So it used to really frustrate me to have people talking loudly all around me not understanding a word of what's happening. It was as if the whole country was conspiring against me by bluttering out their secrets loudly in front of me in a language that I just couldn't understand.

Now I thankfully know enough Italian to actually understand what people are talking around me. Its really funny because people tend to say the strangest things. Its actually pretty cool because I can not only understand Italian people being weird but also the tourists here who are speaking in English. Anyways, this morning I was traveling in the metro to school and two middle aged women were in a deep philosophical debate about the meaning of life (Seriously how do people even have the energy to talk about these things at 8.00 in the morning, I'm normally half asleep in the train). She tells her friend in Italian:

"I want to know the meaning of life, the answer to all the unsolved questions on earth."

At this point the metro stops at a station, a teenage kid sitting on the other side of the women gets up, looks at both of them and says: "Forty two" (in Italian, of course) and then walks out of the train, the doors of the train then close and it starts moving. The women were stunned and probably didn't know what the make of it and kept giving me dirty looks for the rest of the way because I giggled to myself loud enough to them to hear me. Thankfully, I had to get off at the next stop.

So I'm guessing, its not just me who loves listening to people, is it?

PS: If you don't get the post, its because you haven't read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I realized that it was rather presumtious of me to think that everyone had read it. Anyways, its hilarious and I would definitely recommend it.

Valentine's Day Blues

What is the whole bloody deal with Valentine's Day?

Seriously, I dont get it and this is not because I'm perpetually single and bitter during this period of the year. No, absolutely nothing like that. This is just me trying to understand why people make it such a big deal of a normal day. If I see one more arsehole on the street carrying flowers and smiling to himself, I'm going to well... I'm going to do something bad that might hurt him and possibily put me in prison. Alright I do understand the need for romance and fluffiness in life. I'm also one of the most romantic people I know (I dont know a lot of people but still...) I like mush. For heavens sake, I have cried my eyes out everytime I saw You've Got Mail, even in Italian and this was when I didnt know a word in Italian. I also have to stifle a sob everytime I read Wuthering Heights and Cathy passionately tells Nelly: "I am Heathcliff" or when I read Captain Wentworth's letter to Anne in Persuasion or the last scene of The Blind Assassin for no reason altogether. So, I'm definitely not a cynical person. But Valentine's Day is just too much even for my romantic, fluffy nature. It is an overly blown up shallow Hallmark holiday created people who own shops and want to increase their profits (That's the nerdy Economist in me talking; this is what happens if you study Economics in school).

So how did I spend my Valentine's Day one would ask me? By going to an absolutely useless Career's Conference with a whole bunch of successful, rich people telling me how successful, rich and lucky they are. Anyways I'm off to die alone with no one but Quincy by my side and he's not even human, well, he might as well be human because he definitely one hell of an emotional computer.

I'm officially sulking now!

Alright, not sulking anymore.

Happy Valentine's Day to the four people who regularly read this blog, I love you all!

PS: TPF has a great post on Valentine's Day, a Single's Guide to V - Day. Actually, its hilarious and deserves to be read!

Manipulative Children's Literature Much?

I read my first novel length book when I was about 7 years old. I actually even remember what it was: Five Go Off in a Caravan, followed by Five Go Off to Camp. This was the beginning of my Enid Blyton phase, which I think lasted till I was about 11 and then I discoved the joys of Sweet Valley. I refuse to rant about Sweet Valley in this post because I think that its so bad that it deserves a post of its own. Of course, I did read a LOT of other stuff between that but never stuck to a specific author. I have probably read every series that Enid Blyton wrote (and trust me there were a lot and yes, I do remember them clearly and no, I refuse to write them down).

So the point of all these books is that now I look at them and think about how hypocritical they all were. They were manipulating children. Georgina, a girl in the Famous Five series, wants to desperately be a boy, so she dresses up like a boy and is the coolest character in the whole series along with her cousins, Julian and Dick (obviously male). Anne, is the wimp who like to stay at home and cook food for them and play the mother to the group. Isn't it nice that she's got her priorities as a woman sorted out from a tender age of 10? This realization actually made me feel worse than the time I realized that C.S Lewis was manipulating children with his Narnia books because Aslan was meant to represent Jesus, Narnia as heaven, everyone suddenly dies and goes to heaven apart from Susan who couldn't enter Narnia anymore and was going to go to hell because she used make-up.

