Rating: PG-13.

In college, I took a World Literature class. It was taught by a barefoot middle-aged woman, who by eccentric people’s standards, was still pretty eccentric. Over the semester, I pieced together her tragic story of betrayal and violence, playing out the nitty-gritty dramatic details in my imagination. Every love story — real and imagined — seemed to end in tragedy, even my very big deal love story at the time. Don’t I wish I could tell you that one.

The class went like this. We’d read a poem about sailboats, but wasn’t about a sailboat, if you know what I mean. It was about the wind, who was really a female, who crushed the sails, who was really the man who deserved it, yada and etc. Girl power. I felt pretty bad for all the guys in the class. The class was 90% discussion, and so the fighting over this or that was amusing.

After the discussion died down, I’d raise my hand, “Maybe it’s just about a real sailboat. The author is a fourteen-year-old island boy.”

Boo. Hiss.

I had trouble connecting with the professor with my writing, though truthfully, I see now that it was probably just because I was a terrible writer. The best evaluation I could hope for was, “Interesting….” Oh wait. It was really, interesting with a question mark like this: “Interesting….??????”

So one night, the day before a major paper was due, I went over to another student’s apartment to get some help. He was of the male gender, but somehow he’d figured out how to do well in the class.

“Just tell her what she wants to hear.”

So together, he typed while I paced the room thinking up the most colorful, ridiculous analysis I could muster. Lustrous, boisterous, voluminous adjectives, all were used to describe normal, everyday objects. And sex, lots of steamy sex – the kind this professor needed to unwind herself a bit. When the description was only stupid and not outright ridiculous, he’d grab the thesaurus to get something to put us over the top.

We had many high-fives that night. We even concluded the essay with, “Ergo…” Nobody uses the word ergo anymore, but we were thrilled with the effect.

We read the final copy aloud with theatrics, and at the conclusion he said, “I think you should turn it in.” Easy for him to say, it was my grade on the line. But hey, it was what it was.

I got an A+. Nobody had ever gotten an A+ from this professor. It might be the only one in history (or it might not).

The key to success was to find out what she wanted and then give it to her. This is not a way we ought to live life, of course, especially if you’re a parent or a spouse or a tax accountant. It is a precarious thing to be an agreeable person to live with and to be an honest person at the same time. I am trying to do that — be agreeable and honest — with the financial series, but it’s a wobbly plank to walk.