Flight

So it's the last day of class, and in the time-honored tradition of last classes, I show a movie. A good one (Live Nude Girls Unite!), but also an admission that I just can't get it up for one more class discussion. The students, too, have used up their intellectual mojo. It is hot--near 90. Life on the Big Lake means three months of March, then suddenly, July!

The students like the movie, and want me to hold office hours after so they can talk about their manifestos. I go to the office, the empty spare room off the lower floor of the house that houses Gender Studies, a home long since converted into a catch-all minority studies center. The administrative staff are spraying table tops with windex downstairs. They invite me to the farewell for the Big Gay History Professor who is leaving Elite University for Yale (yes, him). I nod politely with no intention of going. One of the few benefits of adjuncting is that you don't have to show up and make kissy face if you don't want to.

The students come to the office in groups. They want me to look at their final projects, their manifestos, because they want to see my reaction. They are proud of them. I notice that their shyness is gone. The high point of my day is when they tell me that they some of them had been advised to take Gender Studies to boost their GPA. "But it's hard!" they say, in a complaining voice, not complaining. They love that it was hard. I love them for liking the difficulty. We are not sure how to close things, but I know that saying goodbye is really why they have come. It's a nice thank you. I thank them too. They were lovely.

The growing hum outside my door tells me the farewell party is picking up. Students come in, close the door to keep the noise down, and finally, leave. The last one marches off, and I peek out after them, realizing with a sinking heart that I have failed to make my exit in a timely manner.

The entire room is full of people chatting with their reception faces on. Earnest, leaning into their cake and napkins. I see to my horror that someone I used to know is in the room, talking away but facing the other direction, away from my door. An ex friend, the one who dropped me a while ago and who decided not to say hello to me in the hotel lobby at MLA (ok--to be fair, I decided then not to say hi either). Trapped! What can I do? Slink by in my damp and unflattering t-shirt, heavy, defeated? Me, the adjunct; her, next year's director of Gender Studies at Elite University, both of us the same age. Once we were young hopefuls. We double-dated with our respective spouses. I fed her cat when she went away, a lifetime ago.

I can't do it. I just can't go into that room.

Fortunately, my little borrowed office has, oddly, two doors, opposite each other on two facing walls. The door less traveled by leads to a little hallway and bathroom. From that hallway, which opens further down one side of the crowded main room, I might be able to reenter the big room and go out the rear of the building without being noticed. It is worth a try. The alternative is sitting in an office with bad wireless reception for an hour, hiding.

I quietly close and lock the door opening to the main room. I turn out the light and unlock the other, opposite door, making sure that the knob locks behind me. First stop, bathroom. Then stride purposively into the empty end of the big room, turn without looking away from the crowd, and proceed to the back entrance. I have never used this door, but I know it is there.

All goes well until I try the back door. The lock won't turn. A sign tells me not to use it, that it won't lock behind me if I go out. I recall that security locks up the building every evening, checking all the doors before setting the alarm. It will be ok. Have.To.Get.Out.Now. I fumble with the lock, feeling like any minute someone will see me, stop me, and lead me back to the Room of Shame. Can't people see me? Isn't anyone wondering what I am doing here at the end of the hall? At last I slide the bolt across and fall out into the open air, choking with panic.

Outside, the air is heavy, and it is raining softly, sizzling and evaporating even before it hits the pavement. No one has followed me. I turn, puzzling the best route to my car. The sun is trying to break through the rain, making the air look pink. I move south, the only way out of the alley, towards a huge puddle directly across the path I have to take. When I reach it, however, I see immediately that it isn't that deep at all, only so clear that it looks like a lake. I step over it and into it, the water barely reaching the tops of the thick soles of my sandals. I tiptoe and hop, holding my pantlegs up like a ball gown, feeling the warm drops splash my toes. With each step the rooftop spires reflected in the puddle waver, dissolve, and reappear, dark spikes moving in the water under my feet, like the shadows of migrating birds.

so zoo me

It's been hard to blog lately because of the end of the season, the end of the quarter, and the end, for me, of who I've been. While there will be a lot of continuity in the next several years, there will also be, well, not. So I decided to get back on the bloggin train with an entry about nothing in particular that reminded me how intensely thinking can happen in everyday life without any institutional assistance at all. After all, we think hard every day, even at the zoo.

Today we went to the zoo. My dad is visiting, and we thought we should ramble through the park a bit. I don't know why it made me feel better to go to the zoo, but it did. Maybe it's because I live in a great city with a free zoo. Maybe it's because being outside on the first warm day of early summer connects a person to everything and everyone again after a long winter. Maybe it's good to remember the rest of the planet, and the creatures on it, as a way of keeping perspective. All I know is that zoos are places where you can't help thinking--about captivity and freedom, about preservation and ecology, about ethics and species, about unconscious and conscious ways of living, about habits, about mental darkness, about selflessness, relaxation, justice, civic duty, community, communication, separation, clumsiness, and meaning well. It's not that zoos are nice or horrible. They're just very, very complicated places.

