The Cob and Log Hampster Wheel

Firstly: you can excuse most of this drivel as me being hysterical. As per usual.

This week is called "Gay? Fine by Me"  week at BC.  That says it all right there. "Fine by me."  I mean, can you sound a little more like an obnoxious brat — "Fine! Be gay! That’s cool. I didn’t care anyway!"    

It’s wierd to me to see all these well-scrubbed BC undergrads walking around with t-shirts that say "Gay? Fine by Me,"  some of them underneath a smart little spring-pattern jacket and ribbon accents, and some of them over a cable-knit sweater. What’s really outrageous to me is that every male on this campus looks gay to me.  Even some of the football players.  Everybody is scrubbed and plucked and exfoliated and gelled and pampered and pleasured — walking around in their pastel polo shirts tucked into distressed denim that even show no marks or fraying as they swirl around the edges of their perfectly coordinated Pumas. I swear that the boys grab each other’s madras-covered ass; I’m sure at the very least everyone is fantasizing about throwing each other into the infinity pool at the summer house on the Vineyard.

The girls and their tote bags are less suspect to me.  I don’t even find any thrill in imagining any of these girls exploring their college lesbianism; perhaps it’s because I don’t care for long hair and there is A Lot of Hair at Boston College.  Girls are always flipping their hair, brushing it, braiding it, scooping it up with smooth milky hands and letting it fall back down around their tote-ed shoulders. A lot of girls like to sit with their legs crossed while listening to another girl tell a story, carefully pulling apart the ends of her hair, looking at split ends for a moment and then looking back up with extreme interest: "No way." "Shut up."  "You’re not serious." "Well, then what did he say when she finally came out of the bathroom?"

I am also not a fan of makeup or extremely large breasts, and there is a lot of that here.  So I’m mostly left to gaze at the faux-gay boys (who may or may not be wanting to shake their latent-homo maker) or to, alternately, lose myself in the stacks of O’Neill.   I was on the floor for a long time today staring at geology surveys of the Columbia River basin.  The floor smelled, strangely, like strawberries. Not the kind growing wild on the beaches of Oregon, but the chemical kind that are engineered in labs up and down the California coast.  I mean: whatever. Who cares, right? I had some epiphany in the stacks of the library. Right, Ivy. We get it: there’s a lot of information in the world, there are a lot of stories to be told, the world is really wierd and funny and beautiful while it’s busy being fucked up and cruel.   

But somehow, I end up wanting to dance like a ballerina across the tables of everyone here.  I want to stand up and start throwing books out the window, I want to disrupt lectures, I want to tear down the screen showing the Laramie Project and remind everyone that we see hate crime every day all the time, I want to go through the stacks and write secret messages in every margin of all of the books. 

What is everyone doing with all of this knowledge? What are we all stroking it for?  Everyone flips their hair back and has really nice and interesting things to say about, say, rural development, the Fourth Amendment, or human rights at Guantanamo Bay, but I don’t know how we are all going to do what is necessary. Isn’t there a gulf between the future policy makers here at BC, and the former forest defenders out in the forest (who are bruised, broken, jailed and/or repulsed by the preponderance of rapists in the forest)?   But why even compare BC to the forest defense scene — there is a pretty huge gulf between Chestnut Hill and Roxbury.  People here think that I live in a ghetto because I live in Jamaica Plain, which kills me, because JP is all fancy ice cream and condo realtors catering to lesbians in Subarus.   In one seminar today, an undergrad was talking about how she hoped that her history courses on China would help her culturally relate to the families of her students, and I understand the sentiment, I really do, but somehow I just felt this enormous fear that people still don’t understand the work that we need to do if we’re working for social justice.

Everyone in the cable-knits in the education department is well aware of the fact that they’re white — although nobody will say the word "white" and will only say, "You know, like me."  Non-white cultures are just "different than mine"… and everyone falls all over themself to talk about how committed they are to multicultural education.  Somehow, though, I never seem to get the feeling that anybody knows what that means. I made it through page 7 of our textbook "Creating Culturally Diverse Education" before I was writhing on the ground in pain at the state of affairs that we find ourself in.    And then there is the compulsion on everyone’s part to de-emphasize their whiteness. "Well, I’m Jewish," "Well, I’m Italian," and everyone’s favorite at BC, "The Irish used to be considered colored."  And I dont want to minimizes people’s various identities: We all struggle with oppressions and we all gain from privileges. I get this, I relaly do, but there are quite a few times at BC when I want to just get up and throw the table over. I want to get down and dirty. I want people to say what’s on their mind.  "Gay? Fine by Me"  ?   Fine? Is that what you have to say? It’s fine? Is there anything more we could say about it?  I mean…….I’m not sure I want to hear it, but there are times when I just feel like the facade of charity here at BC is obscuring something. I’m just not sure what it is. I want it all right out there in the open so that we can see how ugly and full of shit most of us are. We don’t even know how to talk to each other half the time, and we aren’t getting where we need to go fast enough for my tastes sometimes.

But then: what the fuck am I doing? I’m sitting here in the library, with my thumb up my ass like I have autism, developing a more complex multi-color highlighting system to complete my research project on nuclear weapons history and stroking my intellectual brain. Sending dirty text messages and shopping on E-bay for a new pair of shoes to wear to San Francisco.  It’s all so intense sometimes.

So that’s essentially where I’m at. At the end of all of this, I’m really just gazing at the twink-looking boy next to me, wondering if he’d want to stop fidgeting with his pink polo shirt long enough to go have a quickie in the "laptop room" with me.

I gave a really stupid lecture the other day about the value of money. It would not have been notable had I not been observed by my supervisor, the scary hardliner vice principal that all the students absolutely hate. 

