I am taking calculus this term. There is hours and hours of homework: at our last KFC meeting, I paged through my notebook and it was all algebra and trig and f(x)s. “This is what I’m doing instead of writing now,” I said pathetically, although there were plenty of KFC meetings before I started taking calculus at which I showed up with no writing.

But calculus is going well, partly thanks to Sanguinity, in whom I have an eager live-in tutor. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I catch the early-early bus and eat a Luna bar and get downtown in time for a 7:45 start in our basement classroom. I finish off my travel mug of blessed blessed coffee and watch our instructor, who is a peppy grad student named George, do stuff on the whiteboard. It’s like TV. It’s a pretty quiet class, but on Friday we had this conversation:

George:*mathy talk*

student across the room: *makes a joke I didn’t quite catch*

George: What?

student: Oh, it was just a Jane Austen reference.

George: I don’t know what that is.

everyone: *stares at George*

George: Is it a comic?

student: No, she’s an eighteenth-century romance author…Pride and Prejudice? Emma?

another student: It’s a girl thing.

me: What?!

male student in front of me: yeah, those are good books.

George: Okay, well. *back to mathy talk*

So today I was tickled to come across Jane Austen Goes to War, showing the editions of Austen novels sent along with soldiers to World Wars I and II, with a link to Kipling’s WWI story “The Janeites.”