So we went to the zoo. And I'm putting up a giraffe because there is something inspirational about such an improbable creature being able to reach so high.

Happy 150th Birthday Dr. Freud!

Happy Birthday May 6th to the man who made postmodernism possible. I discovered Freud for real in graduate school, in the wake of Juliet Mitchell's reclamation of Freud for feminism, and feminism's reclamation of Freud for Lacan. I've been trying to teach him to skeptical undergraduates ever since. The really amazing thing about Freud is that he tried to listen to women and he took women on as students in an era in which such things were marvelous. He laid the groundwork for the critique of so-called "normal" heterosexuality, showing that almost nobody isn't sexually queer in some way, and outlining in painstaking detail the difficult road children must take as they try to assume the burdens of gendered subjects. He found reluctance, nostalgia, sadness, deflection, self-sacrifice, loyalty, loathing, and courage in every form of human attachment. His writing is often fair and kind, and the mind revealed in his work is one genuinely moved by all kinds of people.

One of my favorite Freud moments occurs is his essay about Leonardo da Vinci and sublimation, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. Positing that Leonardo's attraction to his own mother was the source of his homosexuality, Freud attempts to account for Leonardo's artistic output and scientific curiousity by theorizing that Leonardo literally transformed his homosexual impulses into art and research. Noting the playfulness of Leonardo's mind, Freud writes:

"Indeed, the great Leonardo remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way; it is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries. It is only we who are unsatisfied that he should have constructed the most elaborate mechanical toys for court festivities and ceremonial receptions, for we are reluctant to see the artist turning his power to such trifles.

. . .It is probable that Leonardo's play-instinct vanished in his maturer years, and that it too found its way into the activity of research which represented the latest and highest expansion of his personality. But its long duration can teach us how slowly anyone tears himself from his childhood if in his childhood days he has enjoyed the highest erotic bliss, which is never again attained."

The wistfulness of this passage always gets me--the appreciation of the innate playfulness and creativity in everyone, the ominous sense of the world ready to crush that creativity and replace it with the gravitas of respectability, the longing of the Freud who comes through in this brief moment as a man trapped by adulthood, a prisoner gazing back at the bright patch of sunshine receding from him, as childhood recedes from us all.

Detachability

It's very strange to live your life without getting attached to any of it. Most people like to think of themselves as hard-headed, rational, practical. It comforts us to imagine we control how permeable we are. What goes out and comes in needs monitoring, as if love and satisfaction are scarce emotions, and precious. If you are an adjunct, you need to not have an investment in your students, the curriculum, or the university where you teach. It helps if you try not to notice how beautiful the trees are, all in bloom, or the pockets of hot perfume they create as you walk to class. Even better if you block out the feel of the sun warming your skin and hair as you cross from your car, and stop yourself from admiring the steps down, across, then up that negotiate a dip in the landscape next to the hockey fields,stop yourself, too, from lingering on the vast parklike places gleaming with new greens and yellows as far as you can see.

Every spring the blossoming trees amaze me. I always forget about them in the summer, fall, and winter. Especially winter. I think it's because you forget how to smell in the winter, since the air is so cold and there's nothing there, except maybe exhaust, or mud, or maybe a little ozone. When the blossoms come, the rows of ugly buildings are bathed in creams and pinks and delicate gold braid, and the dirtiest sidewalks and roads become sweet pathways littered with delicate crushed petals. Their appearance tears at your heart because you know you can only love them today, maybe tomorrow at most. They are supremely undependable. In a matter of days the wind will rip down all their lacy finery, and the hot green shoots of summer will uncurl their naked little fists in every tree,all up and down the block.

When you get to class, and you have a particularly fun discussion that day about sexism in the workplace, or beauty culture, or docile bodies and working out, you have to remember you will never see these students again. You have to enjoy the conversation just for now, and then let it go. There are four more weeks, and then the quarter is over, and it all ends for good.

So you enjoy them. They say funny things that make everyone laugh. You bond with them about the difficulties of gendered self-presentation in the workplace. You like it that they like the assignment they are working on. You grow fond of them, because they are learning, thinking hard, strategizing how to use what they have learned in the world. You notice that they are more comfortable, more open, and that those awkward pauses in class have disappeared. This intimacy is so beautiful, and so fleeting.

Then class is over, and you move into the hall, out the doors, onto the sundrenched grass once more. The air smells like blossoms, heated with an undercurrent of cool wind, as if somewhere out there on those green fields the ice is still melting. Keep walking past the blossoms, past the flowers, past the muddy fields. Find your car and drive away, across the city. Say goodbye every day, a small goodbye for now, the first goodbye of larger ones that will come later, inevitably, no matter how much or how little you try to feel about them.

