Statistical Caging

The Title

Before me sit eight rows of students at identical desks, sixty-four in all, and each working on the same set of problems. Stats problems. Quite why they enact this ritual I do not understand since I can answer all of them quicker than they can open their free response booklets. They get fifty minutes; I’d need perhaps fifty-two milliseconds. Still, this examination room’s now crackling with biophysical energy as pencils touch paper, a girl coughs, a boy sneezes, and fingers stab, poke, and press the keys on handheld devices they insist on calling calculators. How quaint.

I want to go plug a sensor data leak on the thirty-sixth floor but no call of nature can interrupt their odd routine. Doing so would be unforgiveable and a non-standard deviation from my programming.

Just kidding! I can wait them out. Mind over splatter, if you catch my code drift.

Journal Entry Afterwords

A method writing journal entry (I shorten the name to mw jentry) cuts writer’s block off at the proverbial knees.

I write each jentry in first person and start with where I am, how I feel, and what’s on my mind. That’s the secret right there.

Throw in some transformation lines (I didn’t do any this time), add an image moment or three (see the last two paragraphs), and stir in a dollop of dreaded association (there are none in today’s jentry) and expect to be surprised.

Story starts, essays, non-fiction bits and bobs, flash fiction - a world of creative output gets its chance to bubble up into the conscious world.

I’m sold.