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Mike twirled a strand of hair and doodled while he mostly ignored Professor Hubert. As long as he remembered to glance up occasionally he was free to do what he wanted and could finish reading the chapter later. He'd quickly learned that Prof. Hubert tested directly out of the 'Modern European History' textbook.

His absently switched from just hair twirling to also finger-rub his cheek even as he ~also~ drew a tiny, elaborate curly-curve. It itched.

His face itched. Not the french curve. It itched every Thursday.

Electrolysis itched. Before it happened, anyways.

His brain seemed to itch sometimes, too, and what was currently itching around didn't seem to want to be scratched.

He re-read what he'd scrawled and corrected and shaped and re-written over and over for the last half-hour. Order from chaos. Big idea words that were just disguises for not having a clue. Half the problem was Hubert talking away and having to pay a bit of attention in case he asked a question. Half was trying to be clever.

But at least half was... something closer to the brain itch. He drew the strand of hair out full length and then across his mouth so he could hold it in his lips.

"History is presented as progress: a sequence of logical decisions and their predictable, planned outcomes. The parade of dates and events is interspersed (he really liked the word 'interspersed' and underlined it again... have to remember to use it somewhere...) with the occasional extraordinary character who seems to define an era or personify a great leap forward:

"Queen Elizabeth I. Napolean. George Washington. Julius Caesar. Count Dracula."

(Ok. Maybe not Dracula.)

Mike inked out Vlad's name, but he left the little fangs. His castle's location was the only thing Mike could remember from a deadly-dull lecture on the Balkans last week. Count Dracula personified last week for him, at least. Maybe the whole middle ages....

The real point, he thought as he looked at the messy paragraph and pretty good doodle of fangs, was that "history" was... dull.

But it ~wasn't.~ Not if it was your history.... He scratched at a new spot right under his chin as he drew kissy-lips around the fangs, puckering his own lips absentmindedly to match.

~Personal~ history, Mike thought, does not slowly, logically "progress." The things that'd happened to one person - him - seemed to be anything but organized... or something that could be called progress, anyway.

And they sure weren't slow!

Lately, life was more like an avalanche, like a bucket of golf balls poured down a stairwell... it bounced all over, everywhere, and made no sense at all. Not the way history was supposed to. And it was fast!

On a new page, he drew some stairs, and a bucket...

At least it ~did~ go in one general direction... away from the bucket. From the 'defining event.' So things weren't entirely random: they went downhill. (little balls all over the page...)

But the further and further it went, the more random-seeming it got.... With every bounce and ricochet and... and every time one bounced, the more it spread out, too. (dozens of balls at the bottom... dots for dimples...)

That wasn't right. It was totally wrong, really. He tucked his hair back behind his ear and sat up a little.

The random spreading out. He looked at the bottom line of the page. At what his little, round drawings were telling him. There wasn't really a "bottom of the page" in real life. Entropy, maybe, but that wasn't reality for his normal life....

Everything - his personal bucket of balls, really - everything that happened, started in one place. And time. And it went down, sure... Or out, more...

But even after just a few seconds, it stopped being random.

People changed everything. People weren't random.

Practically every ~person~ that one of those balls reached would pick it up and bring it back if they could see where it had spilled from. Or they played with it. Or put it in a pocket. Or they gave it to a dog and she played with it... Or they gave it to someone else and ~they~ brought it somewhere else.

And some of the balls - heck, ~most~ of them - would still be out there, bouncing and rolling away... and someone was gonna move every one of them, sooner or later. And more of them would be brought back. Sure as borsht.

Mike looked at the page again. Tried to put it all... tried to fit it to that itch.

The bucket was still empty, at the beginning. It had still poured it down the stairs. And the balls, even if they ~all~ eventually came back....

Even if a miracle happened and they were all brought back, they'd never be in the same order again, in the same places in the bucket again.

So even after the bucket was full of returned balls, when it ~looked~ the same again... it was really totally different.

And was he the bucket? Or the balls...?

He'd never be exactly the same again, even if he made it all look the same. He was never even what he looked like, ~before~....

History was a bucket of balls that they told you was the truth, but it was just something that ~looked~ like what had really happened. And what really happened wasn't what it looked like, either.

Mike blinked awake again. Looked at what he'd written before, on the last page. History. He scratched with one nail at a particularly irritating bump at the top of his neck, carefully.

There were a hundred little balls... he'd drawn a waterfall of balls. Bouncing balls. He drew a few more bounces.

The next sentence he wrote ran over top of a dozen falling little balls, above the bounces, which he thought was appropriate.

"Change is a river. It looks the same every time you see it, but it's different water."

He looked at it. Wrote underneath it: "Change is a whirlpool."

Water flowing, rather than little balls bouncing....

He liked that more, or thought it was more accurate. Mixing and going around... but a whirlpool was a depressing metaphor. And the bucket looking the same while being different wasn't the only point....

If the bucket still existed, and all the balls did, even spread all over? Was it the same as before? In parts?

Wasn't a river really the same, even after all the water had flowed by, over and over for... ever?

Mike thought a long minute, doodling spirals and stars....

"Things never go back to exactly where they were."

He looked at the page. All the balls, all the activity of bouncing and change. At the spirals that he'd changed into whirlpools....

He looked at the bottom, at the dozen balls he'd settled there. Pushed a few hairs out of his eyes. Then he turned to a new page and wrote right in the middle.

"Is going back in the bucket really better?"

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End of part Un. (More girly stuff later on... trust me)