She's Unable to Dine Today, Madam

I am sorry to find that Anonymous Professor has taken his blog down. I personally thought his habit of calling people "bitches" and "morons" was horrible, but he should be able to have a blog if he wants one. My biggest beef was with Inside Higher Ed linking to one of his particularly hateful posts, but I also took issue with The Chronicle's snotty "Thomas Benton" as well. I do feel as if everybody has the right to free speech, but every time I found myself feeling the least bit sorry, I reread Anonymous Professor and felt too disgusted to even think about retracting a word.

Internet blogging is not the same as private journaling, anymore than giving a speech in a town square is the same as talking to one's self. Anyone can happen by and read it. So why are people so bent out of shape when their rants get read?

R. I. P., Dr Mandrake. I'm sure we haven't heard the last of you.

Miss Manners Regrets

Is it our job to teach manners? Should it be?

As a bossy oldest sibling, I am happy to enforce norms and box ears. However, some bloggers take issue with "raising" students as well as teaching them. This is a point which also turns on gender in several ways, since it may very well be that those of us who resist and resent feminizing roles in the academy might also draw the line at being Mommy in the realm of manners, while those of us who do not feel particularly feminized might be perfectly happy to enforce better behavior. Or, some of us who HAVE experienced quite a lot of pressure to "act like a girl" in the academy--ie be daughter-like or mommy-like in legible ways--still might not mind being Miss Manners, because there's something satisfying and powerful about putting young louts in their place. After all, Mary Poppins understood that most of the fun of being in charge was being PERFECTLY superior in every way.

I am in the latter category.

It may be that it is related to teaching English, as I imply in my earlier post. After all, if we draw the line at knowledge (I am teaching Contemporary British Lit., and that's ALL I'm teaching), then I guess we would only teach writing in writing classes. That seems absurd. If we read Foucault, we know that besides our expertise, we are also correctly training docile bodies. That also makes the issue of not teaching manners and civility seem like an arbitrary line in the sand. After all, we are already doing so much more than teaching our actual narrow fields.

I wonder what you think?

hatefulprofessor.com

This seems to be I Hate My Students Week in higher education. In the Chronicle, the pseudonymous Thomas Benton writes of "The Seven Deadly Sins of Students," while on the web, Inside Higher Ed features a blog by Anonymous Professor titled, simply, "I Hate My Students." "Benton" hates his students because they fall behind (sloth), grade grub (greed), cover their vulnerability and terror with hostility (anger), wear revealing clothes (lust), eat whole chickens in front of him in class, apparently without his intervention (gluttony), express the frustration they feel at their professor's alienation and indifference by attacking smarter, more together students (envy), and wish to be better and better off than their parents and yes, their teachers (pride).

I felt horror when I read this: "It seems hard these days to find a student in class whose mouth is not stuffed with food. Such students will often say that they have no other time to eat, but previous generations — who were no less busy — managed to consume small snacks between classes. That is why colleges have vending machines."

So let those students rushing to or from jobs, and those students on financial aid overscheduling themselves, eat cake, right?

Reading Benton, I am reminded of professors I know in disciplines other than English who complain about teaching writing to undergraduates. The sad fact is that it is ALL of our jobs to teach writing to undergraduates, because that's what we do: we teach. Similarly, when students sit half-naked eating chickens while trashing each other in class, it is our job to teach them manners. Sadly, most people don't have manners anymore, but the world is usually always improved by civility. Why are his students so indifferent, desperate, freaked-out, naked, hungry, hopeless, and grandiose? Is anybody talking to them, working with them, giving a shit about them? What the hell is going on here?

Anonymous Professor hates his students because they grade grub, write crappy papers, and want genuine feedback from him about their ideas as they relate to the discipline, rather than the responses of a TA paid to grade for him. It is clear from his tone that he doesn't respect them; he calls them "Stupid Bitch" and "Moron" in his blog, which is structured to show what he actually said ("I'll be happy to give you more substantive comments") and what he wanted to say/should have said ("Hey, moron, no one will give a fuck about what content you have when you don't even know the difference between than and then or weather and whether. They will just laugh at you. So shut up and sit down and fuck yourself.")

Wow. And they pay you to teach ANYWHERE?

Students are frustrated because they are paying tuition at rates that terrify them, their parents, and their spouses/partners. They are working hard for a degree that may not lead to a job when they graduate. They are working full-time jobs. They have kids. I have taught students from Trenton and Newark whose large families lived on less than 12K a year. I have taught culinary students up since 3:30 am cooking who wished they never had to write another paper. I have taught first-generation college students from immigrant families, students working, going to school, and raising families of their own. I've taught kids who just want to party in Florida, kids who giggle when I joke about coming to class stoned--because they ARE stoned. I've taught geeks and sorority types, athletes and rich kids, students from fancy suburban high schools and students from the inner city.