When it wasn't the sexism in the books, it was perfection and the lack of feasible characters that completely ruined them.

'Oh look at me, I'm Nancy Drew, I am a detective at 18, I'm hot with blond hair, I'm really smart too. I have a hot boyfriend and millions of other love interests in every book that's written about me. I'm always right and the police love me because I'm so much smarter than everybody else in the entire American Police.'

'Oh look at us, we're Frank and Joe Hardy, we're Nancy Drew's male counterparts and love interests in crossover books. We're exactly like her, but male.'

'I'm Katie, my father's rich and my mother's dead and so I was naughty little girl who didn't listen to her elders that's why God punished me by crippling me. When I was in my wheelchair, I realized my past mistakes and became a good little girl and that's why I can miraculously walk again.'

'I'm Heidi. I'm perfect and there's nothing more to say apart from the fact that everybody who meets me loves me. I also happen to live in Switzerland.'

'I'm Sarah. I'm so good. I make up stories. Now I'm a poor orphan because my father made a bad business deal and then died. I'm mistreated by everyone and made to work as a servant in my old boarding school but I'm still so good and not bitter. Oh, the business deal my father made was not all that bad after all. I'm rich again but I'm still so good'

'I'm Cedric and I'm so good that even my grumpy grandfather who hates the world loves me. Everyone who meets me loves me. I might as well be a reincarnation of God on Earth with my goodness, blond curls that make a halo around my face and I also have an angelic smile.'

I still don't get what was the point of all these books? Was the authors' intention to make us all realize what bad little children we were? If that was it then all I can say is it that they succeeded in making me feel like a (forgive me for using the word) shitty little child, that I was. I don't think it was fair on us children to read all this junk. Of course I loved these books. Who wouldn't? They represented people who I aspired to be, people who behaved in a manner which adults would have liked me to behave. But now even thinking about them just irritates me so much.

No wonder I preferred books like Just William, The Secret Garden (without that idiot, Dickon), The Naughtiest Girl. Actually I never realized why I liked them so much more than the other books I used to read till I got a little older. It was because I guess I could relate to the protagonists. At least they were normal, believable children.

My rant ends here but I still feel a little cheated!

If I Was a Rich Girl...

I apologise profoundly for the random nature of this post. Its much easier to be random rather than trying to put things in context all the time.

Anyways, I had a weird dream last night. It was one of those really cool dreams that you never want to wake up from. And no, I didn't have sex, in fact hormones were hardly involved in this dream. To quote Blake, "I dreamt a dream! What can it mean?/ And that I was a maiden Queen/ Guarded by an Angel mild" Sorry for that. I can never resist any sort of an opportunity to quote Blake. I love Blake. But I digress!

Moving on; it was rather a strange dream because I normally never dream of my mother and this time it was just my mother and me. In the dream, my mother has just miraculously become rich overnight. I'm not sure how, I think she has written books or something but I don't really remember. So we have become so fabulously rich that I had my own personal designer who chooses clothes for me and helps me to do my hair and make-up every time I go out (because I can't do these things myself for some reason). My mother and I are out shopping in a Venice-like city in England (I knew it was England because we kept on talking about the prices in pounds). I called it Venice-like because it was full of water canals; exactly like Venice actually. This extraordinary attractive guy is taking us around the place (I'm not sure whether he was hired to do that or he was doing so just out of his own free will) and he takes us to this expensive store (the sort that you cant just enter wearing casual clothes) and I think my mother buys a dress and a small metal jewellery box. On our way out my mother tells me that the shop has gifted us a pair of diamond earrings for shopping with them. So the conversation goes like this:

Pan: "Why did they give us such an expensive gift?"
Mum: "Because we shopped for more then 10,000 pounds"
Pan: "wow, that's a lot, but didn't we just buy a dress and a box?"
Mum: *giggles* "I know and we spent that much"
Pan: *giggles* "wow! I don't even feel guilty"
Mum: "Nor do I!"
We smile...

