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Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2012 1:50 pm
Tate had crammed every waking hour of her life with classes, and work, and applications for scholarships, loans and grants. She had given up most semblances of a social life and all semblances of sleep for days like today: The Destiny City University's Senior Luncheon. At the start of senior year, before thesis, before capstones, before everything stressful, the various departments got together food and inspirational speeches and let the seniors just have time to socialize before getting down to business.
She appreciated it. It was a chance to meet everyone she'd had some class or the other with, catch up with her friends and peers, and more than that, eat for free. (Tate was a college kid; she liked free food, especially when it was good.)
In the interests of Senior Solidarity, the seats had been assigned to best mix all the majors; she was seated between two English majors, being as they far outnumbered the criminal law majors. To her left was an older woman Tate had never particularly gotten along with. She wrote terrible crime scene fiction and probably wouldn't accomplish anything with her creative writing degree, ever; she also had three cats and a narcissistic streak. (Tate had noticed her checking out her reflection in the windows too many times during a shared Brit Lit class to miss the reliance on hair and makeup.) The guy to her left, though, was a relative unknown; she smiled thinly at him, offered a hand for him to shake. "Tate Konstantin. Nice to meet you."
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Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2012 10:05 pm
James couldn't remember why he had agreed to attend the Senior Luncheon, it was probably because of the free food. Free food was always a good way to draw the lanky boy in(who turned down free food?) but he was there seated uncomfortably at the table. He looked bored, restless even as his tapped his fingers against the top of the notebook he had brought along with him with one hand and fiddled with the lens of camera dangling from his neck.
There were two things the English major made sure to bring with him everywhere. One was a notebook, the other his camera because he never knew when inspiration would strike him. He had been in a rut since summer began and he had hoped that this event would shake him from it.
When Tate spoke to him he seemed to snap out of his daze. He stopped tapping and leaned forward, elbow coming to rest on the table and hand reaching out to take hers. "James, James Ryan Cheney," he replied offering her a smile. "So, is this your usual kind of scene or did you cave because of the free food?" He asked.
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Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2012 12:20 am
"Mm. Nice to meet you, James," she said, trying and failing to patch together any details she knew about a James Ryan Cheney. The fact that she knew nothing didn't mean there was nothing to know, or that he hadn't done something remarkable, but it was a fair indicator. (She liked to keep her ear to the ground.) Still, a lot of her friends didn't necessarily have major drama or trauma; you never knew who might be fun and interesting. (But you could guess.) At least he was a forthright kind of dude! Tate grinned a little, sardonically, waving the hand he'd been shaking just a moment ago. "Free food. It's not exactly like I have a lot of time to spare, with a thesis paper to write and all…" She smiled a little, then shrugged. "So you're an English major, right? What's that like, being all brit lit all the time?"
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Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2012 11:51 am
"Pleasure is all mine," he replied, green eyes watching her. "Free food is almost always a good way to rope a starving college student into attending any sort of school sanctioned event," he joked leaning back in his seat. He himself didn't have too much free time with classes and his student teaching gig but he probably wasn't as busy as some of the other seniors.
"I am," he answered nodding his head and glancing over at the notebook on the table. "English with an emphasis on creative writing, I hope to teach one day," he explained with a slight shrug. He decided that he'd leave out the part where he hadn't written anything outside of essays lately.
"It's not as boring as one might think," he began nodding his head back and forth. "I, personally, find that the change in styles over the various time periods fascinating. The literature from the l19th century is probably my favorite. Though I figure you've got to have an interest or researching and reading old text will get pretty boring after a while."
He was quiet for half a second before speaking again. "What about you, it's...criminal law right? Sounds pretty fascinating. Got any tips about how things really are for someone who might be interested in writing some detective fiction?" He himself had never particularly been interested in writing in that genre but it was the most popular and it never seemed to go out of style.
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Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2012 7:48 pm
Tate always approved of things that gave back to society; her skeptical look at his statement of his emphasis faded to a somewhat reluctant smile when he said he wanted to teach. That was fine, then, if he wanted to, you know, contribute to things. Like society. By giving back. "On the one hand, looking up precedent is fun," she said. "On the other hand, I despised writing papers when I took Revolutionary French Literature. With Jameson. Did you end up with that old b*****d, or did you take it when Professor Monahan was still here?" She couldn't stop herself from frowning at James when he asked about detective fiction. Her feelings on it were really, really negative; investigations almost never took only a few days. "Concisely, don't," she informed him. "But if you have to, it's probably best to remember that this crap takes time. Lots of time. Nothing happens in three days and no one's ever sentenced the first day they're tried. It's slow, but people get points for realism, right?" Tate crossed her arms over her chest and shrugged. "I love it just as it is, but it's not as cool as they make it out to be in CSI."
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Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2012 3:41 pm
"I was lucky, I got Monahan," James replied. He hadn't heard too many things about Jameson. "Writing papers is a pain but I just, don't know. There's something about the history and the way things are written that completely pull me in. I hate the idea of having to do a paper but when it comes to writing them it just...happens," he went off without realizing, until after he had finished speaking, that he had been rambling about nonsense.
Tate didn't want to hear that, who talked about writing papers anyway? Sometimes James was a little awkward in conversations. Just a tiny bit.
At first he seemed taken aback by her strong dislike of detective fiction but as she began to explain a little more, he was simply amused. "So I take it you just don't care for the genre," he pressed his lips together as he cocked his head right to left. "It's one of the most...popular genres of writing and I think that's why people try to write it. However I think that the biggest, amateur mistake is that people don't do their research," he told her glancing at some of the other people at their table. "People don't realize that they can have the greatest concept ever but if it isn't implemented in a way that is realistic to a reader it's going to flop," he continued, rambling once again. "So that's good to know."
He shrugged when she said it wasn't as cool as TV made it out to be. Nothing was ever as cool as TV made it out to be, okay no most things weren't. "Hey, as long as you love it does it matter if TV makes it more dramatic and adventurous than it is?"
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Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2012 11:37 pm
While James was telling himself off for the switching to the paper topic, Tate's smile was growing from a slightly sardonic curve of the lips to a full grin. "Don't you love it when that happens?" If the topic was interesting enough, then it was like she looked at her computer screen and it just filled up with thoughts right from her head. She didn't even have to consider it; she found sources and then it just flowed. As long as it was a law class, she didn't care how many papers she was assigned. She would do them and love them to death. Unfortunately she'd missed that with Revolutionary French Literature, and besides, her degree would be a lot more useful in her career field. Tate nodded. "If you challenge the suspense of disbelief, it will snap, like a bridge with too much weight on it." Only much less disastrous on a macro scale, except your book would suck. She shrugged at the question of the television and its effect on her love for her career, and said, "Honestly, I don't remember a time when criminal justice wasn't what I wanted to do. I've always wanted to be a cop--well, I suppose I wanted to be the President and then a knight, but, we can't always get what we want." Although in some way, she kind of had.
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