Scammed

It's a well-known fact that people with PhDs have no common sense. It has something to do with spending too much time in dark rooms with books, and something else to do with idealism and ivory towers. Anyway, I'm here to reinforce that little stereotype with a story.

A young kid showed up at our door on Friday. He was wearing skinny jeans and dirty converse shoes and some nondescript t-shirt. He was probably in his mid-20s and he stood, pigeon toed, and fidgeted through a speech he'd clearly practiced. He was a junior at UF, he said, and was raising money to study with a BBC TV program we recognized. He didn't want money directly, though; he would be funded if he convinced people to purchase a certain number of books for a children's literacy program. He showed me a brochure I was too busy to examine closely; we were on our way out for the evening.

At this point in Pigeon-Toed's speech, I began to hear sirens. They sounded like fire engines and they got louder and louder, trying to blot out the kid's voice. But I remembered growing up in Linden -- the capital of small town USA --, and how hard it was to fundraise, and how people always helped me out when I needed to go on a school-related trip. Andrew seemed to think the guy was OK and he has much better sense than I do. So the kid gave us his name, pointed to his house, took our check, gave us a receipt for tracking our book order, and disappeared.

By this point the sirens had dulled. Instead, I felt a gnawing in my gut that translated to "wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong."

Fast-forward to one day later. That same gnawing chewed my husband out of sleep at 2 AM. His city-boy instincts finally kicked in. He searched the internet for the scam, and there was the boy's canned speech, the general description of the types of scammers who engage in this scheme, and all of the actions people had taken to try to stop the criminals.

The rest of what happened isn't important. We put a stop payment on the check and signed up for fraud monitoring, since this crook now had our bank account number. He never got the money.

But it taught me a lesson I'd hoped never to learn about trusting young faces and supporting people's endeavors in hard times. It also taught me something frightening about the state of the economy; what kind of a person has such a hard time that he decides to show his face to the people he's robbing? What WON'T a person like that do? And why, in heaven's name, didn't I know any better?

Cacoethes Scribendi

I am a hypocritical composition teacher. Let me explain why.

I tell my students that I believe anyone can develop the fervor for writing, when really I believe I was born with a hunger to do it. This impulse used to be called cacoethes scribendi, often erroneously translated "the urge to write." While it's true scribendi means to write, cacoethes is more akin to madness than inspiration. I could no more ignore the impulse to write as I could to eat or breathe, and trying to explain that to people required to take a composition class has always seemed silly, if not strange and overtly sentimental.

I tell my students that six sources is enough for a research paper when I truly believe that scholars are born with a fire located in the center of their bodies that tells them when they can begin losing themselves in books and tells them again when they can stop and write. I don't read to get to know a subject better. I sink my teeth into subjects like a rabid dog tears into his last meal. I want to rip open every last bit of the subject before I put pen to paper and God help anybody who tries to stand in my way.

I tell my students the best work is carefully outlined and prepared when I secretly write like a woman possessed, letting the pages come out of me like some kind of sickness. When I'm done, I always think of Anne Bradstreet, not because I come anywhere close to her sense of irony or wit, but because she compared her finished product to a monstrous child, hideous when shown to the light of the world.

Sometimes I wonder how I could share this kind of thing with my own composition students without making them suggest that I belong in an asylum. How do you tell people who so desire structure, who want you to show them the steps to becoming a better writer, that it's an urge in the back of your mind or a fire in your core, and that, when you listen to your instincts, they'll take you farther than any composition textbook ever could?

Rookie

Everyone says the first year of any new job is the hardest, but really that did nothing to prepare me for what these first few months have been like.

My typical schedule goes something like this: I push my way into rush hour traffic while blaring BBC Radio 1, which I turn all the way up so that I can ignore the four jerks who will attempt to ram my car in an effort to quickly wedge themselves into the traffic, which is at a standstill.

Then I get to my office to grade and attempt to form a coherent thought before class. Some days, I steel myself for ignorance, resistance, apathy, boredom, and willful misunderstanding of the directions I spent years working into my syllabus. Others, I can barely wait to go into the classroom to discuss an important text or issue, as I think back to the first day I learned about Thoreau or Dickinson or Faulkner.

