Prolepsis: The anachronistic representation of something as existing before its proper or historical time, as in the precolonial United States. On pages 41-44 Eggers recounts his mother's final weeks through the encapsulation of time through prolepsis. Recount an event that has already happened, but tell it from a time before it could have happened. (approx. 2 pages) (To clarify, this is more like a mish-mash of various memories and generalities of my day-to-day school life rather than a recollection of a specific event.)
Goddamnit, I think after I make a wild grab at my wristwatch and see the time illuminated by neon-colored backlight. 5:34 A.M. How in the hell did I sleep through five alarms? How in the hell did I even sleep for twelve hours in the first place? I knew I was tired, but good lord. This leaves me with no time to do anything! Or more accurately, no time to do everything, and of course I had to oversleep on a day on which I actually have homework in Ceramics class.
Okay, okay, think. Freaking out is not going to help. I still have two hours. In two hours, I can do my PreCalc as fast as I can and maybe squish in some of the Japanese homework too… okay, scratch that, the Japanese homework is impossible. So I’ll just do the PreCalc homework after I take a shower (is there still time to take a shower? …yes, there is always time to take a shower, and if I don’t, my mother will notice because my towel and bathrobe will be dry and she is scary and notices things like that), and I won’t have enough time to finish the last few problems, but it really only matters that I “try” anyway. Thankfully, the assignment is on translating graphs, which is relatively easy and will take less time to complete than I would’ve thought just by looking at it. I’ll have just enough time to down a bowl of cereal.
I’ll rush out of the house at 7:30-ish while my mother waves to me creepily from the window of her second floor bedroom. I will arrive as I always do, just two minutes before advisory starts, and start memorizing 5,838,477,383-word vocabulary list for the Japanese quiz. (Really more like forty words, but on some days, it may as well be five-something billion.) I’ll continue to look over the words with the book open on my lap during PreCalc when we spend an hour checking over homework problems in class, and I’ll even volunteer to present that one problem that asks to redraw the graph after adding pi to x just to prove that I did in fact at least partially do the work and thus draw some of the teacher’s attention off of me.
PreCalc will end with me only somewhat aware of what new thing we were supposed to be learning in class that day (though whatever it was, I will undoubtedly relearn it while completing the next homework assignment, so all is well). When I arrive in Japanese class, I will quickly go over the vocab. words one last time before taking the test and doing miraculously well on it, even on that one unexpected section of the quiz with the vague descriptions (simplified and romanized ex. for the sake of my non-Japanese speaking teacher: hataraku hitobito wa kono basho ni ikimasu: shokuba; working people go to this place: workplace) that always included at least one character that was always totally indecipherable. Then while the class goes over the next chapter on Transportation in Yookoso!, I’ll copy the homework from Arlene, who was probably one of only five people in class who bothered to do the assignment anyway.
During lunch, I’ll run off immediately to the library to secure one of the first floor computers and type up the museum visit response for Ceramics as fast as I can. And by “as fast as I can,” I mean as slow as a starved dog wandering in desert heat, and when lunch ends with my paper only three-quarters finished, I’ll curse my tendency to be stupidly wordy when it comes to the writing of artsy things. I will finish the remaining quarter of the paper during InfoTech, but I’ll make sure to grab the Microsoft textbook thing while heading to my seat out of courtesy for my teacher, so that I can at least pretend that I’m working on whichever mind-numbing Excel project the class is supposed to be doing today.
Finally, I’ll run into Ceramics with my freshly-printed paper in hand and spend an hour-and-a-half screwing around with clay and hoping it turns into something cool.