Sometimes they have driven me crazy, but I never hated them. Their arrogance usually masks terror at what they don't know, so you teach them. Their envy is a fear that they can't compete, so you teach them. When they don't do the reading, you make them do it there. When they are frustrated or scared, you encourage them.

It's your job.

What they don't need is some dickless wonder with an incredibly nasty attitude who doesn't have the courage to say something close to what he needs to say to get their respect. Why don't they respect you, I wonder, reading his loathsome hurl of a blog. How can they not adore you, when you clearly possess such empathy, such respect, such strong boundaries?

And what the hell is up with Inside Higher Ed giving a forum to this moron?

Back to the Hellmouth, or, You Can't Make This S#!* Up

If you were writing a novel about my life, what new, sadistic twist would you add, just to keep things interesting? Let's review the plot so far.

Previously, on Sfrajett's City:

Excellent Public U Grad school, followed by four years on the job market, a job, finally, in an expensive Southern city at the miserly salary of 38K, with a friendly but strangely factionalized bored small department, a girlfriend who refused to move there, a new job the following year in an even more expensive city at a mere 5K more, an unfriendly, huge, completely alienated department with massive personnel changes (three different Heads in four years, minority scholar desertion, famously self-promoting new Dean with Something to Prove), a girlfriend who left anyway and a decimated academic leave, the realization that my book wouldn't fly and that I'd have to write a new one fast, a mother diagnosed with brain cancer and dead seven months later that same year, a forgotten fifth-year review (they just "forgot" to do it) also in the same year, a new Head who didn't think much of me, a Dean who wanted only Ivy League junior faculty, a fabulous new girlfriend, an unfabulous turn-down for tenure, a great book contract on the new book I wrote very fast, the department Head's promise to re-open my case, the decision not to reopen my case, a bad job market again and again, unemployment, depression, the decision to go to law school.

Are you keeping up?

So in this episode, I'm enjoying a lovely, no-strings sojourn teaching Gender 101 at Elite City University. Fall, moving, and law school readjustment seem far away. I keep having these wonderful dreams at night where I find new rooms at Elite University, rooms that somehow will help me be able to get my life back. These dreams make me feel happy in the morning. It's a beautiful spring day. The forsythia is blooming, the blossoming trees are blooming, the hibernating bears that work and live here are rolling their tummies out to the Big Park jogging paths. Everyone is happy. My class has spring fever, so they are useless today, but it's still ok.

I come home and I'm checking my messages yesterday, and I see a call from a number at my old school. The one that fired me. I listen to the listless, heavily-medicated voice of one of the incredibly unhappy department staff tell me a box of books arrived there with my name on it, and could I please tell them what to do with it. My books. My book.

The one I wrote to get tenure there, remember? Keep up.

The stupid press, in other words, has mailed my frackin' book to Satan's University, where I no longer work or wish to work or remember or ever think about again, ever. All I have to do is go back to this hellmouth and pick it up.

I slump against a chair. The good news that my book is actually out is quickly replaced by the horror of what I might have to go through to get it. Immediately I imagine parking the car--no, PAYING to park the car--and walking across the street, across the broad, flat, public expanse of concrete and grass where I will be unmistakeable to anyone going in or out of the building that houses the English department, the Administration, Registrar, all the other language departments, Gender Studies . . . the list goes on. The main building on the east side of campus, in other words.

I imagine running that gauntlet only to take the elevator up to the twentieth floor, where I can walk by everyone's office on the way to the English department. Once there, I can declare my name, have others overhear, see the flicker and snicker in the eyes of the medicated secretaries.

If the box is big, I can struggle out the door, into the elevator, and across the concrete expanse once more, fleeing in humiliation with this last, sad vestige of my academic self, the book that should have been a Professional Achievement.

I feel myself slipping into an Incredibly Bad Mood.

GF comes home and immediately declares she will fetch the box for me. I am momentarily cheered, until I begin to imagine sitting at the curb, giving her directions to get to the 20th floor. I don't want her to have to go there, either. Things get even more complicated because her ex works at Satan's University, and wouldn't it be perfect if she ran in to her? But that's a whole other story.

I call a friend to commiserate because I know he will cheer me up. He congratulates me for the book coming out, and declares that it is PERFECT that they sent my book to Satan's U. Warming to the topic, he theorizes my clearly-labeled box of books as a kind of brilliant serendipitous affront, a real statement, an out-and-out rebuke to the mess of misfits who didn't tenure me.

Sometimes I love him so much.

