Nathan Hill - The Nix

POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC

“Just because I skipped class,” says Laura, “doesn’t mean I should fail. That’s really unfair.”

“That’s not why you’re failing.”

“I mean, it’s just one class. You don’t have to go so, like, nuclear about it?”

What made Samuel suffer even more was the thought that what brought Laura and Larry together was likely a mutual dislike of him. That Samuel was the glue between them. That they both found him boring and tedious, and this was enough to make small talk on, enough to fill in the gaps between the heavy petting. It was, in a way, his fault. Samuel felt responsible for the sexual catastrophe that was ongoing in his class, back row, left side.

FALSE COMPROMISE

“I’ll tell you what,” says Laura, sitting up straight now and leaning toward him. “I can admit I was wrong about copying the paper, if you can admit you were wrong about giving the quiz.”

“Okay.”

“So as a compromise, I’ll rewrite the paper, and you’ll give me a makeup quiz. Everybody’s happy.” She lifts her hands, palms up, and smiles. “Voilà,” she says.

“How is that a compromise?”

“I think we need to get beyond the conversation of ‘did Laura cheat’ and toward the conversation of ‘how do we move forward.’ ”

“It’s not a compromise if you get everything you want.”

“But you get what you want too. I’ll take full responsibility for my actions.”

“How?”

“By saying it. Saying that”—and here she puts her fingers in the air to indicate quotation marks— “I take full responsibility for my actions” —end air quotes.

“You take responsibility for your actions by facing the consequences for them.”

“You mean failing.”

“I mean, yes, failing.”

“That’s so not fair! I shouldn’t have to fail the class and take full responsibility for my actions. It should be one or the other. That’s how it works. And you know what else?”

RED HERRING

“I don’t even need this class. I shouldn’t even be in this class. When am I ever going to need this in real life? When is anyone ever going to ask if I know Hamlet ? When is that going to be essential information? Can you tell me that? Huh? Tell me, when am I ever going to need to know this?”

“That is not relevant.”

“No, it’s very relevant. It’s like the most relevant thing ever. Because you can’t do it. You can’t tell me when I’m going to need this information. Because you want to know why? Because the answer is I won’t. ”

Samuel knows this is probably true. Asking students to examine Hamlet in terms of logical fallacies seems pretty stupid. But ever since a certain provost came to power who is obsessed with teaching hard sciences and mathematics in every class (the reason being that we have to funnel our students into these disciplines to effectively compete with the Chinese, or something), Samuel has had to show on his annual reports how he promotes mathematics in his literature classes. Teaching logic is a gesture in this direction, and one that he now wishes he taught more thoroughly, as Laura has used, by his internal count, maybe ten logical fallacies in their conversation so far.

“Look,” he says, “I didn’t make you take the class. Nobody’s forcing you to be here.”

“Yes you are! You’re all forcing me to be here reading dumb Hamlet, which I’m never going to need for the rest of my life!”

“You can drop the class whenever you like.”

“No, I can’t!”

“Why not?”

ARGUMENTUM VERBOSIUM

“I cannot fail this class because I need it to satisfy a humanities credit so I have room in my fall schedule to take statistics and micro so I can be ahead for the next summer when I’ll need to get internship credit so I can still graduate in three and a half years, which I have to do because my parents’ college fund won’t cover four full years even though there used to be plenty of money in it but they had to use it for the divorce lawyer and they explained to me that ‘everyone in the family has to make sacrifices in this difficult time’ and mine would be either taking out a loan for my last semester in college or busting my butt to finish early and so if I have to repeat this class it’ll screw up the whole plan. And my mom wasn’t doing very good post-divorce anyway but now they’ve found a tumor? In her uterus? And they’re operating next week to take it out? And I have to keep going home once a week to quote-unquote be there for her even though all we do is play Bunco with her stupid friends. And my grandmother who’s all alone now after Grandpa died gets confused a lot about which medications to take on which days and it’s my responsibility to take care of her and fill her weekly pill cases with the right drugs or she could go into a coma or something, and I don’t know who’s gonna take care of Gramma next week when I have to serve my three days of community service, which is so stupid because everyone else at that party drank just as much as I did and yet I was the one arrested for public intoxication and the next day I asked the cop on what grounds could he possibly arrest me for public intoxication and he said I was standing in the middle of the street yelling ‘I am so drunk!’ which I totally do not remember doing. And on top of all this my roommate’s a total pig and a total slob and she keeps stealing my Diet Pepsi and not even paying me back or saying thank you and I’ll look in the fridge and there’s one more Diet Pepsi missing and she leaves her stuff everywhere and tries to give me advice about eating healthy even though she’s like two hundred and fifty pounds but she thinks she’s some diet genius because she used to be three hundred and fifty pounds and she’s all like Have you ever lost a hundred pounds? and I’m like I never needed to, but she goes on and on about her triple-digit weight loss and how she totally changed her life since she began her weight-loss journey and blah blah blah weight-loss journey this and weight-loss journey that and she’s so incredibly annoying about it and even has this giant weight-loss calendar on the wall so I can’t even put up any of my posters but I can’t say anything because I’m supposed to be like part of her support network? And it’s like my job to ask her if she’s hit her calorie burns for the day and congratulate her when she does and not tempt her by bringing in quote-unquote self-destructive food and I’m not sure why I’m the one who gets punished for what is in reality her problem but still I go along with it and I don’t buy Doritos or Pop-Tarts or those individually wrapped Zebra Cakes even though I love them because I want to be a good supportive roommate and the only thing I allow myself and like my only pleasure in life is my Diet Pepsi, which technically she’s not even supposed to have anyway because she says carbonated beverages were one of her food crutches before she began her weight-loss journey, but I say Diet Pepsi has like two calories so she can deal with it. And — oh, yeah — my dad was stabbed at a foam party last week. And even though he’s doing fine now I’m finding it hard to concentrate on school because he was stabbed and also what the fuck was he doing at a foam party anyway, which is a question he completely refuses to answer and when I start asking about it he just tunes me out like I’m Mom. And my boyfriend went to college in Ohio and he constantly wants me to send him dirty pictures of me because he says it takes his mind off all the pretty girls out there so I’m afraid if I don’t do it he’ll sleep with some Ohio slut and it’ll be my fault, so I take the pictures and I know he likes it if girls are shaved and I’m okay with doing that for him but I get all these little red bumps that are really itchy and ugly and one got infected and imagine having to explain to some ninety-year-old nurse at student health that you need an ointment because you cut yourself shaving your pubes. And besides all of this now I have a flat tire on my bike and one sink in our kitchenette is plugged up and my roommate’s gross hair is always all over the shower and sticking to my lavender bar soap and my mom had to give away our beagle because she cannot deal with that level of responsibility right now and there’s all these low-fat ham cubes in our refrigerator that are like three weeks old and starting to smell and my best friend had an abortion and my internet’s broken.”