Cleaning off the desk...

Old reading quizzes for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "What subject does George teach?" "What song does Martha keep singing?" etc. I'll need to copy those down in digital form so I can use them again someday.

Keys for grammar tests. I haven't taught grammar since May of 2001. These can go...

Brightly-colored placards I made for the mock Congress session we had in my speech class this spring. One purple, one white, one brown, one orange, one green, one pink. For some reason I'm thinking of the dwarves' hoods in the opening chapter of The Hobbit.

Paper clips. Everything is fastened with paper clips. I keep pulling them off as I toss the papers away, and they've filled my little magnetic dispenser to overflowing.

Letter from a colleague. Uh-oh. Should have answered that one...

Ack! My copy of Harlan Ellison's Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed! I've been looking for that! It's one of my favorite collections of essays, and it belongs in a place of pride on my shelf, not buried under a midden of vocabulary quizzes and out-of-date syllabi. Forgive me, Harlan!

One of many mysterious post-it notes, pale yellow with red ink: "Computer is ___. Needs: Male: 25 holes. Printer is ___? Needs 18 little fangs." Am I writing vampire cyberporn to myself?

No fewer than nine orange-and-black trimmed cocktail napkins, each bearing our school's seal and motto. I like our motto: A posse ad esse. English infinitives don't work well with Latin, alas, so the literal translation doesn't exactly sing: "From to be possible to to be." The best translation is "From possibility to being," which is a very cool statement for a school, in my opinion. It certainly fits in with the whole self-actualizing/Maslow's hierarchy thing.

Blank Lincoln-Douglas debate ballot with No Oral Critiques written in thick black letters at the bottom. Hey, I agree.

Xerox copy of "The Cask of Amontillado" with notes and handwritten glossary included. I gave definitions for the words amontillado, motley, flambeaux, nitre, vault and Mason, plus translations of Nemo me impune lacessit and In pace requiescat. I should ask the Foreign Language Department for a stipend.

Nature Valley Oats 'n Honey Crunchy Granola Bar. Wrapper intact. I'm pretty sure I put that there this morning, actually.

Hey! The print of Audubon's Columbia Jay that fell off my wall a few months back! I'll be putting some sticky gum on the back of that one and putting it back on the wall. My classroom walls have a lot of stuff on them: a couple of dozen pieces of construction paper featuring quotations from such luminaries as Dante, Lewis Carroll, Tom Lehrer and Frank Zappa; maps of the world, Virginia, and Middle-earth; posters of Oxford, Pete Townshend, Martin Luther King, the Who, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Buckwheat Zydeco, Star Wars, and Roger Dean's painting for Yes's Close to the Edge album cover; two clocks, one from the Boston Scientific corporation with stylized hearts for the numbers, and the other with birds for numbers (though I've disabled the on-the-hour birdsongs); two Audubon prints (Northern Cardinal and Columbia Jay); two calendars, one featuring photos of the school and one featuring tigers; a stuffed Wile E. Coyote hanging beside one clock; and a Cornell Ornithology Lab poster of Common Feeder Birds of Eastern North America. It's amazing what you can do in seven years.

Coffee mug. Oh, my. That really should have been taken to the sink some time ago...

1:21 PM

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Trouble, thy name is hotel living.

I'm writing from Charlotte, where one of my debaters has been competing in the National Forensic League's annual National Speech and Debate Tournament. (This is the first time a Woodberry student has made it to NFL Nationals, though we've sent students to the Catholic Forensic League's Grand National Tournament on three previous occasions.) Coaches who attend tournaments, whether at the local or national level, are required either to provide judges or to serve as judges themselves. In order to spend more time coaching their students, some coaches bring along parents, former students, or even community volunteers. I, on the other hand, work at a boarding school in the middle of nowhere; the parents and alumni usually live far away, and the community isn't really large enough to produce a bumper crop of volunteers willing to gve up a week to judging speeches.

In short, I've been judging speeches. But because of the vagaries of scheduling, I finished doing so on Tuesday at noon. I spent another day coaching, but when the preliminary rounds were over and my debater hadn't advanced to the semifinals, he left. So since yesterday at 2:30, I've had nothing to do but hang around the hotel. And that's trouble.

I've stayed in hotels before, of course, but always because I had something to do. Here I faced the prospect of nothingness for over 48 hours before my flight back to Dulles at 6:50 pm Friday. I have books--I just started James Hynes' excellent The Lecturer's Tale--but no human contact other than that coming across the wires to my room's TV. And since my home has no cable, the TV is a constant temptation. I've watched more television this week than I have in three years.

I saw the US beat Mexico in the middle of the night to advance in the World Cup. I watched Spain defeat Ireland on penalty kicks. I saw Osmosis Jones uninterrupted on HBO and Total Recall cut to ribbons by the censor on TBS. I watched Sportscenter probably thirteen times and the CNN Headline News loop almost that often. I saw the memorial service for Jack Buck and am ready now to kill that idiotic dude in the Dell computer ads with my bare hands.

I'd forgotten what a huge, heavy monkey television can be. Or maybe it's just that my back has grown weak.

Thank god hotel TVs now have internet connections, too...


6:39 AM

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