VANCOUVER, BC — On Monday, Texas Boxerbatte, a third-year English student at SFU, found himself locked out of his home after dropping his house keys somewhere in the depths of his 150 pages of readings for the week.
“I was vibing on my porch, immersing myself in my literary theory readings,” said Boxerbatte. “Which was very, very hard. I got up to get away from the mosquitos and my keys just fell out of my pocket and plopped straight in.”
Boxerbatte has been unable to locate the missing keys anywhere within the text, which he was supposed to read in the 24 hours between the professor remembering to unmute the module and the lecture session. Even his keys’ distinctive jangling has been drowned out by the white noise filling Boxerbatte’s brain every time he’s forced to look at the words “authorial intention” or “estranging the self.”
“They’re real deep in there, probably lodged in some backwater intersection of ideology and economy,” he shrugged about the keys. “I don’t know. I guess I will make a life for myself from the stones and the grass.”
Boxerbatte’s attempts at retrieving his keys via CTRL + F have also failed, as this reading is yet another badly scanned image-only PDF. His housemates have refused to let him inside, allegedly for fear that it is only a matter of time before they, too, vanish into Boxerbatte’s course readings.
Eli Tesma, a philosophy instructor at SFU, claimed that Boxerbatte is not the first student known to have lost things in their course readings. He has heard of students losing their remote controls, their laptops, and most recently their medical masks.
One student reportedly lost his sense of proprioception somewhere in the sentence “Individual historical ages are here described as ‘allegories’ of nature insofar as history is envisaged as the epochal ‘petrifaction’ of historical into quasi-natural forms,” from Terence Holden’s “Adorno and Arendt: Evil, Modernity and the Underside of Theodicy.”
At press time, Boxerbatte was still living in his broccoli garden, reading Style: Ten Lessons In Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams and hissing at trespassers.
