Creative product today? Minor registration day? At GHP?

It is to laugh.

My job on the first Wednesday of the Governor’s Honors Program is to sort 700 children into their first or second choice of a minor, the class in which they will spend the rest of the summer every afternoon. That’s 700 pieces of paper I must touch at least six times each: collecting, dividing into preselected and non, shuffling, sorting into first choices, counting, redeploying overages, and counting again. Repeat the last two steps until every class is within its limit and every child has his first or second choice.

And after that, I have to type in all 700 choices into the database. The whole process takes about five hours. At 9:30, I have to print out three copies of the list and take them to the dorms. I do not post them. I dump them with the RAs on duty and leave.

Then, at 10:30 pm, I have to call down students whose forms were not filled out correctly and put them in whatever class is still under its limit. And then I have to make the adjustments in the computer and print out rolls for the teacher. This year I made it to bed at midnight.

The only thing even close to being creative I did today was to attend Cinema GHP, which showed Casablanca as the first movie of the summer. Just to witness the perfection of that movie is a creative act.