Can you tell? Damn it.
*After a day spent talking mostly about Shakespeare, I will stay on campus for our Open House later this evening. While getting ready this morning, I decided against packing an extra shirt and tie or whatever. I figured that I would likely pass on lunch, and therefore there only existed a slim chance that something terrible would happen. Well, guess what? The best laid plans…
I stopped by Starbucks this morning for breakfast and a VMCwW. Also, I popped the third disc of season three of Lost into the DVD player. Well, I guess I am not as coordinated as I think I am. That, or yogurt with chunks of granola is less stable than I thought. Because while my eyes were glued to the tv screen, my hand raised a scoop of the stuff towards my mouth. And then all hell broke loose. A sizable portion of the yogurt dive-bombed off the spoon, impacting my tie in a line. Some of it fell onto the crotch of my pants. The rest onto the seat of the chair beneath me.
As soon as it happened, I stared down and froze. Then I started laughing. This was the exact situation I was confident wouldn’t happen. It never happens. God or whatever higher being you believe in certainly has a sense of humor. It’s a good thing I do, too. Ugh.
Parts 1 and 2 of "How I'm Going to Make it Through the Day."
I assume that I will simply grade exams and term papers in the space between the end of the day and the start of the Open House. Well, that’s the plan, anyway. That’s the ideal. But as we all know, and as has been illustrated by my breakfast disaster, the ideal rarely plays itself out as such. The more likely scenario is that I will end up on the computer trying to elevate by best score this week by feverishly blowing up jewels. Perhaps I will run through a baseball mock draft. In addition to these wonderful time-wasters, I will have an extremely difficult time preventing myself from turning on the DVD player and watching more Lost.
Watching Lost on my down time is great. Not so great is having to explain the show to every single person who walks into my classroom.
I let one of my co-workers borrow seasons 3-5 of Lost, and she recently returned it to me. That’s three seasons. That’s roughly eighteen discs. That’s roughly 72 episodes of Lost. Of course my production slips while trying to do work with Lost on in the background, but it makes me feel better. Psychologically, I guess the best way to put it is that if I sit in my classroom and grade papers, then I’m just sitting in my room grading papers. That’s depressing. But if Lost is on, then I’m watching Lost, but also grading papers. I can trick myself into thinking that Lost is the primary focus, and that t papers are of only a secondary importance. This is nowhere near as depressing. When I walk to my car as darkness falls between 6:30 and 7 in the evening, I don’t feel like I’ve spent 4 hours of my life grading. No, I feel like I just got through four awesome episodes of Lost (extra awesome if I catch an episode that features Evangeline Lilly in her underwear).
Now, of course, that last paragraph means that I’m aware of what Jedi Mind Tricks I’m trying to run on myself. “That’s so stupid,” perhaps you say. I wholeheartedly agree. But still – and pardon me for being melodramatic – but grading papers and exams in my classroom is exactly like living on the island in Lost: you do whatever you have to do to survive it.
