How to say nothing in five pages!

Today I drove to pick up my daughter to bring her home from Thanksgiving weekend. I had to rendezvous with the girl that was driving her up from San Diego. The friend was driving to Lodi, near Sacramento, so I met them in Los Banos (that means "the toilet" in Spanish) which is a town about an hour from where I live. Because it was a long drive I listened to another audio book. Today's book was Plato and a Platypus Walked into a Bar. This book tried to describe philosophy using jokes. The one I remember the most was an optimist say the glass is half full, a pessimist says the glass is half empty, and a realist says the glass is two times too big. Listening to this book made me think about writing college papers, when I was asked to write a five page paper to explain something that I could discuss in half a page. Fluff was necessary to expand the paper to meet the requirement. Listening to this book seemed like the author wanted to tell some jokes and he needed a medium, so he compared them to philosophy. It was really a boring book to listen to, except for the jokes. As I was listening to the boring book and all the fluff I was thinking about a paper I wrote for Art History in college. I have never liked Art, not only because I have never been very good at it (you can ask my mom about the horse that looked like a llama), but also because I don't understand it. When we studied abstract art we were told to get an abstract picture from the library and take it home. We were supposed to live with the picture for a week and then write a five page paper that described the picture and what it was supposed to represent. I went to the library and got a picture that I thought was getting an abstract picture. It wasn't wild, just a picture of a house and the door was open and there was water right outside the door. So it looked like a house was floating on a lake. I thought it was abstract because a house can't float on a lake. I put the picture on the wall, for a week, and then wrote the paper. I wrote five pages on this simple concept, and I thought I was doing a good job. I was sure that I understood the assignment, so I fluffed up the paper and wrote about how this picture made me feel like I was in a floating house and felt free of all earthly encumbrances when I looked at the picture. When I got this paper back I got a "C-". I was surprised and asked the teacher why I got such a bad grade. The teacher scowled at me and said, "that was a picture of a house with the door open and water outside, not anything more". She caught me writing a five page paper about nothing! Do you think I did that again? You're right, it didn't keep me from fluffing more papers ... like the guy that wrote the book!