...Then I wake up, look at my tiny bedroom and mentally go: "Well it was too good to be true, it just had to be a dream! But if only..." It was really nice to be rich and shallow even if it was only in a dream. Actually, even if I miraculously become rich in real life, the last thing I would do is spend my money on clothes. Nah, I'm not a clothes kind of person or a jewellery-box kind of person as a matter of fact.

Anyways the next night, we're back to the same old routine of nerdy dreams, where I dreamt that my Chemistry teacher tells me that he doesn't like my 'Planning Experiment' and I've done it all wrong and now its too late to do anything to change it. God, I'm such a nerd at times that I almost feel like TPF, I said almost.

5 Things Meme

I've been tagged my TPF to do this silly meme. Its quite a bit of fun actually.

Instructions: Remove the blog in the top spot from the following list and bump everyone up one place. Then add your blog to the bottom slot.

1. Ultimate Writer
2. Golgotha_Tramp
3. FrankenGirl
4. The Poodle's Friend
5. Panacea

Select 5 people to tag

Sorry folks, I cant do this, I'm friendless in the blogging world. Apart from my dear TPF, I dont happen to know anybody

What were you doing 10 years ago?

Wow, this sure is embarrassing, torturing little boys because I was definately taller than them.

What were you doing 1 year ago?

Exactly the same thing Im doing right now: the IB and wondering if it could get any worse (apparently, it did)

Five snacks you enjoy:

1. Cadbury's Dairy Milk Chocolate
2. Lays Chips (the Mirch Masala flavour, the kind that you get only in India)
3. Chocolate Chocolate oooh any bloody kind of Chocolate
4. Twix
5. Chocolate chip ice-cream, the kind that you get only in Italy

Is it some kind of coincidence that most of my list consists of only chocolate?

Five songs to which you know all the lyrics:

1. Mamma Mia by ABBA
2. White Flag by Dido (dont even ask me why..its catchy alright!)
3. Killing Me Softly (this is one of my little secrets that's coming out right now. Its such a sobby song that you just have to love it)
4. Summer of '69 by Bryan Adams (*sigh* I love Bryan Adams so much)
5. Every track from The Sound Of Music (oh, dont you just love old Hollywood musicals?)

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire:

1. Buy one of those cool shiny sports cars (I've always wanted one)
2. Buy a cool, huge house with a swimming pool of course
3. Have a personal library room in my cool house with an attached study that has one of those leather chairs that Chandler and Joey have in Friends
4. A Macintosh, I've always wanted a Mac, its so pretty, its white for God's sake!
5. Do something useful for someone who really needs the money.

Five bad habits:

1. Fanfiction...definitely, this one is bad!
2. Throwing up on 'vintage skirts' (sorry, in-joke here guys, ask me about this story sometime and I'll probably change the subject)
3. Chocolate...yum...I just cant resist it.
4. Clutching onto people next to me for no particular reason when I'm watching movies
5. Whinging incessantly. (TPF will definately agree with this one)

Five things you like doing:

1. Dammit, eating chocolate of course.
2. Reading fanfiction and not the normal kind, if you know what I mean.
3. Watching crappy tv shows like LOST and Desperate Housewives (I know they're bad but I just cant help myself)
4. Reading a book cover to cover lying on my bed the whole day long when I'm alone at home
5. Watching movies. I love watching movies. Any kind of movies, from the start till the end.

Five things you would never wear again:

1. A horrible horrible bright blue sweatshirt with PARIS written on it in white
2. These strange striped white and blue jeans. Why the hell did I even buy them?
3. Werid frilly dresses that my mother made me wear when I was little.
4. Another strange bright orange t-shit (why do I own these things?)
5. Ribbons on my braided hair that my old convent school made me wear.

Five favorite toys

1. My beautiful beautiful Calculator with a games program and my amazing high scores.
2. My Ipod, it may have a bright pink cover but I love it from the bottom of my heart
3. Quincy (who is my perfectly heterosexual computer who has a homosexual name)
4. Tortie (my stuffed tortoise that I've had since I was about 5. I adore him. He's so soft!)
5. A ball point pen that I think I've had since 5th grade now (I keep changing its refills, of course) I just love the way it writes.

