some party this is, juno

On Tuesday afternoons, I usually put in a good 2 hours grading very short response papers or quizzes for my advisor, who I TA for. The classes I usually grade things for are the Lit classes that everyone is required to take, so the answers I get to some of these quizzes are pretty hilarious sometimes. You can tell when someone has Spark-noted or just plain not read something. Which, face it, everyone is guilty of sometimes. But really, when you start getting answers like "Shakespeare wrote around 500 BC" you start to wonder. Some people just draw little pictures instead of answers--one guy responded to a question about Don Quixote saying "I don't know...but here's a spider," and there it was.

I had a moment today, when I was reading through the 50th response paper about whether Dido should or shouldn't have been put into a different circle in Dante's hell for being suicidal, when a certain phrase jumped out at me. It was describing Dido and Aeneas' moment in the cave, ahem. It was this: "the gods threw together a quick celebration when they were in the cave together during the storm." I don't know if this is actually funny, or if it was just the way the wording drew pictures in my mind, but I thought it was hysterical.

I started picturing a bunch of gods saying to each other "oh, SHOOT Juno! You forgot to get the party hats! Where are the balloons? What about ice-cream cake? We are really going to have to throw this party together in a hurry...quick, reserve a cave." "Whatever Venus, you're just angry that you forgot the candles." Yeah.