Friday, 12 March 2004 | Poseur

The professor sat in a chair at the front of room with a jacket draped over her legs. I sat at the back, where I'm happiest, next to a friendly and observant girl from Brazil. I counted the students: 18 females, five males.

A red-headed guy sitting next to the wall had ball-point words written on the back of his hand, all of which had been crossed out. The Israeli girl on the other side of the room played with her long bangs, twisting them around her finger, tucking them behind her ear, and letting them fall over her eyes like drapes. After the break, she noisily crumpled her bag of food, the brown paper singing like hushed fireworks. A girl with messy short blond hair and a fuzzy heather gray ensemble took notes, her shoulders curled over like a dying leaf. To my right, a soft-spoken girl drew rounded flowers with a hot pink pen all over a page in her notebook.

"You aren't in this class, are you?" the Brazilian girl whispered, when she noticed that I wasn't writing down the assignment for the mid-term. I shook my head no. "I'm just sitting in, to see whether I want to go to school here," I whispered back. She gave me a warm smile and nodded.

In the elevator on the way up, a hefty girl with cornrows carried a professional movie camera on her shoulders. In the elevator on the way down, a bent-over man peeked through the viewfinder of his professional movie camera, which was sitting on the elevator floor, presumably recording feet.

The street outside looked different than it had before I'd gone in, at least in that moment. It felt like a campus, and I entertained the idea that all of the people around me—those wearing suits, those wearing denim and leather, and even those who were homeless and stuffed up against stairwells—were students. I entertained the idea that I was a student.

...

I'm in Austin, Texas for SXSW again this year, from today until Tuesday. If you're going to be here too, come see me at 20x2 on Monday; I'll be showing a short film that I made.