GF, Phone Call and I all pour ourselves drinks and toast each other. We are all cheered up. Friends save the day.

This morning, in a sluggish monotone, Satan's secretary offers to mail the box to me.

Hell avoided!

Easter Bitch

I thought in this season I would republish this old story from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette because it still makes me choke convulsively on my own t-shirt collar. As you can see from this picture above (not part of the original story), the Processional Pageant of the Penitent Bunny seems to be spreading to other communities around this great nation of ours.

Easter Bunny whipped at church show; some families upset

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

Associated Press

A church trying to teach about the crucifixion of Jesus performed an Easter show with actors whipping the Easter bunny and breaking eggs, upsetting several parents and young children.

People who attended Saturday’s performance at Glassport’s memorial stadium quoted performers as saying, “There is no Easter bunny,” and described the show as being a demonstration of how Jesus was crucified.

Melissa Salzmann, who took her 4-year-old son J.T., said the program was inappropriate for young children. “He was crying and asking me why the bunny was being whipped,” Salzmann said.

Patty Bickerton, the youth minister at Glassport Assembly of God, said the performance wasn’t meant to be offensive. Bickerton portrayed the Easter rabbit and said she tried to act with a tone of irreverence.

“The program was for all ages, not just the kids. We wanted to convey that Easter is not just about the Easter Bunny, it is about Jesus Christ,” Bickerton said.

Performers broke eggs meant for an Easter egg hunt and also portrayed a drunken man and a self-mutilating woman, said Jennifer Norelli-Burke, another parent who saw the show in Glassport, southeast of Pittsburgh.

“It was very disturbing,” Norelli-Burke said. “I could not believe what I saw. It wasn’t anything I was expecting.”

Fun With Number Two

File this one under: Huh?

Money Magazine just reported that the second-best job to have in the country (behind software engineer, at number one) is "college professor." Money's rankings are based on level of stress, pay, and growth possibilities, among other things. Money acknowledges that competition for tenure-track jobs will remain stiff, but that higher demand for faculty is bound to happen, given an exploding population of students. Money thinks that the average professor's salary is 82K a year.

"So by 'college professor' do they mean 'full professor'?" you ask. The answer is no. Apparently they are factoring in what they call "moonlighting adjuncts" as well. It's a good thing they factor these in, too, since the fantasy that retiring tenured professors will be replaced by tenure-track lines is, well, a fantasy. In the meantime, if anybody knows anyone who has one of these low-stress, high-paying jobs, let me know.

Swan Song

I want to hate Elite University. I want to feel cross at the students for being so privileged, so confident, so enthusiastic, so (mostly) white. I want to hate the campus, so noveau and midwestern and striving, its 1920s and 30s Oxford/Princeton/Yale bespired and gargoyled buildings so out of date when they were built, even by gothic revival standards. I want to resent the immensely pleased faces of the faculty and administrators floating by me as I leave class, their clothes so respectable, their hair so gently mussed, their smiles the drugged smiles of cult devotees. I watch yet another boy in sandals bob across the quad, the afternoon sun making a golden halo of his long, soft brown curls. Of course you're happy, I think to myself. All you have to worry about is writing papers and passing tests. You have the best teachers, the smartest classmates, the brightest future.

I test my grumpy attitude out on each figure I pass as I walk to my car. The girl with maroon tips and a pierced eyebrow who waddles on her way to class. No, I can't hate her. She looks a little out of place. She's overweight and awkward, and for some reason I decide she can't be rich. The boy with the dreadlocks might be smug enough to hate, but his battered army jacket is a little soiled, like it might be his real winter jacket, maybe for a couple of years now. Another guy with a bad haircut is walking very slowly because his backpack is so loaded down with books I'm surprised it hasn't burst open. An older woman with a lined face and fading blonde hair is wearing a puffy, unfashionable down jacket that also looks as if it could use a washing machine. She is obviously no friend to either sun block or makeup. Can't really hate her, either. I'm looking for rich kids and frat-boy types, but all I see are misfits, nerds, and sweet, dorky intellectuals who don't seem to notice the peeling paint and indoor-outdoor carpet, the sooty buildings and dull classrooms of this school. There is a grail inside their heads, shining out of their eyes. They are living for something higher, something more than what is here around them.

