My day--musings

MY DAY TODAY

So I decided last night that I wasn't going to go to yoga, because the only time I could go was 6 in the morning--my kid is sick and I have to take care of her in the morning: her father was supposed to drop her off around ten or so. I'm not going to go--but my body has other ideas.

5:30 a.m!! My very irritating body jerked me out of bed, rolled me into yoga clothes and shoved me down to the studio.

6:00 a.m. Yoga was taught by a very energetic German guy, which made me decide never to get up to do this again. I don't like having orders barked at me in German accents under the best of circumstances, but at six in the morning at 110 degree heat it made me feel like I was in the ovens.

7:30--11:30
I went home and tried to rest, but my body decided that this was the day for going through all those piles of paper stacked in snowdrifts around the periphery of my apartment while watching my newly bought third season of Soap. I am growing really irritated with my body at this point so I try to convince it to calm the fuck down by a nice midmorning wank or whatever the female equiv of that would be. But it didn't work. It was up and doing again, and that was about the time my kid's dad called to say she wasn't coming over anyway, leaving me with way too much time and energy. One kitchen floor washed later, and I am finally tired enough to try to get a little rest before leaving for my job of trying to tame wild animals and teach them where to put semi-colons (community college English teacher). But it seems that my neighbor has decided that this would be a great day for letting a dog bark in her apartment when she isn't there. She doesn't have a dog, so I gather she must have rented one for the morning just to piss me off.
So I get up and go to work, figuring I can use the extra time to find a book I need for a class. I go, I park on the sixth floor of the parking garage, and by this time I am really tired, and I am almost to the bookstore when I realize I have left my wallet in the car. Reverse, back up the elevator, back down. Definitely coffee time.

12:00 Choices. I am tired and cranky and the corporate coffee place and bookstore are more likely to have what I need than the non-corporate coffee place and bookstore which are also across the street. Conviction wins out and I trot virtuously across the street.They don't have what I need. I slink back. I then buy some of what I need but the book I need most, they don't have.
After a few minutes of looking, I get the existential dread that always afflicts me in bookstores as I stare looking at all the trees that have been mulched to publish OTHER PEOPLE'S BOOKS. I stare at all the books, feeling a horrible mixture of lust and envy and despair: will I ever write a book? if I do, won't it get lost in all this sick spewing of print? How can I ever read all the books I want? Will I die hopelessly ignorant? Shouldn't someone put Ann Coulter out of her misery?

12:45 I am sexually harassed on my way to my office hours by a crazy black man who demands pussy. Due to the demands of my job, he is officially the third crazy angry black person I have dealt with this week. I curse the racism of this nation that has broken so many people and then put them on a collision course with me. I just want to peacefully teach semi-colons; leave me the fuck alone!

1:00 Sanctuary. I chat with other teachers in my hidey hole and surf the net. No students come.
2:00 After a dazzling performance on the subject, "What, really, is a noun?" (To most of my students, an abstract noun is a strange and mythical beast that must be approached with caution), I put my students in groups for the exercise in teacherly negligence that is the rough draft workshop. While they are engaged in giving each other bad advice, I reread The Land of Oz.

The Land of Oz is a very weird book, the most disturbing of all the Oz books, because in it a bad army of bad girls take over Oz with their knitting needles and proceed to steal jewels from the city and lie around and eat chocolates. Then Glinda, the good witch, confronts them with her trained army of disciplined good girls and forces the bad old witch Mombi to tell her where Mombi has hidden Ozma, the true ruler of Oz. Mombi tells Glinda that she hid Ozma as a boy! And then Tip, whose adventures we have been following, has to become a girl in order to take the throne. He doesn't want to at first but he bows before his royal duties and becomes a beautiful dainty princess. This must be both enticing and heartbreaking for young transsexuals, I tell you. I mean what was Baum thinking? What is this crazy world all ruled by women, and what the hell is he trying to say? Was Baum a cross dresser, I wonder?

Anyway, what with not having to actually do any work, the time sped by and soon enough it was time to leave, but I thought that I would swing by one more bookstore on my way home, so I went in and, once again, didn't find the book I was looking for but three more books that I somehow needed found their way into my possession, and i left the store poorer to the tune of something like thirty dollars. The sad thing is that the book I have been looking for all day I used to own but lost, and I'm sure it's somewhere in the slowly swirling vortex of papers, clothes, and books that is my apartment. But instead of replacing it, I am just buying more books that I don't have shelf space for. Crap in a felt hat.

Came home, called the kid. She and the dad are on the way over and we're all going out to eat and then we'll watch many many episodes of Gilligan's Island. I used to love Gilligan's Island as a kid and think now that it is responsible for many of my political convictions. But my Marxist interpretation of Gilligan's Island will have to wait for another day.