Then the tedium takes over. I sit through a meeting about a meeting, which usually ends in a discussion of splinter meetings I try to avoid getting sucked into. Someone needs someone to sign up for something on a Saturday morning, on a day late in December, which will last for 87 hours without a break. Anybody? Nobody? Come on.

I attempt to work on my research and am stymied by something. An inability to concentrate. A lack of resources. I research anyway. I can't help it. I open an email about a conference I applied to and then ignore it. It's too much to think about. I thumb through the calendar and try my best to remember why I decided to sign onto this or that project. I can't. It has something to do with tenure though; I'm sure of it.

If I'm lucky I catch dinner with a fifth floor friend. If not I eat in my office--leftover soup that is cold in the middle.

I'd go home but there's another meeting at 8 PM that goes until 11. I stagger home, tripping on a mountain of comp papers, and crash into bed, only to awaken bleary eyed to a cruel alarm clock that goes off four minutes later. I wave to the man I'm positive is my husband and begin the cycle over again.

I eventually learn secret exits out of the building where I work. It dawns on me that some papers may take a while to grade and that's ok. I figure out, slowly, how to ask for help. I apologize to the family I never see and stuff down the guilt that accompanies living in another time zone. I say no to people I like being around to make time for a dinner date with my husband (the person I like best). I get sick from the exhaustion. I make time to walk the dogs. And I stop to thank God I have this job, these friends, this life.

Have you Lost Your Dog?

The day began with bad signs I chose to ignore. The first was that my dog woke me chain-barking at 4:30 in the morning. The second was that my cat woke me thirty minutes later by sticking his claws in my closed eyelid. Then he bit me in the face.

The third was rush-hour traffic that crawled to a standstill. It did that, I found out, because people were rubbernecking to see a motorcyclist, unhurt, in an accident. I can't tell you why that makes me angry, but it does.

My class went well, so I thought perhaps this "bad-day" beginning was a fluke. I was wrong. I returned to my office to ensure I had the rest of the week's lessons lined up, when I suddenly did a double-take at my syllabus.

What was planned for tomorrow was written down for next Tuesday. What the students should be reading for Tuesday was on Thursday. My syllabus was one. day. off. Which means: the blogs the students were supposed to post were all screwed up, the day Valentino Deng was supposed to visit now didn't make any sense, & the due dates for the composition papers were wrong, wrong, wrong.

And I had the dubious honor of telling 50 freshmen about this problem. In my experience, no student likes a change in the schedule, but freshmen despise it because it leads to 10,000 other questions. I wanted to sit down in my office and cry. Instead, I went home.

When I walked in the front door, I got a call from my vet. In Batesville, Mississippi. "Have you lost your dog?" she asked. This was a mystery to me. Of course my dog isn't in Batesville Mississippi. "No," I said wearily. "I live in Tampa now." I can hear my vet shake her head. "Someone from Tampa called; you still have your MS tags on your dog. She's out." This is impossible. And yet, when I step wearily out on the back porch, there's a hole where Sierra should be. Fantastic.

It gets better when the woman who has Sierra calls and begins quizzing me: Why does the dog have a broken leg? (It's not broken.) Why won't she take water? (She's frightened.) Why did she escape? (The @#$% mowers let her out.) These questions and her tone all mean: why do you abuse your pet? should I give her back to you? maybe I should keep this animal?

She reluctantly returns my dog to me. I walk into my house, exhausted. All of the strings holding me together break, and I begin to weigh the advantages of alcoholism. I'm still weighing them, actually. I'll let you know what I decide.

Barefoot Running

Sometimes, I get a little overeager about things. Nothing really illustrates this more aptly about my latest experiment with barefoot running. 

See, I'm reading a book called Born to Run, the story of the Tarahumara ultrarunners, who run ultramarathons through canyons in Mexico -- barefoot.  And the strange thing about these people? They don't have injuries, depression, heart disease, obesity, or diabetes.  They are happy when they run; they are happy because they run.  

The point of this study is to bring to light ever-increasing evidence that the tennis shoe is ruining our feet -- and our backs, knees, and ankles -- because it deprives us of our natural pain-sensors.  When you put your foot in rubber and foam, it doesn't know the proper way to hit the pavement, so it strikes heel-first and as hard as possible in search of something solid.  But when you take off your shoes, your pain-sensors (there as many in your feet as in your groin) tell you to roll your feet from the inside out, to spread your toes wide, to tuck your legs under your hips, and to avoid striking the heel at all cost.  People who have tried it have found they no longer suffer pain in their knees, feet, or back -- in part, because we were all (at some point) engineered for running.  

