Michael thinks I should start a dream blog, since I have such crazy dreams. They are pretty cool--filled with TV characters, talking animals/babies, incredible special effects, and the hautest of couture (clothing often plays a big part in the "plot" of my dreams [trust me, that word is in quotes deliberately])--but I'm not sure anyone would be interested in reading them. Their charm lies more in the telling.

But I'm very tempted to start an anonymous blog for hilarious student writing. Not the "hilarious" where they are trying to be funny (or at least not funny in the way they intended), but hilarious because it's so bad. So bad, and yet so good--the nuggets that make grading worth it. Seth Pierce thinks I have an invaluable opportunity here to write a bestseller, the content of which would be the scanned pages of these laughably awful papers, along with my (at long last) true commentary on the ideas and writing, where I can be as sarcastic as I wanna be--the English teacher's version of "Celebrities Undressed," which, if you haven't seen it, is a) hilarious, and b) not at all what you're thinking.

I have to be purposefully vague here, alas; I can't share any of these nuggets, because that would be illegal . . . and wrong. Even if I had the students sign a paper at the beginning of the course giving me permission to use their work later, it would be wrong to make fun of them, unless I told them that's what it was for. And then who would agree? I wouldn't.

Well, I might. If no names were mentioned.

By the way, did you notice the beautiful punctuation moment in the first paragraph? Bracket, parentheses, dash? Mmmmmmm, multiple punctuation. Almost as good as diagramming.

When I first started taking the bus to work, I was a little apprehensive of the kind of people I'd be riding with. I thought they might all be crazy, creepy, and/or stinky.

Some of them are. There's a guy who I don't sit behind anymore, because the one time I did, I was almost asphyxiated by the stench of urine. He always wears the same brown fedora and houndstooth patterned coat with a rip over his left shoulder; now when I get on the afternoon bus, I make sure to keep walking past him.

There's also a guy who mutters and whistles to himself on the morning bus. He reminds me of Lieutenant Dan--long, stringy grey hair and beard, old army coat, and he has a gravelly, gutteral voice. He might be reciting e. e. cummings poetry for all I know--"the leaping greenly spirits of trees"--but sometimes my imagination runs away with me and I think I overhear the ramblings of a serial killer--like "redrum" or "I'm hungry for liver and fava beans" (my imagination is overpopulated by movie references).

And then there are the harmless characters, like the guy who wears a Star Trek combadge on his T-shirt and strikes up conversations about comic book heroes. Or there's the Asian nun-wannabe, who rides around Lincoln wearing a long black dress and a white felt hat, praying for people. She carries a wooden cross with an emaciated Jesus on her lap at all times and says "Hail Mary, full of grace," or "Praise Our Lord Jesus," at random times on the trip.

This is what my mind does. I create characters out of the people I see every day. The teen mom with her Arby's nametag still stuck to her shirt, pushing a stroller with two kids onto the bus? I want to know her story; I look for clues.

Until recently, however, I thought of myself as invisible or at least unremarkable in any way. Since I never talked to anyone on the bus, I never thought about people noticing me, creating a story to fit the details of my appearance and behavior.

I realized that I had become a character one day when I got on the bus in the rain. I was sopping wet, my grey slacks soaked, my hair and makeup severely mussed. The two girls behind me saw me, looked at each other, and began to talk about me.I had noticed them before--two girls about my age, riding the same morning bus as I, who always spoke castellano Spanish to each other and got off a few stops before me. This day, they were commenting on my outfit, saying that I didn't look as pretty as I usually did.

It made me smile a bit as I left the bus. I'm shy about talking to strangers, even interesting strangers. On airplanes, I keep to myself, partly because I don't know what to say, and partly because I don't want to feel obligated to make conversation-lite for the entire 2 hour flight. But I spoke to the Spanish girls the day after that. I made faces and blew bubble-gum bubbles at the teen mom's one-year-old. I even struck up a conversation with two ladies in Taco Inn the other day. Now that I know that I'm a character, too, I feel less like an observer and more like a participant in this community.