In fact, I'm finding it hard to hate anybody here, or anything about this gig. When I go in to class, the students are respectful and hesitant at first, then their ideas and feelings come tumbling out. They have not only done the reading--they've digested it. They have ideas about it, criticisms, hypotheses. Some think Roe v. Wade is a curiously woman-centered document. Others are suspicious of the conclusion that everything rests on the bourgeois confidentiality of a woman's relationship with her doctor. I let them go. I rein them in. I remind them what the manifestos wanted. I try to make sure the two really talkative boys don't take up all the space, though I love how excited they are. I try to get them to think hard about Othering in Simone de Beauvoir, but then let go when they also want to just talk about the plot of the original Stepford Wives. They like the comfort of all these different levels. One chubby long-haired boy scrunches up his face when he thinks hard. Another young woman remains cool and impassive in her groovy silk headscarves and big earrings, asking smart questions from the far corner. A tall, gangly blond boy whose mouth falls wide open and stays like that when he gets an idea has finally gotten up the courage to sit next to me at the discussion table. I try to resist them, but I can't help it. I think I love them.

I know I should get paid more. I put together a great syllabus. There's a lot of reading. It takes years of experience, education, and research to be a stimulating teacher. Still, sometimes when I look around the room after a great discussion I can't believe they're giving me money to do this. And I can't believe people who get to teach here for good could ever not know how lucky they are. This is what you hope for in grad school. This is what you think a professor's life will be like. This is what it almost never is.

No wonder so many people walk by me with gentle smiles on their faces.

I tell a friend of mine who taught here as a postdoc that I can't find anything not to like about being here. He agrees that there is no place like it that he has ever been, before or since. "People really care about ideas there," he says. "I think it's a great place for you to be right now in your life. A perfect Swan Song."

I feel myself getting irritated. Swan Song? Is that what my career is doing? Dying?

I was hoping that law school would give me new things to think about. I don't really think of it as an ending--more like a road leading out of what for me has become the cul-de-sac of literary studies. The other day I had a conversation with someone who works out at my gym and can't get a job. She has an Ivy League degree and a postdoc at Elite University. She told me that the MFAs hired as creative writers are teaching all the modernist courses in a lot of departments now, since that's what so many undergrads want to read. I thought about all the PhD programs continuing to accept more applicants every year than they will ever be able to place, a pool of today's exploitable graduate students that will become tomorrow's exploitable adjuncts. I told her I was going to law school. She told me she was going back to her Ivy school to adjunct for a couple more years. "If I can just hang on," she said. "I just have to hang on."

I think about how law school seems so different from my academic world of scarcity and myth. Law students know there are probably going to be jobs for them when they finish. The professors know it too. There's a ridiculous amount of optimism. I wonder if that optimism is misplaced. How could things get better? How can it not be just another delusion on the road of delusions that make up my student loan debts? I hug close to my heart a recent study I read that found that while law firms have grown bigger and bigger to accomodate new business, the number of law applicants has fallen, setting off fierce competition for graduates, second-year summer associates, and even some first-years among employers. It's hard to believe, but there seem to be a lot of opportunities out there for a JD-PhD. It seems, finally, like there might be more to life than hanging on.

When I look around my classroom, I see a lot of optimism. I see students whose liberal arts education has given them critical minds, political consciences, and the desire to make the world a better place. I would never recommend a vocational major for them. I believe in their broad education, and I hope they will take a wider, bolder road after they graduate than the one I took. I didn't know what to do after college, or how to do anything other than go to school. They seem less worried about what they can get and more interested in what they can do. I wish I had been more like them when I was their age. I'm glad I get to know them know, though. They are curious and kind. Their education is a privilege they seem to take very seriously. I don't think this class is a Swan Song, for me or for them. These days, when I walk out of the classroom into the afternoon air, across a campus that smells and feels like the first muddy green days of spring, everything feels more like a beginning.

Ague Potion

Here's a potion for the colds, flus, and agues that come in the change of seasons. Not only does it work, but it soothes your throat and gets you tipsy enough for sleep. The original recipe was from a friend I used to have in New Jersey who is a chef from Provence. My dog used to bark at him because he had a beard. Then one day he brought her filet from his restaurant, and then she drooled whenever she saw him. Me, my then gf, him, and his wife were all good friends until his wife went psycho. Even though I met them through my then girlfriend, and I really don't care about anyone's weight, and I'm gay, his wife decided that I was making fun of her weight and I was out to steal her husband. I got him running and he taught me how to make a great caesar dressing. I still have a picture of me and then-gf holding their first child. I painted a little chair for this child with the man in the moon and stars on it. I take his wife's psychosis as a sign that I was once beautiful, which I was then. The dog is dead now and the relationship with then-gf long over, but I'm glad I have the potion, and the caesar dressing, and my gf now. She has added garlic, hates the lemon, and always, always drinks the whiskey.

POTION

boiling water
lemon juice from a lemon
honey
cloves
cayenne
fresh ginger
tea, preferably echinacea, gypsy cold care, or both
cinnamon
2 shots whiskey (bourbon, Jameson, etc.)
several chopped cloves of garlic (my current gf's addition)

Boil water, cayenne, cloves, garlic, ginger, and cinnamon until you feel it has all steeped in--5 min or so. Pour over tea bags in a mug, straining out garlic chunks and cloves (if you want). Add lemon juice, honey, and whiskey. Stir and drink while hot.

