An Example of What's Keeping Me Busy

This past week I've read 8 student "memoir" assignments. 6 pages each. The topics:

1. Joining a fraternity and "bonding" with the other boys through binge drinking and puking into a trash can lined with
a Hefty bag. (This kid is second only to Flapjaw in the "He Loves to Hear His Own Voice" category. The tension level in the classroom crackles each time he speaks.)

2. Getting drunk and walking around lost in the streets surrounding campus.

3. A British girl wrote about going through sorority "rush" and seeing what it amounted to. She'd seen the plastic red beer cups in movies about greeks and wanted to see them in person. She did not join a sorority.

4. An attempt to eat 80 chicken McNuggets in 80 minutes. (He made it to 62 and then puked.)

5. Volunteering in a homeless shelter and getting to know a formerly wealthy engineer whose life went to crap, and then started to look up, and then went to worse crap.

6. Remembering a father's terrible hoarding habit (magazines, VHS, cassette tapes) and trying hard not to become like him.

7. Driving to Newark (from another town in NJ) to buy heroin and crack and getting a gun held to his head.

8. A girl wrote about being 3 years old, having her mother buttoning her overalls for her, then suddenly slapping her mother
in the face as hard as she could, because she'd seen someone do it on TV.