Alright, Im done here!

Genre Problems?

People sometimes get rather annoyed by the fact that I dont have a favourite genre. Everybody else seems to have one. I cant help it if I'm fickle with my genres. I read books according to my mood and not their genre. Its rather bigoted of people to not even try a particular book because its not their kind of genre. Alright, I do seem to understand that some people just like some kind of books but you cant label a book by its genre. Most of the times your preference just depends on the writing style and the story rather than whether it is set in Victorian London or in the 25th century on another planet.

I'm rather ashamed to admit it, but I just have to, sometimes the books I read don't even depend on the quality of writing but just my state of mind or external environment. I love reading all kinds of genres and just won't be able to choose a favourite. I love reading a variety of genres from classical literature like Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations, dystopian novels like 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, science fiction like A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or fantasy like His Dark Materials to contemporary fiction by Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, John Irving and other writers. I also admit to falling prey to badly written fiction for 30 year old single women by people called Meg Cabbot and Sophie Kinsella and thoroughly enjoying them. Sometimes you need a 'happily ever after' in an unrealistic situation to make you happy. I am female after all, that's what we do: read cheezy american novels and watch cheezy chick flicks and squeal "awwwww" and sob for no reason at all, while everybody else rolls their eyes.

God, while I'm on with confessing my deepest and darkest secrets I might as well say it: I read The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons two summers ago. But you know, when you're lying on the beach in France at Nice or Antibes, in the middle of summer, right after your GCSEs, with no worries about anything at all, under the deep blue skies of the Cote d'Azure, anything you read then seems to be the best book in the world. Then, I come back home after a great summer holiday and while putting my books back on the shelf at home look at those two books and think to myself, what did I read this summer? What the hell did I bloody read this summer? Seriously, Dan Brown, what was I even thinking? Those two books come under my 'books-that-are-so-bad-I-cant-believe-that-I've-actually-read-them' list. But you see, when I was actually reading them, they seemed great, probably because of the atmosphere I was in.

Bookshelves and Morality

This post is solely dedicated for my own amusement and is also a great opportunity for TPF to mock me once again (as if she didn’t already do so the whole of today). Anyways, Thursdays are always bittersweet for me because even though I start with Biology and Chemistry one after the other in the morning, I have a double free lesson in the afternoon which is the best thing ever. So today at our free lesson, TPF and me sneaked into Dave’s room which was empty at that time and used his computer to go on Mugglenet to read the Harry Potter captions (which are really funny this week by the way).

One whole wall in our English class is a big bookshelf filled with really cool books that nobody reads, so they’re just gathering dust on the shelves there (fine, I'm the only one who finds them cool). Sometimes there are several copies of the same book, so I decided that since there was nobody in the room at that time, it would be a great idea to steal a book that has multiple copies on the shelf, so it wouldn’t even be missed (how moral of me!). So this book that I decided to steal was on the topmost shelf, which I obviously couldn't reach because of my height. At that time it standing on a lower shelf with high heels in order to reach the upper most shelf seemed like a great idea (don’t even ask me why!). So, as soon as I tried to stand on the shelf, the shelf obviously broke becauase of my weight and all the books on that shelf fell down on the floor. At that exact moment, the bell for the next lesson rang and people were probably about to have a lesson in that room with Dave. I obviously panicked and my first thought was to sneak out of the room before people started entering, like any rational person would have done in my place, but no, TPF made me feel moral and guilty about wanting to sneak out and so we started trying to fix the broken shelf.

Thankfully we managed to fix the shelf, dump all the books back on the shelf, steal the book that I originally wanted (thankfully TPF is taller than I am) and get out before anybody entered. Thank god, people are always late to their classes in my school because if we were caught we probably would have been in a rather compromising situation and TPF would have had to explain to Dave why he had a broken shelf and a hyperventilating student (me!) in a classroom that is supposed to be out of bounds when he’s not in there.

On a completely unrelated note, I’m mocking TPF in this post because she was being rather silly and not to mention, very nerdy by writing random Romeo and Juliet quotes (that she knew by heart, by the way) on the board of an empty classroom today.