Help, My Ex-Girlfriend is in My Creative Writing Seminar!

Or at least, she could be. I don’t know! Class hasn’t started yet.

See that? That’s called a cliffhanger. It gets the reader interested because they don’t know the answer, and neither do you. Examples include: “Are you sure you love me? Are you really sure? Also, do you have a crush on Jason?” Asking questions like that is what makes you a good writer. It is also what makes your girlfriend call you clingy. Or was it too attached?

That’s ambiguity. William Empson thought there were seven types of ambiguity, but I know there are 412 types, one for every day we were together.

Here we have hyperbole. It involves a vast over-estimation of an object. Incidentally, that’s also how Freud defined love. For example, love will convince you that she was telling the truth when she said that she’d never had an orgasm before you.

Speaking of, here’s the climax!

What will I do if my ex-girlfriend is in my creative writing seminar? That’s a rhetorical question, used in apostrophe. Apostrophe is when you talk to an entity who can’t actually answer you back, like for example, a nightingale, or Psyche, or not your creative writing professor. Asking your creative writing professor if a certain somebody will be attending his class in the fall, for instance, is not an example of apostrophe because your creative writing professor can answer you back. Should answer you back. Professor Lowell?

But hey, even if she is in the same class as me, even though we haven’t talked in the year since I found out she slept with Jason while they were “studying” abroad in Shanghai, it could be worse. Like, I could be bald. That’s hyperbole again, except not really, because I mean it. Being bald must be awful. It must make you so insecure about your virility that you have to over-compensate by sleeping with someone else’s girlfriend, Jason. Being bald must make you bitter, bitter enough to prey on girls who probably have mixed up ideas about men anyway because their own Dads are bald, even though Margaret’s dad (Louis) was otherwise very nice. Being bald, actually, and I hope you go bald, too, Margaret, being bald must be even, somehow, worse than having your ex-girlfriend in your creative writing seminar, so, there, that’s reconciliation, which leads to catharsis, which leads to my first A in the class, am I right?