So, the more I read of the book, the more stories I heard of people taking off their shoes and suddenly being able to run 80 miles instead of 2.  As someone who has been forcing her way through 2 or 3 miles a day for 15 years, I was eager to give it a try.  

Totally inspired, I kicked off my tennis shoes and socks.  Andrew, wrapped up in my hypothesis, decided to try it, too.  Exhilarated, I shot forward onto the pavement and smashed my heel into the ground.  My foot instantly corrected itself -- VERY wrong form, it told me immediately -- and I felt my toes spread.  I waited for a sensation of flying, of freedom.  I waited to feel like I could run a marathon in 15 minutes with nothing on but flip-flops.  

Instead? In my zeal, I pounded my pampered, pansy little toes onto the suburban sidewalk, cutting and bruising feet that have never run barefoot and rarely go dirty. I'm brought up short by the sharp gravel I have to cross to get to my driveway. Rather than flying, I'm tiptoeing around the loop in pain.  My teenage neighbors look at Andrew and me askance.  

"I could've gone much longer!" Andrew says, smiling, apparently unscathed. I hobble past him into the house, to soak my feet.   

Cereal-Box Decoder Rings for the Code of Life

Adjusting to a new place involves more than just finding a house or making new friends. It means breaking the code. 

Here's what I mean. Yesterday, I attended 11 hours of meetings, 4 of which were about health care benefits.  While I knew this was very important information, I missed much of it because it was delivered in code.  We had a rather self-important representative -- self-important people love to speak in a code only they can decipher -- and her presentation sounded like this to me: 

"Your options are to sign up for the PPOL, the PPOH, or the PHMO. The VLETS  -- don't worry about what VLETS are -- will tell you that PPOs are better than the PHMOs, but after a quick glance at your W4s and I9s, I can tell you the VLETS don't know what's best for you. I do. I've worked with Barb here for 15 years."  Here she stops to pat Barb, whose name is Joan, on the head.  "She can vouch for me."  

Needless to say, I left that orientation, disoriented.  But really that's not the only code I've struggled with since moving here.  For example, I've just begun to crack the traffic code.  On the road, "big construction switch" means "plan to sit still on this road for 3 hours." At work, the words "highly recommended" mean "mandatory for those who'd like tenure."  At home, the term "HOA dues" translates to "fees you pay your neighbors for tattling on you."  

Working through a code is typical of any move, and it always takes time, which makes me wonder -- why doesn't anyone make cereal-box decoder rings to crack open the code of life? 

Junior Faculty

The first day I heard I'd have an office, I was ecstatic. I get a job and an office I don't have to share with 15 other people? I just couldn't wait. I called every week I could, asking if my keys were ready, if the furniture was moved in, if the paint had dried. Finally, I got the room number. The person who gave me my office assignment laughed a little when she gave me the keys, but seeing the confusion on my face, she pulled herself together. "Well," she said as lightly as she could, "No one will come to bother you there."

I did not know what that meant.

At least, I did not know what that meant until I moved in. Andrew and I loaded about 6 heavy boxes of books and other paraphernalia and set off for the fifth floor of the building where I work. What with required ADA compliance, I didn't even consider the possibility that the elevator only stopped at the fourth. I should have.

Forty-five minutes later, all of the books had been hauled upstairs to a stifling attic with no air conditioning. The ends of the hallway were littered with "take me" books and discarded waste bins and broken filing cabinets. The lights were out.

But I didn't care. I was excited to see what the view from the fifth floor looked like. And, anyway, I'm healthy. I can take stairs.

I flung open my office door and was greeted with a view of . . . the roof. A rusted nasty debris-littered roof whose slopes and angles hindered any view of the city or its river. My furniture was peeling, the handles on my office chair brown with rust. My carpet was filthy, and my desks and bookshelf were covered in a fine layer of gray dust, no doubt courtesy of a long stay in a storage building. I felt as if someone had poked a hole in my elation.

I channel my mother, and wonder what she'd do. She certainly wouldn't whine, not after all it took to get to this dusty attic office. So with Andrew's support and the downtown Ikea, we reconstructed it. And these were our results.