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xaaraSo my day sucked. Because I'm still a little sick, I slept through my alarm. This meant that I got to school later than I usually do, which threw off the coffee-getting because the Deli guys had to brew a new pot in the middle of my waiting in line, which in turn threw off my scheduled study time for a quiz, which put me in a bad mood so that when D came in all I-just-got-out-of-bed-why-the-hell-are-you-talking-to-me I snarked back at him and basically said that I wouldn't want to talk to him anyway. Which I immediately rescinded, because of course it wasn't true. He was pretty good about it and only sulked for a little while, but it bothered me more than I wanted to admit.
Then in second period, Ms. O'Neill was tag-teaming with the research teacher and was gone for the first half of class. She left us for an hour with a quiz that took about ten minutes, then came back and told us that in the remainder of class we were going to see the African-American Civil War Memorial at U Street-Cardozo, about a half-hour from school. I balked, feeling the beginnings of a headache. I'd been feeling sort of okay for most of the day, but after crawling around with my third- and fourth-graders yesterday, I wasn't really up to walking miles through DC. Ms. O'Neill said I had to come anyway, so I staggered through the Metro after the rest of the class, standing on the escalators and taking deep breaths every two steps so I wouldn't get winded. Fortunately, my friend A was there and dragged me along after her, forcing me to concentrate on what we were doing instead of collapsing on the nearest park bench and taking a well-deserved nap.
After what seemed an interminable length of time, I made it back to school, ate lunch, and flopped into third period. "We're going on a little field trip today!" Ms. Mahoney chirped through my now-pounding headache.
Brilliant, I thought.
As it turned out, "field trip" meant going to the Marvin Center (the GW cafeteria/bookstore/student union) and eavesdropping, something I could mostly handle. But by the time school let out, I was almost completely exhausted. Of course, I have my poetry class afterschool on Wednesdays, so I hauled myself down G Street to the building, found myself a chair in the classroom, and curled my head onto the pillow of my arms.
What seemed like seconds later, an army of lively college students burst into the room, chattering at the top of their lungs. Ben asked me if I was all right, to which I responded something like, "Of course, you idiot," which made him smile.
Today we were workshopping Tom's poem and, if time allowed, mine. Tom's was, to put it rather bluntly, awful. Or...at least cliché. The professor used it as a springboard for discussion of what made good poetry vs. what made good pop song lyrics, and crushed poor Tom, who sat in a corner and sort of frowned at his paper. When the professor realized that he was coming down a little hard, he backpedaled as quickly as possible, but it was too late to salvage Tom's feelings. On that note, we started to discuss the first draft of my "Celestial Dignity" (lj-cut below in case you're interested.)
Celestial Dignity
Woke up early this morning.
My eyelids fused with sleep
and refused to open for me,
refused to open for the sun.
I stumbled down the stairs
without stopping to change
out of my socks and scrubs,
made myself a cup of tea.
Watched the morning news.
Sunspots today, they said,
will interrupt your service
on our local radio stations.
A man explained the theory
there, that it had something
to do with unseen radiation
and maybe the atmosphere.
No cause for alarm—it isn't
dangerous or even unusual.
It's just that same old sun,
the one we've always had.
And I smile at that old sun
just bloodying the horizon,
and squint at the rays we
all love and need and ignore.
It's about time it got even.
I read it aloud to the class, and my fellow students spent about ten minutes telling me what they liked about it before we moved on to the useful part: the criticism. Since I wasn't allowed to talk, I just sat back and took notes while my classmates argued about the meaning of lines, about certain line breaks, about what they would have done differently with the end.
"I'm not sure why it's important to tell us what the speaker does for a living," Chase said as the discussion was winding down. "I thought that was a kind of distracting detail."
Mouth firmly closed, I raised my eyebrows.
"You said the speaker's wearing scrubs," he said. "That means she's, like, a doctor or nurse or something, right?"
I was so close to opening my mouth and pointing out that the poem was about morning and clearly the speaker was wearing scrubs to bed and why the hell was he asking that stupid question anyway when Ben jumped in.
"A lot of people sleep in scrubs," he told Chase, the implied dumbass peeking from between his words. "It's really common."
And then he turned to me, nudged me with his elbow, and murmured, "I've got your back."
It was the nicest thing anyone's done for me in weeks.
I think the intensity of my reaction scared him. I mean, I almost broke down and cried, right there, in class. Instead, I patted his hand and offered up a shaky smile. "Thanks," I managed to whisper.
He kept sneaking frowning-eyebrow glances at me throughout the rest of the class. After class, I headed toward the Metro without him--I didn't trust myself to talk to him at the time. I've since had a long conversation with him in which I explained my Mad Hatter exit and apologized profusely for my uncharacteristic response to his friendly defense.
