Tardy Voices

I was planning on writing this the moment I got home from the first day of school. Three weeks later, here I am.


Do I leave? Do I stay? I don't know. I never know what to do in these situations. A debate was going on. It was a debate that I'd prefer plant itself on C-SPAN, instead of vocally bantering behind me. It's the debate about whether or not it's okay to reasonably leave class if a college professor isn't present for a specific amount of time in which class should have been in session. But here we are. It's the first day of school--not to mention my first class of the fall quarter-- and my English professor is already 32 minutes late. And counting.
The first ten minutes of class was comparable to a field trip to a mortuary. But now, after listening to, and simply overhearing cordial conversation, I've already learned that at least three of my new classmates have accents. Two sounded Austrailian; the other one was most likely a British or an English one. Either way, I like accents. I've always wanted one. I've even tried speaking in one for an entire day. Too bad I only lasted about thirty minutes. After a half-an-hour, my dialect seemed to change and fade out, and it only went downhill from there. I think it's fun to watch their (people with accents) mouths as they're speaking. Creepy, I know. But for some reason, I feel as though their mouths move differently as a direct result of the accent, itself.
Soon enough, my class caught word that our professor was "on his way," from a teacher down the hall, apparently. "He'll be here in fifteen minutes," so she said. Apparently he "forgot" there was class today. Or something like that. I laughed when my classmates joked about how our professor was probably going to stagger in, wearing sweats and sunglasses, in attempt to hide his drunken stupor. Too bad he turned out to be about 80 years old. On a positive note, he has an accent. And even though he speaks in the slowest drawl I've ever heard anyone speak in before, I have a whole ten weeks to figure out what the accent is.