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Back from the AP reading. I can say for sure that Louisville is not nearly as pleasant a place as Daytona to read exams, although it had its points. As before, I've learned all kinds of things I didn't know about classic literature:

"David Copperfield is the bastard son of a famous man and the crazed erroneous widow." (Apparently there is only one crazed erroneous widow in the world, which is reassuring.)

"Without the past, exsistence would not be."

"This paranoia causes Winston to start hiding in an owl cove away from Big Brother."

"After Blanche's husband died, she began to sleep arond. Once you someone starts in that business, it is hard to get out." (I assume that the kid realized, with horror, that he or she had just implied that the exam-reader might have "started in that business," and hastily crossed it out.)

"At the end of the novel Gatsby gets shot and around that time in the 1900 many people were getting murdered. The reason being is because of slavery and Holocaust. Which and a very negative impact on people in the past and present, as a whole."

I also learned that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a great admirer of Keats, and that Gatsby, who is in a sense trying to make his life into a work of art, is a bit like the "bold lover" in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" -- who can't ever quite reach his ideal, but will never see it fade. Only his tragedy is that he's human, stuck in the real world and at the mercy of time and change. Yeah. A seventeen-year-old writing a forty-minute timed essay came up with that (although I'm sure this student had thought about Gatsby before, a lot). Gives me hope for the future, I tell you.

Off to New City on Tuesday to look at apartments. I am SO not ready for this.