"Don't worry about it," he said. I think he still doesn't know what that quick, unthinking, "I've got your back" meant to me.
And although I can't really return his gesture, next time he and I go out for coffee, I'm definitely buying.
Then in second period, Ms. O'Neill was tag-teaming with the research teacher and was gone for the first half of class. She left us for an hour with a quiz that took about ten minutes, then came back and told us that in the remainder of class we were going to see the African-American Civil War Memorial at U Street-Cardozo, about a half-hour from school. I balked, feeling the beginnings of a headache. I'd been feeling sort of okay for most of the day, but after crawling around with my third- and fourth-graders yesterday, I wasn't really up to walking miles through DC. Ms. O'Neill said I had to come anyway, so I staggered through the Metro after the rest of the class, standing on the escalators and taking deep breaths every two steps so I wouldn't get winded. Fortunately, my friend A was there and dragged me along after her, forcing me to concentrate on what we were doing instead of collapsing on the nearest park bench and taking a well-deserved nap.
After what seemed an interminable length of time, I made it back to school, ate lunch, and flopped into third period. "We're going on a little field trip today!" Ms. Mahoney chirped through my now-pounding headache.
Brilliant, I thought.
As it turned out, "field trip" meant going to the Marvin Center (the GW cafeteria/bookstore/student union) and eavesdropping, something I could mostly handle. But by the time school let out, I was almost completely exhausted. Of course, I have my poetry class afterschool on Wednesdays, so I hauled myself down G Street to the building, found myself a chair in the classroom, and curled my head onto the pillow of my arms.
What seemed like seconds later, an army of lively college students burst into the room, chattering at the top of their lungs. Ben asked me if I was all right, to which I responded something like, "Of course, you idiot," which made him smile.
Today we were workshopping Tom's poem and, if time allowed, mine. Tom's was, to put it rather bluntly, awful. Or...at least cliché. The professor used it as a springboard for discussion of what made good poetry vs. what made good pop song lyrics, and crushed poor Tom, who sat in a corner and sort of frowned at his paper. When the professor realized that he was coming down a little hard, he backpedaled as quickly as possible, but it was too late to salvage Tom's feelings. On that note, we started to discuss the first draft of my "Celestial Dignity" (lj-cut below in case you're interested.)
Celestial Dignity
Woke up early this morning.
My eyelids fused with sleep
and refused to open for me,
refused to open for the sun.
I stumbled down the stairs
without stopping to change
out of my socks and scrubs,
made myself a cup of tea.
Watched the morning news.
Sunspots today, they said,
will interrupt your service
on our local radio stations.
A man explained the theory
there, that it had something
to do with unseen radiation
and maybe the atmosphere.
No cause for alarm—it isn't
dangerous or even unusual.
It's just that same old sun,
the one we've always had.
And I smile at that old sun
just bloodying the horizon,
and squint at the rays we
all love and need and ignore.
It's about time it got even.
I read it aloud to the class, and my fellow students spent about ten minutes telling me what they liked about it before we moved on to the useful part: the criticism. Since I wasn't allowed to talk, I just sat back and took notes while my classmates argued about the meaning of lines, about certain line breaks, about what they would have done differently with the end.
"I'm not sure why it's important to tell us what the speaker does for a living," Chase said as the discussion was winding down. "I thought that was a kind of distracting detail."
Mouth firmly closed, I raised my eyebrows.
"You said the speaker's wearing scrubs," he said. "That means she's, like, a doctor or nurse or something, right?"
I was so close to opening my mouth and pointing out that the poem was about morning and clearly the speaker was wearing scrubs to bed and why the hell was he asking that stupid question anyway when Ben jumped in.
"A lot of people sleep in scrubs," he told Chase, the implied dumbass peeking from between his words. "It's really common."
And then he turned to me, nudged me with his elbow, and murmured, "I've got your back."
It was the nicest thing anyone's done for me in weeks.
I think the intensity of my reaction scared him. I mean, I almost broke down and cried, right there, in class. Instead, I patted his hand and offered up a shaky smile. "Thanks," I managed to whisper.
He kept sneaking frowning-eyebrow glances at me throughout the rest of the class. After class, I headed toward the Metro without him--I didn't trust myself to talk to him at the time. I've since had a long conversation with him in which I explained my Mad Hatter exit and apologized profusely for my uncharacteristic response to his friendly defense.
"Don't worry about it," he said. I think he still doesn't know what that quick, unthinking, "I've got your back" meant to me.
And although I can't really return his gesture, next time he and I go out for coffee, I'm definitely buying.
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Date: 2005-02-09 05:23 pm (UTC)And I did a double take at your current music - I was just thinking about Paganini's La Campanella yesterday; not because I'm uber-knowledgeable about music, lol, but because it was the music used for the 1992 Olympics women's gymnastics compulsory floor music. (I memorized the routine). :p