Snap, Crackle, Pop

I learned early on when I went to college not to tell my parents everything happening. No, no—I’m not really referring to a lack of disclosure about bacchanalian activities as you might be imagining. I remember one afternoon in the first week or so I called my mother to pour out my sad little heart—some tale of woe, I can’t recall. I called again a few days later to share some wonderful little bit of news—again, the mind is foggy about the details—and my mother was so concerned about what had been my state of mind in the earlier call. That previous gloomy mood had lingered and then passed. As I remember about college there were roller-coasters of emotions, regularly, and I learned that things shifted gears almost hourly. So why share every bad mood?

When I was in the United States over spring break a dear friend, and a regular blog-reader, asked me if I ever had a bad day. From the blog entries she concluded that it is always sunny here (it is) and that I never suffer from grouchiness. Au contraire! But I did make a mini-self-pact when I started the blog (almost 11 months ago!) that I would not use this forum as a means to vent in an unproductive way, speak tooooooo candidly (anyone can access this at any moment!) or grouse in too catty a tone. After all, just as I learned in college, I may have a difficult morning, and by the setting of the sun over Madaba and imbibing a Coke Zero, I might be calm and serene once again.

But Tuesday I was in a bad mood. It was a goodie. And as the day progressed it got worse! So I reveled in my Ebeneezer-Scrooge-Bah-humbug-frame of mind. The morning got off to a rocky start as I finished grading some tests from my 9th graders. Granted, about a third of them were stellar, a third were fuzzy and sloppy, and a third were several steps waaaaaaay back from our most recent test performances. One was so bad it was actually funny—trying to see a student attempt to pull some information out of the inner recesses of the memory bank—hoping against hope that one of those scrawled words might actually match the thoughtful answers I had hoped to provoke from my young scholars.

(It helps if you read the next paragraph super-fast)

About 9:00 a.m. I checked email for the first time of the day and discovered an email with one of the red exclamation points—Danger, Will Robinson! goes my 1960s-TV addled brain—from a recent hire to our department. I had written the new colleague with the proposed course assignments for next year. Well, it turns out that during interviews with other administrators promises were made about such things, and I had not been told. As it turns out, I don’t think I can keep the promises of course assignments as they were tendered. And the slate of big-wig administrators are all in London this week for a meeting of the Board of Trustees. So what to do? Not an easy dilemma—either I come off as uninformed (which of course I was about the promises!) or unkind (you’ll do what I say newbie!!) and, hey, that brings up another point. I can’t even assign all the courses anyway because we haven’t done course selection yet! How can I possibly assign faculty if we don’t know what juniors will elect to take! I can’t guess what the juniors will wish to take! Following on the heels of this rise in blood pressure I get a call about book orders for next year—there are problems with the book orders for junior courses—what are the numbers?? Well, I can’t say since we haven’t surveyed the students—we can’t really guess among five courses, and 75 students, now can we? No, I don’t wish to hold up the book orders, but how can we get an authentic order? I could just pick numbers out of a hat!

During lunch two faculty in my department approached me with that look—we teachers all know that look—that look of sheepish You-won’t-believe-this-but-I-don’t-know-why-I-didn’t-get-all-my-work-done devastation. That evening we are supposed to meet as a department and edit each other’s exams. We had picked the date a month ago to make sure we proofread exams and could get them in on the due date to the Dean of Faculty on June 5. The exams were not complete—maybe started. I didn’t respond with a well of sympathy—I had created my exam two days earlier since several colleagues had wanted to see a model of a final exam. We all had the same assignment.

Exams are not easy to write. I would bet a teacher might easily spend more hours architecting a good exam than some above average students spend studying for them. None of us had an exam in a file to fall back on, and it takes time and planning.

Synapses are snapping. Nerves are crackling. Are heads gonna pop?

The fires of frustration are nicely stoked by now—the day can yield nothing good I decide. I sit with a colleague who did indeed have her exam finished, and we sit far away from other tables. As a few colleagues join us at the table, I warn them: “I am in a bad mood today—just so you know!” One woman looked a little scared and said, “But you don’t have bad moods. You’re Pollyanna.” I didn’t spend much time processing whether I liked being a parallel to the saccharine children’s story heroine who was always happy. I said, “You know that reminds me of one of my favorite monologues in a play. Do any of you know the “Tinkerbell is dead” monologue?

I’m not gonna lie to you—my tablemates looked a little scared as I described this Christopher Durang monologue of an unstable character named Jane. I thought I would re-print the monologue for you. Enjoy!

Jane: When I was eight years old, someone brought me to this theatre. Full of lots of other children. We were supposed to be watching a production of Peter Pan. And I remember that something seemed terribly wrong with the whole production. Odd things kept happening.

For instance, when the children would fly, the ropes they were on would just keep breaking ... and the actors would come thumping to the ground and they had to be carried off by stagehands. And there seemed to be an unlimited supply of understudies, to take their places, and then they'd just fall to the ground. And then the crocodile that chases Captain Hook, seemed to be a real crocodile, it wasn't an actor. And at one point it fell off the stage and crushed a couple of kids in the front row. And then some of the understudies came and took their places in the audience. And from scene to scene, Wendy just seemed to get fatter and fatter until finally by the end of act one she was completely immobile and they had to move her off stage with a cart.

You remember how in the second act Tinkerbell drinks some poison that Peter is about to drink in order to save him? And then Peter turns to the audience and he says, “Tinkerbell is going to die because not enough people believe in fairies. But if all of you clap your hands real hard to show that you do believe in fairies, maybe she won't die.”

So, we all started to clap. I clapped so long and so hard that my palms hurt and they even started to bleed I clapped so hard. Then suddenly the actress playing Peter Pan turned to the audience and she said, “That wasn't enough. You did not clap hard enough. Tinkerbell is dead.” And then we all started to cry. The actress stomped off stage and refused to continue with the production. They finally had to lower the curtain. The ushers had to come help us out of the aisles and into the street.

I don't think that any of us were ever the same after that experience. It certainly turned me against theatre. And even more damagingly, I think it's warped my total sense of life. I mean nothing seems worth trying if Tinkerbell is just going to die.

I finished the description of the monologue and then paused—why did I tell this story? They are looking at me—their fright hardly abated by my silence—also wondering the same thing. “Oh, yeah, as soon as I was called Pollyanna, my mind raced and shouted in an interior monologue, “Pollyanna is dead!” Somehow it seemed funny to me!

Later that day, as several other things sputtered and became detritus on this miasmic day, I went to the gym to treadmill my grumps away. John, a very nice young Gap year fellow asked me, “Hey, how are you?” “Do you really want to know?” Poor guy—he meant no harm!

An hour later I had a text from one of the delinquent exam-writers asking that we meet the next night and he would make up for the problem by cooking a meal for everyone. Wow. I am really shallow. I felt so much better with the promise of a proffered meal!

Later that night, watching my diligent students hungrily tackle some documents on women’s rights issues of the mid-20th century, I remembered other long-ago emotional roller coaster rides—you huff and puff a little, you stomp your foot, and then look around, things will be okay soon.

This afternoon—right on time all of my history department colleagues submitted exams. Excellent exams. We had a good time last night checking grammar, spelling, punctuation, cultural issues, laughing over some questions, enjoying the realization that we had brought these first year KA students to the culmination of our courses. The hamburgers were great, the mood was light, and all traces of grouchy Tuesday gone. Pollyanna isn’t dead, just a little strangled. See—what’s the point of sharing everything!