Consultation

FC 1120

I was standing outside my professor's door, looking uncertainly at the note tacked onto the corkboard which said that she'll be back in five minutes. It was my first consultation experience, and I was unsure if I should knock or come back later. Five minutes, it said. So I went a little way off and sat there, trying to conquer my moment of indecision.

At five minutes I stood up and looked again. Same closed door, same tacked note. I had a sneaking suspicion that Prof Kwe had forgotten to take it down, but all the same, I didn't want to just barge in. It was a good thing I saw Maan, who provided enough moral support for me to knock twice and open the door.

There were two other students inside the room. I sat down and waited for my turn, taking in the nude sketch to my left, the bookshelf to the far right, the large desk roughly across me, in front of which sat my professor, cross-legged and perky as usual in her beige socks and brown sneakers. There was a desk to my immediate left, with a MacBook quietly humming. A musty old smell hung in the air, as if dust and moisture had mingled silently and had now settled on yellowing sheaves of paper underfoot. Outside it was raining.

If I was surprisingly observant, it was because I was trying very hard not to listen to my classmate as she led her poem to the slaughterhouse. Prof Kwe was taking it on line by line with brutal honesty ("I wish I had an Ewwness Meter, you know? So I'll just scan the line it'll beep by itself, etc..." I heard her say jokingly. I leave it to your imaginations to figure out what she meant by that). Sitting there was silent agony. It was like going to the dentist or worse, and I was trying to figure out how much poetic sins I had committed so I would be relatively unsurprised when she pointed them out.

My turn finally came. I nervously handed her my draft, which had already received its initial critique last Tuesday (as did everybody else's), and waited for her comments.

"Ah this one. I like this poem," she said. Whew. She proceeded to discussing it with me, pointing out which lines can be further strengthened to sharpen the impact. I was surprised that her impression of the poem was strangely different from mine, and even though I wrote it, I found myself trying to remember if I really intended it to come across that way. I kept nodding my head to let her know I was taking in everything she said, but at the same time I wondered at how I had come up with those lines, and if putting them together was merely a happy accident to begin with.

At one point she said, "You know what, you remind me [...] of Gelo Suarez. You have the same tone," or something to that effect.

Two things: First, I couldn't bring myself to tell her that it was his book I was reading right before I wrote my poems-- it helps me imbibe a more poetic frame of mind. (Maybe I should try this before debating. Like, I dunno, invoke Leloy's spirit for example. HAHA.) Second, I inferred that she must have been friends (or more than friends?) with Angelo Suarez, else she wouldn't use his nickname. Afterall, she's the subject of his poem, Caffeine (third to the last post), and she's in the acknowledgements section of his first book.

I left there at around 1:15, a little relieved that it's now over and done with. I had my own share of the Ewwness Meter, but for once in a very long time, I finally did something right. It's one little nugget of happiness for the afternoon.