The topic itself (the value of money) is not a strength of mine. My co-operating teacher suggested (read: insisted) that I cover this topic.  “You know,” he said cavalierly, “commodity currency, fiat, where money gets its value, that kind of thing.”    Basically: “Where does money get its value?” We’re not talking the simple answer (“from the government” or even “from limited supply,” though those things apply). We are talking about complex, abstract concepts about the idea that we can formulate a medium of exchange so that if you and I make a transaction, for example, we know that we both understand the unit of account in the same way.

So, my first problem is that the topic is, on its own, kind of boring as fuck and also not something that I can expound on very eloquently. But, in order to prove to both my co-operating teacher and my supervisor that I can write lessons and lectures that conform to state standards with precision and excellence, as well as take an abstract topic and help students make the connections between the words in their textbook and the real world around them, I wrote a stringent lesson on the value of money, using Ithaca Hours as the case study. We even watched a corny little video about people buying massage oil and espresso at the Co-Op with their Ithaca Hours. Boring, yes, but we can’t watch Sundance Channel documentaries and gaze at photographs of the Civil Rights movement every day.   

My second problem was that I had kept myself up past my bedtime not only the night before, but the night before that, leaving me hazy and confused.   The large coffee with 2 shots of espresso went absolutely right through me with no buzz or caffeine orgasm whatsoever (prompting a 10 minute tantrum in the teacher’s lounge, during which I claimed that the coffee place had given me “broken coffee” and I ate a lemon Danish in an attempt to eke out a sugar high), and so when I started this lecture, I probably looked like I’d been run over by the Tired Truck.  (After my performance at high school, I went to BC and took a disco nap in the library, and then groggily went to class where I had to give another presentation on ideas about a historic field trip to the Back Bay Fens. The professor asked me about 10 million questions and I kept wanting to ask him to please, if he could, just shut the fuck up. )

So, anyway, the value of money: I knew I wouldn’t have them jumping out of their seats in delight, salivating at the word “fiat,” or immediately rushing the door to get on the Federal Reserve announcement mailing list. The students are very adept at looking like they are paying attention or doing seatwork even when they are doing neither, so my goal for this lesson was moderate/feigned interest, cursory completion of the worksheet, and actual mastery of 3 key concepts.  But, res ipsa loquiter:   boring topic + tired teacher + the roaming restless, underslept mind of said teacher = you’re sleeping before I even open my mouth. What saved me from having 20 dead-asleep students on my hands was the fact that they knew I was being observed. That they acted in solidarity with me is sweet; they struggled, despite the oppressive banality, to keep themselves awake. My favorite student propped his eyes open with his fingers at one point, and then when that didn’t seem to work, he (I am not making this up) shoved an entire Snickers bar in his mouth and stared at me wide-eyed. 

            The thing about my supervisor/vice principal is that she is one of these classically intense people. She seems to like me a lot (probably because I am totally intense, even though I hope, for the sake of all relationships past, present and future that I am not intense in the same way that she is), but she is, as one of my co-teachers said, a hard-liner.  She sends out multiple email reminders about upcoming assignments (with increasing hysteria nearing the due date), listens with a wide-eyed and penetrating gaze that seems to have origins in soap opera dramatics, and – on a completely unrelated note – has the biggest, heaviest-looking engagement ring I have ever seen.  I often see her at 2:30 pm, running around in her stilettos, still clutching her paper Dunkin Donuts bag that still has her ham and egg breakfast biscuit that she never got around to eating for breakfast.  And then she often sits in the afternoon meeting picking apart that sandwich, ejecting the biscuit into the trash and then eating the ham and the egg patty separately. 

Also: Once, when I was talking about a long-distance lover, she for some reason revealed that the pet name for “having sex” that she and her boyfriend use is “the hot dog sandwich.”

            So, anyway, all that really happened was that everybody was trapped by my underslept and nearly excruciating lecture. Bored as fuck, sick and tired of money, and cognizant of sleep and hysteria as sly enemies, one’s only option in that room was either to observe me or observe me being observed.  In honest reflection, I feel like I was just a cuter version of the teacher in Ferris Beuller’s day off ( “It’s called a Laffer Curve. Anyone seen this before? Anyone,  anyone? Class?” ).  I was even wearing a sweater vest and loafers. I almost went for the bow tie, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. 

At one point, I mentioned that other cities had Ithaca Hours, but to name some examples, all that I could remember was Santa Cruz and Arcata.

“Isn’t that where you’re from?”  my favorite (pet) student said. “Did you use the currency dollars things?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I replied. “There weren’t many places to use them.  Just massage therapists and head shops, really.”   

  Students either didn’t hear me, didn’t care, or chose not to laugh at head shop. At first I was horrified by what was really a faux pas (head shop?  Please), but then I was disappointed that what could have been a funny-haha score-one-for-the-subtly-cool-subcultural-teacher moment went nowhere. Like everything about this fucking lecture!   It was one of these total “is this thing on?”  moments. Someone mentioned that Ithaca is “a pretty nice town.”   I said, dryly and dead-pan, “Ithaca is Gorges,” thinking that I was so clever.  Ha ha, like the t-shirt. Ithaca is Gorges. Get it?    Hmmm. Hey, Ivy: they’ve probably never seen the t-shirts, and, really, that joke doesn’t fucking work if you just say it out loud. 

I sat through my post-observation reflection with my supervisor, while she asked me what was going on, just laughing and laughing on the inside.    When she asked how I felt about the lecture, I honestly said, “You know what. We win some and we lose some.  Shit happens.” 

She said, “Ivy, you’re a pretty smart cookie.”   

And gave me the highest marks that I could receive on the lesson observation. Score another one for the eccentric teacher.