A chimpanzee will pretend to get his arm stuck in the bars of his cage, or will hang by his teeth from a piece of string he's found and spin around. One lion realized that if he urinated at a certain angle, he could spray his visitors and make them shriek . . . --Dr. Jerome R. Clade, The Fundamentals of Animal Behavior American Government is group anesthesia. It's so mind numbingly dull that I stoop to counting the ceiling panels and the floor tiles. After that, I watch Jason Olsen flick pieces of pencil lead, trying to hit the bottom of Alicia Watanabe's shoe. He actually succeeds once, and I have to refrain from clapping. Of course, Mr. Arron isn't teaching us the fascinating, page-turning, and dinner-burning excitement of Alexander Hamilton's illegitimacy, so who can blame me. I bolt out of there, but so does everyone else, and we jam up the doorway like cattle moving toward the slaughterhouse. Or Calculus, rather--same thing. After that, Jenna drives me and Hannah and this other new friend of Hannah's, Kayla Swenson, to McDonald's for lunch, and even that model of fast-food frenzy seems slower than a stationary bike on a freeway.
