Friday, April 17, 2009

Why I Hate Jane Austen

In 1995 I was attending University in Riverside, California. Like anyone else I went to class, stayed up too late, got up too late, ate lunch for breakfast, had too little money, ate too much garbage, met lots of great people and had a great time.

What I never told anyone about was the crazy old professor of Physics who worked in this cramped office off on the edge of campus. As you probably already guessed he plays a major part in the story of how I came to hate Jane Austen.

This is because he had invented time travel. It doesn't work how you might think. You get one chance to travel through time. I picked to go back in time to meet Jane Austen. He told me I was nuts. But I said I wanted to do it. So he sent me back to the year 1800.

The only problem being that I was in California still. Riverside, California in 1800 didn't have any smog at least, or anything else. I was mad at my professor but he was the sort of guy who would forget to mention something like this.

It took me almost two years to get to England and then to find Jane Austen. Then she totally dissed me because I was completely poverty stricken. Also she said I was too proud.

And I said, "Jane, I hope you will reconsider my proposal of marriage." And she was all like, "Mr. Mikalatos, I hope that in the future you will see fit to call me by a more fitting name, like 'Miss Austen.'"

And I did. And we totally were going to get married. But then the Bronte sisters showed up and told her that I had been all making eyes at them which was SO. NOT. TRUE.

But she immediately went off to Basingstoke. Soon enough I received an epistolary communication telling me that she had accepted a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither. Mr. Bigg-Wither! That fat, stuttering boy! But he was rich and I knew the Austen family would be cared for financially.

Crushed, I turned the dial on my time travel device and returned to modern day. I smashed it to bits. I would never return to the past because the pain was too great. Then I bought a biography about Jane, hoping to learn that she had lived a happy life. But instead I discovered that she had broken her engagement to Bigg-Wither within a day of making it and spent the rest of her life mourning a strange, poor foreigner with an impossible name. She never married.

Oh, you foolish woman! Sniff, sniff. Waaaaaaah!

*Sob*

And that is why I hate Jane Austen novels.

THE END

8 comments:

  1. This is all kinds of awesome. I believe in love and marriage and so her life makes me cry.

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  2. I am surprised your story did not include any zombies. That makes me seriously doubt its authenticity.

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  3. uuuh, was that professor willard farnsworth? Had the nephew John who always talked about dinosaurs? Check with Z and A, they know all about him!

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  4. The zombies of course came after I left. As did the aliens: http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2009/02/jane-austen-aliens-new-movie-pride-and-predator.html

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  5. Funny this happened to me once but it was Jane Seymour... not Jane Austin. Also it was like 1980 or something. I realized I was time traveling when I found a dated coin in my pocket. Then, I returned to the present and became Superman. It was weird. It was like I was somewhere in time.

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  6. and this is why i love matts blog

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  7. Anonymous11:46 AM

    The bronte sisters wernt alive in austen's time

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  8. The Bronte sisters also had traveled through time. I know, as if they weren't annoying enough in their own time. Man!

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