The cayenne helps burn out the cold, and along with the ginger is good for intestinal distress; the garlic is good for resistance, the honey and cloves help a sore throat, the lemon has lots of vitamin C, the cinnamon makes it spicy good, and the whiskey is god's gift to man. I swear you will feel better and sleep real good, or at least soothe your throat, quiet your stomach, and get a good buzz. GF swears by my potion. Feel better.

Anniversary Day

We had been having a lazy Saturday when gf had a phone converstion that reminded her that today was the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. There was a rally planned in downtown Chicago and a big march down the middle of Michigan Avenue at 7pm. It was 2 o'clock, sunny, and in the 30s. We had no plans. Somehow we had missed the marches, rallies, and protests of the last three years. We talked against the war and taught against the war, but we hadn't marched against the war. Other days of protest had been busy, freezing, inconvenient. Other people had taken the trouble to represent us while we had done other things. I looked at her and sighed. There really was no getting out of it this time. "You realize we have to go," I said. She nodded. I knew we were both thinking that really, it was time to be counted.

At five we walked to the train with hats, gloves, a camera, and a flask of bourbon. We met a friend at the train and rode in. By 6 we were in a schoolyard, watching people decorate floats. A skinny boy in a studded leather jacket drew the anarchist "A" on a brick wall with chalk. Young people with fucsia hair collected money in buckets, and older guys who looked like Jerry Garcia passed out socialist broadsheets. Women wearing anti-war buttons carried home-made signs. Police in riot gear lined up all along one side of the street.

Then more and more people started to arrive. People with small children, college students, grandmothers, Gulf War veterans, high school kids, teachers. We wandered out of the yard into the street and realized there were already hundreds of people waiting to start the march. It began to feel a little exciting. A menacing hooded figure towered near us, rising from a float like the grim reaper, but when we walked around it we saw that there was no face, only the covered head of an Abu Ghraib prisoner standing with outstretched arms, its feet trodding the corpses of dead civilians.

The crowd swelled and grew restless, and finally stepped off with a roar. We walked, mincingly at first so as not to kick the people in front of us in the crowd. People played plastic buckets and blew whistles. Some tried chants and songs, or rapped into megaphones. The bucket drummer near us was dressed as a banana. He played a mean round-off, and I realized that I was unconsciously guarding right, checking to see that the people around me were marching in a straight line. They were not, of course, and this disturbed me for a while until I a) realized what I was doing, and b) got used to the anarchy of the crowd. Of course I had marched in many gay pride parades and protest parades, but apparently for some reason tonight, old high school marching band habits came rushing back to me. Is it because the dull ache of today's conservatism feels so much like the Reagan 80s come back again? Or did I just forget who I am, the way more and more I get moments where I can't remember what year it is?

Ever since 9-11, my mother's death, and my tenure battle lost, I feel moments of time vertigo creeping up on me, or rather, seeping into me like the water from little waves, diluting my sense of the here and now. Instead of feeling dizzy, I forget the year, how old I am, whether someone is still my friend or my lover, where I live now. Which things are still before me? Which ones are over and done with? Who have I lost and who is here walking beside me?

I wonder if these times, these politics and this war, feel so cyclical, so much like bad reruns of battles we thought were won and done, that maybe large numbers of us are whirling sometimes in little moments of time vertigo like this. Women on the internet are talking seriously, SERIOUSLY about how to set up illegal abortion clinics and emergency networks for each other. The lies about the economy being fine, about the war being just, about the future being bright, are wearing thin. It reminds people of something. What is it? Genocide. Teenage cannon-fodder. Class war. Back-alley abortions. Rich people who don't know how much milk costs. Gas lines. Hamburger Helper. Anti-war protests. Haven't we been here before?

When I was in third grade I told my father at dinner what I had heard from a boy at school about Americans being selfish murderers who killed babies in Vietnam and wanted to take over the world. My father slammed his milk glass down and pointed his finger at me. "Listen to me, young lady," he said loudly, almost shouting. "We are the greatest country in the world! We are the greatest, freest, luckiest country there is, and if you don't believe me, you just go visit other places and see how good you have it!" I remember being surprised at his emotion. I was just repeating something I'd heard.

My father doesn't believe in America anymore. He thinks all politicians are crooks and that the best we can do is keep our heads down and protect our assets. The people marching tonight feel something else, I think. I think they believe we can be something better. Walking down Michigan Avenue, listening to the songs and the cheerful banter and the earnest plastic buckets all around me, I felt the pull of cyclical time. It might be that the 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s, and all the sexual freedom and social dignity we fought for during those times, is over. But I think that's wrong. I think the underground is starting to come alive again, and on days like today, you can feel it rousing itself, like some hibernating creature, to shake off a long impermanent sleep.

