Summer Begins (dress rehearsal)

And I'm in the front row, on my porch, doing the last weekend of Astronomy homework EVER, and trying to get some solar remedial treatment for my head and chest cold. Alas, it is breezy and in the low 60s, a tad chilly to be in this tanktop and shorts, but I just keep moving into the widening band of sun.

It feels like I've been somewhere, even to me, like Spring Term was some sort of season on Survivor, a show I don't even watch. And I'm still on the island, somehow, holding the soggy torch and looking very pitiful. Sort of how my tomato plants look right now, waiting for the heat and sun, limping along, in their fixed tomato plant way. When we were through with April, I was happy to be done with it and don't need a three week nostalgic rehash of it in June.

Almost 4pm and the wind is still chilly, tarnation! Perhaps I should put the books and notes away, to show the proper sunshine readiness, to call in the blazing rays.

My neighbors' raised bed gardens are doing so much better than ours, with their fresh black sifted organic soils from Portland Nursery, and more shelter from the wind than ours. The inches of new mulch look great still, the herbs and roses look splendid, the lavender and lamb's ears are purple as far as the lot line. Next weekend, when exams and work are done for the week, I will come out here and make up for all the lost time I spent studying and writing papers for Keanu.
Who I am not giving a copy of my paper to after all. What if I wind up being a TA in the department and he's got students reading my paper on a sensitive chapter of my life? Eeww.
It's flattering and all, but I'm already over that and experiencing the relief of being done with his class and all the folderal of the dynamics in there.

Besides, he revealed that his real full-time job is being a writer and editor for something or some place, and this is just his part time gig, jacking people around in the name of anthropology.

This only raised my hackles some more. That's why he was grading my syntax and not the substance of my anthropology work. Putz! But I've moved on. Really.

Sure, this is merely stalling, taking a break from the second half of the dreaded-A practice exam. My head feels like a skewered cork you found under your refrigerator from a previous tenant, the dry coughing has blown my eardrums back and forth too many times to be good. "All I wanna do is have some sun..."

Softer Side of Keanu

Oh krist, now he's asking me for a copy of my Pilgrimage paper, and being all nice to me.

As Jon Stewart said to John McCain last year, "Don't make me love you!!"

How to dither-dather a woman who writes? Sincere praise on her writing and wanting a personal copy will do it every time. Yikes, I fell right into flattery pond.

So, now I have to figure out what to say to him when I walk a copy to his office.
How about, "So Keanu, how do I get an A in your class? You nit-picked my first paper, quibbled over syntax on my midterm, and took off one symbolic point from my latest paper that you actually liked. What gives? I got an A in a much harder anthropology class last term when I had to learn human genome 101 in 10 weeks. What's the deal?"

Or---just slink in and slip it into his mailbox cubby and bolt.
As a former boss lady and ex-administrator, I am just dying to tell him how to improve his teaching methods, but then the Kwan Yin compassionate lotus fairy sees him struggling and wishes I could offer some support like a colleague who's in the weeds with a group of cashier trainees. He asks the class a question on the reading assigned for that day, and there's all this restless silence in the classroom for what seems like minutes, until I can't stand it anymore and offer the answer. He turns from the board and realizes it was me. This can happen three or four times an hour, unless I just won't play along. Yesterday it was political history with the Iran-Iraq war and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, or which earlier anti-immigrant backlash occurred with which peoples in the early 1900s. And why?

Okay, so I don't have the student loan debt load (yet), years in the field on site with a trowel, multi-degrees and office in the department, but the guy is only a year older than I am and I just can't defer to him. He's more like a neighbor standing out in front of his house with a dead smoking lawnmower and you want to just hand him a cold beer and offer your weed whacker.

One more week of classes, one last exam, then it's all just a smudge on my transcripts, how I couldn't manage an A in a class in my major that was basically writing assignments with no math or human genomes or science. Little dings, all in a row.

But he talks about his dog all the time, so I know he's not just a total creep.
One more week of watching the doe-eyed nursing student in the front row bending over in short skirts to retrieve her bookbag and looking to see if he's noticing.

Class dismissed.