snooze

out of phase

Sunday night and there was no home-cooked dinner forthcoming. Instead, we jumped in the Mini Cooper and headed to a nearby picnic table drive-in burger joint — with killer chocolate malts. Typically, it’s crowed with motorcycles transporting large women tough enough to make me quake but also enchant me. But that evening, it was threatening to rain. We walked right to the window and placed our orders. Without much delay, they called “Sue” and I received the quizzical look I also get when I claim to be the intended customer. As is often the case, we were ahead of the trend. Not long after we started munching, a considerable line had formed. In Europe this happens because our bodies long for an evening meal several hours before the sun sets. But in general, we seem to have our stomachs calibrated to signal the need to seek nutrition before the rest of America lumbers up to the counter.

That’s how things have been lately. For example, my 11 aspiring STEM teachers are approaching peak anxiety levels. I felt they’d been overly mellow and happy during their summer courses. Meanwhile, I was worried they were entirely unconcerned about the immensity of the challenges they were going to face. But at the last class meeting, I was ready to let them go because I was convinced we had nothing more to teach them. They had tried stuff out in the real world. A former advisee came that last day to share advice and I thought it was a delightful way to show them it was possible to survive and prevail. Looking around the room, most of their tanned faces had become ashen. I’m ready to buy rounds of drinks for my lovely instructors but we can barely pry the student teachers out of their chairs, down the steps, and out into the gritty world. Tomorrow evening I’ll see them after they have spent a few days in school. I am eager to be in their delightful company. Truthfully I anticipate they’ll be trembling with a school-onset version of PTSD: nails and hair chewed to a frayed condition, eyes wide and twitchy. Me: I’m proud as an uncle who after teaching my siblings' kids to make fart noises from their armpits. I am up and my students will probably be down.

For several months, I am experienced this odd sensation that my emotions are completely unsynchronized with the rest of the world. Here’s an example: my new post-doc is eagerly hiring “minions” to help collect qualitative data in schools next month. AND she wrote the IRB application plus is coordinating the protocols with other members of the project. Similarly, even though our participation rates on our survey were less than half of what I wanted, we STILL hit some important milestones in terms of statistical significance and adequate effect sizes. All of this is frosting on top of the delicious cake that is my preservice STEM program. When I hear about others who aren’t have the same time of their lives as me, I worry and wonder whether there might be something to the notion of karma. My brother’s depressed because his “baby” graduated from college, a former doc student just buried his father-in-law, a local outdoors buddy just told me his wife* is leaving him, and someone I remotely know just spent two weeks sleeping on a hospital bench next to her daughter who was recovering from a scary ailment. I don’t really believe the universe cares enough to make sure the happiness quotient is zeroed out. I feel nothing resembling guilt because others are talking to divorce lawyers or funeral directors or pediatric residents. I suppose what I wish is that others could be as tickled by their work and lives as I am right now.

But that’s not going to happen soon. My teacher friends are frantic because their classrooms aren’t fully stocked and set-up for the invasion of knowledge seekers. My professor friends are realizing they must tuck shirts into long pants and shuffle off to lecture halls and office hours. Me? After assuring my underlings that even though the work is demanding and that they will eventually find moments of delight (or at least decent stories to tell others), I walk out the door and prepare for a European expedition. Yes, while you’re worrying whether the Find/Replace feature caught all the dates on your slides so nobody knows you are recycling old presentations, I’m struggling with whether it will be dry enough in Cyprus that I can depend on hand-washing undies so I can get by on half the number of briefs relative to the number of days of travel. Department meeting next week? Sorry, I’m away at a conference. Paperwork for accreditation? It’ll have to wait until mid-September. Paid trip to Athens, Georgia? Oh sure, I’ll be back in time for that! And I will happily buy drinks for my compadres!

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* Note: Use google translator to see how to say "bitch" in Spanish.

rueful admissions told across a stone wall

Mr Collins spoke at length Wednesday night and I listened intently to almost every word. It might come as a surprise that listening requires so much energy, but it does. The reason it was so draining was because I was inspecting and harvesting the words ideas that drifted my way. My ambition was to etch the better phrases in my mind, both the words themselves but also the rhythm, tone and pace with which they were delivered. Standing outside the crowded sunken garden, peering over the wall as if seeing his head made it easier to make out what he was saying, I probably appeared calm even though my mind was frantically spinning the information around in my hands, looking for blemishes where there were none and then having to quickly decide which to try and preserve even as a fresh volley was launched over the rugged rock barrier.

Neither he nor the phalanx of introducers cautioned us against recording or memorizing what was spoken that evening. And yet somehow, even if I had been able to preserve exactly what was said, I'm not sure I have the authority to repeat anything. My inability to perfectly repeat what I just said, let alone the utterances of somebody else, helps preserve the unspoken covenant with poet. What I can recall are mere snatches – haikus about eel in a sushi house, a dog driven to madness by the sound of his tags, losing track of the names of rivers and book characters, an unhinged moth above the lovers' bed, and imaging a musician handing over a saxophone to an audience member.

What Mr Collins didn't share was this. One path for solving a problem is by walking is by turning away. Diogenes the Cynic is reputed to have avoided an annoying individual and situation by leaving it behind. Rather than ponder and wander, abandoning a person or problem does in fact serve as another way to enact the "make our way by walking" maxim.