My View On Too Much Homework and Living Life

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Theodosia. She found her name absolutely contemptible and very English, like a high lace collar that had been so overstarched it could stand on its own. As the rain fell down gently, she looked from her high window, across the pond to the parking-lot opposite. She saw two or three people huddled beneath their umbrellas, walking quickly to their automobiles and scurrying in. She saw rain dance on the shallow puddles spreading across the cement. She saw a little silver car nip out of the parking lot and a curvy red one glide in, as if they, too, were anxious get get out of the rain. She saw steam rise sullenly from a building far away. She saw a security man in a golf cart buzz through the parking-lot, disappearing between the two apartment buildings. She saw all this happen, while listening to the Allegro Movement from Bach’s Double Concerto.

She wished terribly to be outside, feeling the rain on her face, inhaling the cool breeze that doubtlessly roamed the campus, and wanted nothing more but to press her nose against the window like a small child and continue watching.

But no. She sighed and looked away from the lead sky, rippling with clouds and adventure, and to the book sitting sullenly on her lap. “Lucretius: On The Nature of Things” glowered at her in white and red letters against a black background. How horrible! Would it not be better, she thought, to experience nature and its things, rather than only read about them? Would she not better understand the true sense of rain as she felt wetness trace her face, not by a textbook informing her rain was a three-atom structure, composed of hydrogen and oxygen? Instead of being told the universe was made of the solid and the void, couldn’t she just look at bubble wrap and understand?

Theo huffed, glared at the book, and opened it to chapter four, scanning the overview of the chapter.

Theo blushed a lovely shade of red, much like Heinz 57 or a ripe cherry, coughed twice, and revised her opinion. Perhaps she had been overhasty in her judgment. Some things, it seemed, were better to be read about than to learn about by experience at the current moment in time.