What I saw: the Saturday after Thanksgiving I thought it was Sunday.
What I did beforehand: I set aside the Friday after Thanksgiving for doing anything that is not shopping.
I think I am better at shopping for my theoretical self than my actual self.
What I wore: riding clothes until after my lesson, when I changed into jeans.
Who went with me: the Bacon Provider. 19 was probably around but I didn’t see him.
Why I saw this show: I’ve been distracted. We thought we lived in a democracy until we elected a woman and got an unqualified fraudster instead. When I show up at the barn, people ask me how I am, and I always say I’m doing great. I’m not doing great. I’m freaked out.
Things that were sad: last year at the time all the leaves were off the trees in our yard. This year, many still cling. In the arctic, it is winter when the polar ice cap should be growing and instead it is shrinking. We have caused a catastrophic global climate emergency and fixing it should be one of our highest priorities.
Also, Captain has deep feelings when people leave, and spends a day in a feelings chair.
Things that were funny: our houseguests played a lot of Boggle and though I played only briefly I found my sheet. Also, The Graduate’s roommate built a colossal tower of Plankos.
We finished the last of the beer we brewed in June. It was a traditional British single-malt IPA that we named Brexit. We messed it up when we bottled it, and it turned out tasty but flat.
Schwartz has recovered from the rude dog at Thanksgiving and is back to dominating the household.
Things that were not funny: the proliferation of fake news is a popular new thing to talk about on social media. Does this mean we should assume that even the Washington Post “makes stuff up?” Also, someone lost half of the toilet-paper-roll-holder-thingy on Thanksgiving and it hasn’t turned up yet.
What it is: Sunday panic is the dread of going back to work on Monday, probably more related to the feeling that weekends aren’t long enough than that jobs are bad. Lately, the Bacon Provider had been traveling a lot, and too many trips have begun and ended on the weekends, so he’s lost some weekends altogether. I am trying to convince him that we need a vacation in January, and he doesn’t want to travel. Thinking it was Sunday on Saturday meant that I thought we were almost out of time.
It feels very Sunday-like right now, America, but it’s not. It’s Saturday. Keep it in mind. Don’t have two Sundays.
Last night, I stayed up too late, and slept poorly. At first light the cat started bugging me, meowing and placing a paw on my chin. I could see in the wan light of morning that it was still snow-covered out there. I patted the cat, feeling like winter here will never end. The cat settled in next to me, and I slid back into restless sleep. After another half an hour, the cat stretched out on top of me, putting both paws on my mouth. I patted him, knowing by the blue quality of the morning light that we had heavy cloud cover and snow yet on the ground; I fell asleep again. We played this game for several more repetitions. I overslept.
H____ was right, of course. People pretend that nerds have inherited the future, because a couple of nerds like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became billionaires. But most nerds just do ordinary jobs for regular salaries, and while they may share messy hair or dirty glasses or a fondness for a particular mock turtleneck, being a nerd is more about your passions than your fashion. I can’t think of other days of the year that my affection for things mathematical is necessarily appreciated.
Several lifetimes ago, I was a college math teacher, and then a stay-home mom, and after a long time away from the classroom I got a job teaching math in a nearby Catholic girls high school.
Coming from a college teaching background, my contact with students had been mostly limited to 2 or 3 days a week for either an hour or an hour and a half, and office hours. I had done some student advising, but it was always cut and dried, about picking courses and a major. In this job I was taking attendance, reporting dress-code violations (in theory), supervising clubs, doing parent-teacher conferences, writing college recommendations, and listening and handing out Kleenex when girls came to me to cry about things.
I was surrounded by them, from a little past 7 a.m. when I arrived, until some time past 3 p.m. when I dashed out with an arm-load of grading, late to pick up my own kids from their schools across town. I had them in my room as soon as I unlocked the door in the morning, I ate lunch with them in my room at noon-ish; I went to the bathroom with them. I had a room cleaner assigned to my classroom, who cleaned the white boards, swept, and wiped down and rearranged the desks each day after school. Once a week I walked the neighborhood before school, with a safety vest and a clipboard, writing down the license plate number of any student car that was parked in violation of the rules.
That first year, I never conducted an exact head-count of my students until late February, when the head of the math department asked me for it for ordering pies for Pi Day. I had never heard of Pi Day before this job. What a silly reason for a celebration. It had never occurred to me that March 14 might be written 3.14, perhaps because I always thought the ordering day-month-year more logical. As a math person, I understand affection for numbers. I put a line through my sevens, for clarity. My favorite integers are, in order, 8, 0, and 24, and though I do like e and the square root of 2, I love i. Ok, yes, I’m a huge numbers nerd. But, Pi Day? Really?
The department chair allowed 6 pieces per pie, because, she said, they were small pies. She ordered enough crumble-toped apple pies from Borrachini Bakery to feed a piece of pie to every math student in the school. This number was essentially the full enrollment of the school, minus the one or two seniors who were headed to art school and didn’t take math their senior year. Like most of the math department, I had a teaching load of five classes: four honors and one, non-honors section, known as, “college prep.” The honors classes had the highest enrollments, with a maximum of 26 students in each, and the majority were full classes. I had perhaps 104 honors students, and an additional 20 college prep students. At 6 pieces per pie, that’s 20 2/3 pies, but, of course, pies don’t come in a fractional form, so let’s make that 21 pies.
The mood on Pi Day was always festive in the math classes, the way it was on spirit days when the girls came dressed head-to-toe in their class colors, or Halloween, or the last day before a break, or any day when snowflakes were seen falling outside the hundred-year-old windows. Maybe I should call the mood distracted. They were excited for pie, of course.
From the moment that the pies were brought to my classroom, in big stacks of tidy pink boxes, the smell of the pies was intense. Apples, sugar, apples, sugar. Apples! Sugar! And from the first moment of cutting a pie with a pie server I brought from home for the purpose, more apples, and more sugar. By the time the first 26 students had their slice of pie during first period, I was already done with the smell of pie. The desk set aside for pie slicing was already sticky. My garbage can filled up with paper plates and sticky forks and gooey leftover apples and sugar, and don’t forget the empty pie boxes, four boxes per class. The floor around the desk with the pies got sticky. The floor around my desk got sticky. The floor around the trash got sticky. The doorknob got sticky. The room got even stickier through the day. Sticky.
By the end of the day, my clothes were sticky with pie. The light-switch was gooey with pie. My nose was coated with pie. My eyes felt gooey with pie.
She is in graduate school now.