White Board

         I was sitting in math the other day, and I had a curious revelation: that stuff on the white board, all that supposedly two-dimensional stuff, actually exists, in the form of a thin layer of smelly marker-material.  As if on cue, that blasted tangent graph popped off the board and started wriggling all over the place--within the asymptotes of course.  The other graphs and calculations started to peel off and pretty soon the room was filled with sauntering sines, tangoing tangents, and meandering metrics.  Miniature graphite versions began rising out of my notes and dancing around on the desk.  The room reeked of markers and pencil lead.  Physics stuff started drifting out of my open backpack, pulleys and cars and cliffs and massless ropes.  A couple red 70's accompanied the physics, much to my chagrin.  Next came letters, words, sentences, rhetorical analysis, Hawthorne summaries, vocab lists.  Ubiquitous expanded until there was hardly room for anything else, pecuniary rummaged through wallets and purses, pedantry strutted about, abject struggled to stay in one piece.  Next to emerge was Franklin, Washington, Adams, setting boundaries and negotiating, then the Marquis de Sade came out and started hurting the maths, much to my delight.  Einstein popped out and started tinkering with Newton's ideas and blowing minds.  Cells were next, microbes, intermediate forms, endangered species, a long strand of DNA.  It had become hard to see, even breathe, in that cloud of animated graphite and ink.  The air got thicker and thicker and heavier and heavier and I started to suffocate, laden down, incapacitated, oppressed by academics.
         But then a doodle emerged.  Wacky and incoherent, it drifted about, causing the refined, intelligent figures to recede in horror, unable to cope with such triviality and randomness.  Still fighting for breath, I grabbed my pencil and my newly blank notes sheet and started to draw.  Suns and towers and wildebeests and aliens and presidents and cars and spaceships, they leapt off the page with vigor and cavorted about, further agitating Lorentz, Emerson, and Clay.  Finally, the flowers and sun rays got to Poe and he burst through the door, fleeing the scene, the rest the newly animated figures following him, leaving me and the doodles to our devices.  I pulled my notebook from my backpack and continued doodling and making up words and designing fighter jets and animating the corners of the pages.  At some point I stopped to look up and realized that I no longer held the esteemed company of Mr. Faraday, or of any great mind for that matter; they had gone elsewhere to pursue their scholarly designs.  I might have been sorry, but then I saw my three-legged leprechaun-centaur flying a Maserati fighter jet.aw my three-legged leprechaun-centaur flying a Maserati fighter jet.