Nathan Hill - The Nix

Her phone chirped. Another iFeel update. It was Vanessa: iFeel scared about all this terrible economic news!!! Which was exactly the kind of boring update that got you taken right off the Alert List. Laura selected Ignore. One strike against Vanessa.

Anyway trying to read Hamlet and identify “logical fallacies” in Hamlet’s course of action, which was such bullshit because she knew for a fact that when she interviewed for executive vice president of communications and marketing for a major corporation they would not ask her about Hamlet. They would not ask her about logical fallacies. She had tried to read Hamlet but it kept getting all gummed up in her brain:

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on’t! ah fie!

What the fuck is that?

Who talks like that? And who said this was great literature? Because mostly from what she could tell in the few places where Shakespeare actually wrote in English was that Hamlet’s just stupid and depressed, which she was like if you’re sad and depressed and cheesed about something it’s probably your own dumb fault and why did she have to sit here and listen to you wallow in it? Plus there was the matter of her phone, which chimed and squawked and dinged roughly ten times per soliloquy and made her feel mentally encumbered trying to read stupid Hamlet knowing there was an update just sitting there waiting for her. It was a chiming sound for a text message but a birdlike chirping sound whenever her closest seventy-five friends updated their iFeel status, was how she’d programmed the phone. At first, she set it to alert her when any of her iFeel friends posted anything, but she quickly realized this was untenable given her thousand-plus friend roll, making the phone look something like a stock ticker and sound like an Audubon sanctuary. So she culled the Alert List to a more manageable seventy-five, though this list was a fluid, ever-changing one as she spent at least a couple of hours weekly reevaluating it and swapping some people out for others on the bubble using an intuitive sort of regression analysis based on several metrics, including the interestingness and frequency of the friend’s recent posts, the number of hilarious pictures recently uploaded and tagged, the presence of anything political-ish in the friend’s status stream (political statements usually caused bickering, so anyone chronically guilty was ejected from the top seventy-five), and finally the friend’s ability to find and link to worthwhile internet videos, since finding, in any consistent manner, good internet videos was a skill like panning for gold, she thought, and so it was important to keep in one’s top list a couple of these people who could spot cool videos and memes before they went viral, which made her feel good vis-à-vis her place in the culture, seeing these things a day or a week before everyone else in the world. It made her feel like she was on the leading edge of everything. It was approximately the same feeling she had walking around the mall and seeing how every clothing store reflected exactly what she wanted right back at her. The photographs, poster-size, life-size, some even blown up bigger than that, showed attractive young girls just like her, in groups of attractive and racially kind of diverse friends that looked just like her friends, having fun in outdoor settings that she and her friends would totally go to if there were anything like that around here. And the feeling she had when she saw these images was that she was wanted. Everyone wanted her to like them. Everyone wanted to give her exactly what she desired. She never felt as secure as she did in dressing rooms rejecting clothes for not being good enough for her, breathing in the deep, gluey smell of the mall.

Her phone dinged. Jason again.

Ur at home?

Yep all alone feeb’s at the gym:-)

Only now there was this dumb English professor who seemed set on not giving her what she wanted. Who actually seemed intent on failing her. Not even her learning disability had persuaded him, to her dismay. The paperwork for this disability was on file at the Office of Adaptive Services. It was official, this learning disability, because of a particularly brilliant plan that was hatched at the beginning of the year, when her new plump roommate, who was on several medications for her truly severe ADHD problems, let slip how many legally mandated accommodations she was entitled to, including someone to take notes for her, extra time for quizzes and tests, extended deadlines, excused absences, and so on. In other words, complete freedom from the scrutiny of her professors that — even better! — was legally binding under the Americans with Disabilities Act. All Laura needed to do was answer a questionnaire in such a way as to trigger a certain diagnosis. Simple. She went down to the Office of Adaptive Services. The questionnaire was composed of twenty-five statements she had to either agree or disagree with. She figured it would be pretty obvious what she needed to lie about, but once she started the questionnaire she was troubled by how true some of the statements were, such as: I have trouble remembering things I just read. Yes, she did! That was true almost every time she was asked to read an actual printed book. Or: I find myself daydreaming when I’m supposed to be paying attention. Which was something that happened to her literally dozens of times per class. She started feeling queasy that there might be something actually wrong with her until she got deeper into the questionnaire:

The thought of homework makes me feel panicked and stressed.

I have trouble making friends.

The stress of school sometimes gives me unbearable headaches and/or indigestion.

None of these things were a hundred percent true, and this made her feel more or less normal again, such that when she was diagnosed with severe learning disabilities she felt really good about herself, like when she interviewed for that movie theater job and got it immediately, that same sense of accomplishment. She did not feel guilty about playing the learning disability card, since she had answered several of the statements on the questionnaire honestly, making her roughly ten percent learning disabled, plus her classes were so boring and stupid and impossible to pay attention to that she added another forty-five percent to that as a kind of de facto environmental learning block, making her fifty-five percent learning disabled, which she then rounded up.

She tossed a handful of paper clips approximately three feet into the air and watched as they began spiraling away from each other as they flew. She thought if she could practice this enough she could achieve perfect paper-clip symmetry. She could toss them in such a way that they’d go up and down as a single aggregate lump.

The paper clips sprinkled themselves across the floor. Hamlet said,

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

This was such a waste of time.

She had one move left, one more bullet in the chamber. She dialed the dean’s number.

“Professor Anderson is not creating ideal conditions for my education,” she said once she had the dean on the line. “I don’t feel like his classroom is a good place to learn.”

“I see,” the dean said. “I see. Could you explain why?”

“I do not feel I can express my individual viewpoint.”

“And why is that, specifically?”

“I feel like Professor Anderson does not value my unique perspective.”

“Well, maybe we should have a meeting with him then.”

“It is not a safe space.”