Breaking: Your Personal Life Deemed Irrelevant to Class Discussion

Despite a longstanding history and a wealth of assumptions on your part that indicate otherwise, neither your revelatory off-term in Africa, the dynamics of your family situation, nor any other tidbit of information regarding your personal life is actually in any way relevant to the reading you didn’t do for your 10A. This game-changing information may come as a surprise to you, since up to this point no professor has ever straightforwardly addressed how inane your baseless opinions appear to everyone else, probably out of respect for social graces (a term which is also likely unfamiliar to you; look it up on Urban Dictionary).

Many classmates of yours, when reached for comment by the Dunyun, seem to have caught wind of this news long before today. Leah Archibald ’12 confirmed that the general irrelevance of your commentary to her own understanding of class material has irritated her since she was first in a class with you last fall. “I just don’t get it. Literally every time the professor asks a question to the whole class and no one seems to have done the reading, this idiot has like an automatic arm-raising trigger that kicks in after three seconds of silence. We’re not even graded on class participation, and why would you make it even more obvious than before that you have no idea what you’re talking about? There doesn’t even seem to be a strategy involved. It’s just like, I haven’t heard my own voice in awhile. What does it sound like again?” Archibald lists several totally arbitrary anecdotes you have shared with the class, including how you bought a Jason Derulo ticket for seven times the original price at the last minute and that’s “kinda like supply and demand, you know?” Further investigation has shown that you made this comment in your Women and Gender Studies class, increasing the likelihood of its irrelevance from highly probable to definitely definite.

Some of your concerned peers would like to give you the benefit of the doubt that perhaps you have not yet learned about the existence of office hours, leading you to believe that your only opportunity for an extended one-on-one conversation with your professors is during class time. Others submit that you perhaps suffer from a lack of peripheral vision, or any vision at all for that matter, leading you to be unaware that anyone else is even present or that their endless glares and side-eyes are ideally meant to transmit excruciating pain throughout your entire body. And no, it isn’t a coincidence that every time the guy next to you clears his throat it sounds kind of like “shut the fuck up.”

Though you seem to have nothing to say for yourself as of yet, your roommate confirms that this behavior in class points to a larger belief you hold that every conversation topic does and should relate back to your own life. “Yeah, once I was telling everyone about how worried I was since my mom got cancer, and it was like the immediate response was ‘Oh my God, I’m a Cancer, but I was born on the cusp so I actually have more of the personality traits of a Leo.’ Seriously? Can you say Asperger’s?”

Preliminary reports further indicate that your story about meeting Obama through your dad’s connections does not get any more interesting the third time you tell it. At all.