"He's a professor whose name I don't know."

"C'est un professeur dont je ne connais pas le nom."

Part of a series from a page titled "Practice Quiz on Relative Pronouns."

I contemplated the Pepperidge Farm cookies. The variety would have been suffocating, if one were the type of person to let the baked goods market dominate one's life. As it was, I was bored by the thought of being forced to select one indistinguishable package of blandness from the array. I swiped my arm across the shelf like an apathetic bear, causing a few packages to tumble into my cart.

I continued up and down the aisles, collecting food items that were bland enough to appease about 30 people. Every few steps, I had to adjust the strap on my slingbacks; this provided the perfect cadence to which I cursed the professor who had arrived on campus to give a talk on something that was only tangentially related to everything I cared about (and even that was debatable). Like the Pepperidge Farm cookies in aisle 3, each visiting professor was just as bland as the previous one: Vision as Truth in Flaubert's Madame Bovary; Corneille as Proto-Cinema: Close-Ups and Crane Shots in Illusion comique; Rousseau and Spanking...even the lecture linking hermaphrodites to the discontents of Socratic rhetoric during the Renaissance couldn't hold my interest.

When I had inquired into the topic of today's lecture, I had only been given one substantive: "Spice." My gay friend had made a joke about the Spice Girls, and I remembered being briefly angry with him for being a stereotype. All I knew about this professor (not even bothering to register his name) was that he was in the Classics department at one of the schools in the University of California system--but not one of the schools you ever hear about. The only tinge of emotion I felt in reference to this obligatory lecture was when I realized that all of the UC campuses must hate each other over constantly fighting for state funding; this cheered me up.

I wheeled my cart to the checkout. As the cashier called for a manager to process my in-store account form, I looked out the window into the parking lot: snow. Maybe I'll get into some sort of accident and receive permission to miss the lecture on account of me being in the hospital. That was my only hope.