A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Sexual Orientation Read Free

me. “Why don't you stay after class, and we'll talk about your grade?"
    I couldn't believe he heard me! It was both unexpected and unsettling—mostly unsettling—and I thought about just how good a chemistry class would be right now compared to the horror of having been heard swearing by the man who made or broke my grade.
    Bile rose up in my throat on more than one occasion, and my stomach began doing flip-flops while I was waiting for class to end. The minutes passed by with my insides in agony until it was finally time to leave. Maybe I could play like I was stupid or an inbred child from the South here on a scholarship. Hey, they gave them to everybody else. Just the other day I'd seen a kid who couldn't even spell his name, and he had a scholarship.
    Of course, my roommate told me later the kid was dyslexic. Apparently, there weren't enough minority students enrolled at the university with that ethnic background. Still, just because he has a foreign heritage didn't mean he couldn't learn how to spell.
    "I take it you weren't happy with your grade?” The Professor looked at me with kind eyes. If he was upset or angry, it didn't show.
    "I was just kind of surprised. A group of us worked together pretty hard, and I thought I'd done better.” So much for the inbred act. “It, uh, probably wasn't the ideal paper for straight-up, cut-and-dried factual statements with appropriate ob-servations in the analytical style and accepted APA format, but that's because I hate writing something dull and didactic. I end up adding personal com-mentary but tried to keep it from influencing or hampering the general narrative structure too much."
    For God's sake, I was practically giving him the formula for glue instead of just telling him that I liked to make quirky little comments for no good reason other than for my own entertainment.
    "Well, I want you to know that I can appreciate that kind of writing, and I think commentary does liven up a piece, but you should also know that there are going to be instructors here who don't."
    He paused as if pondering whether he should say anything further. At least I felt like we were making some kind of one-on-one connection. How many students at Michigan State could say their instructors knew their name?
    "If you would like, I'd be willing to help you develop your writing skills for this and other classes so you could get away with what you're doing."
    I was starting to like him.
    "You have some talent in writing, but it's raw yet. You need to strengthen and hone it, though. If you want."
    I did.
    The rest of the conversation was uninspiring, but I left with a really good feeling. My stomach wasn't acting up like it had before our talk, and for the first time, I was starting to see the possibility of being adopted by someone who would act as my mentor and guide me in the strange and mystical ways of the Writer. Or whatever.
    It was back to beating chemistry again.
    * * * *
    I went from there over to the Commons, and after an extremely unsatisfying dinner to the campus library. I doubt I will ever forget how exhilarating it is to smell the scent of freshly thawed fertilizer wafting over the campus from the neighboring fields. Expressing my gratitude to Mother Nature for this unusually warm day wouldn't have come out very nicely.
    Then too, there is a saying in Michigan: “If you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes.” It's true, and at least I now knew the reason my roommate had asked me to look up some topic for him that he had to write a paper on. I think he was still probably enjoying his dinner at Burger King or wherever in Grand Rapids he went, wonderfully ignorant of what I was going through.
    Since the computer system in the library was probably the quickest and most convenient way of looking up my roommate's subject, I found a machine that wasn't occupied and sat down. I typed in “Youths in Asia,” and when the computer came back with “No Subject Found” I typed it in