Huge Luck

Here's a shout out there to all those adjuncts on the quarter system facing uncertain times. It's that part of the year when enrollments dwindle, and the trickle of cash you hoped might last till June dries up in the blink of an eye. You know you shouldn't depend on it. You try to keep yourself from hoping, but you can't imagine why, with students requesting you for the no-brainer (I mean this. You literally take your brain out like a supplementary drive and check it until class is over) Comp II class they have to take next quarter, there won't be something for you. You let yourself believe that maybe you'll make it through a good part of the summer. In a fit of luxurious hopefulness, you buy three paperback novels discounted to half the price by independent sellers on Amazon. You think maybe you really can finally replace those two expensive plastic hubcaps stolen from one side of your car by the kids up the street when you had that flat tire for two weeks. It's not a big break you're hoping for, really--just a little piece of something to sustain you as you wait for the upswing to happen. A tiny bit of luck in the first optimistic days of spring.

Thursday was the last day of class at Culinary College so I made sure I was there in time for my Last Free Meal. It was a doozy, as usual, with five different stations--hand-cooked and assembled cajun pasta, three different fish entrees, a salad bar filled with oysters on the half shell, a peppery roasted lamb, a pizza station, a salad bar. Desserts galore. I always try not to eat too much, but I took as many oysters as I could reasonably fit on my tray. I collected papers in two classes, then checked in with the coordinator to find out about final grades and possible spring courses. I found him at his desk eating salad out of a "to go" plastic clamshell, looking glum. We spent twenty minutes talking about final grade submissions before I asked him point-blank about courses, and he told me there was nothing. He could have told me up front. He knew from my flurry of emails that I was desperate. But he held back, hoping I wouldn't ask. Why?

He explained thet Spring enrollment was slack. Fewer courses were being offered, and most of these had to go to full-time people whose contracts required three or more courses per quarter. He didn't have anything for anybody, and by anybody, he meant adjuncts. The coordinator showed me the schedule, and pointed out the different classes and who would get them. But I could see over his shoulder that actually, one of us HAD gotten a class, out of the four of us that had started that quarter. I recognized the initials of one of the adjuncts penciled in. I didn't say anything. I know the adjunct, and I remembered that while a couple of us had gotten two courses to teach this past quarter, he had only gotten one. It seemed fair to give him a second course. The weird thing was, the coordinator was lying about it when he said nobody was getting anything. He didn't have to lie, but he did it anyway, hesitating when he came to the initials I recognized. I felt bad for him. His life was about holding back information and lying to people. He felt bad, too. He looked miserable. I think it must kill your soul a little every day to know that your job is to treat people like they are expendable. He promised to keep us in mind for summer, for next fall, trying to convince himself that he actually could reward loyalty and good work. But his hands are tied. Culinary College is run by a for-profit educational company. No programs will be built there, ever. As he gave his little speech, I laughed somewhere in my own head. See you next fall? Fat chance, sucka.

I drove out of the parking lot for what now seemed like the last time, but I didn't feel sentimental. Better to get out before my facade of taking it seriously cracked. When I swung by the apartment after class to pick up gf for a much-needed trip to Costco, though, I burst into tears. I was a failure. I couldn't even keep a stupid comp job at a sham college. Gf cheered me up with an exhortation to remember everything I had to look forward to later in the year, how far I'd come, how everything would work out. She offered to drive, and we switched places for the short journey into the land of suburban bulk-buying. At Costco, as usual, toilet paper is cheap and plentiful, and strangers offer us exotic reheated foods in little paper cups. Everything is giant-sized. Cereal boxes and Starbucks bags of coffee have huge, Mesezoic dimensions. That which was once big will be big again. Think big! Buy big! Dream big!

When we get home a letter in the mail tells me I have gotten a merit scholarship to Neighboring Big State University law school, putting it in the running with my in-state University law school. Cheered, I go to the back room to check my email, and find a solicitation from Elite University in town to teach an intro to gender studies course for them this quarter. One course at Elite pays a little more than I would make teaching two courses at Culinary. Whoa. Now I have to put my brain back in and make a syllabus. The hilarity of moving in two weeks from teaching composition to cooking students who don't want to be there to teaching gender to some of the best students in the country at a better school than any place I have ever taught strikes me. As an adjunct I can go places I never could as a professor; once long ago I thought teaching at Elite University was the most amazing and impossible thing. I knew I could do it, but I also knew it would forever remain out of my reach, reserved for much grander people than me. Under the radar, below the regulatory mechanisms of hiring and tenure, they are happy to have me. "Welcome aboard!" the email says. It doesn't mean status or validation. It means rent money for the next three months. I look at it. I feel lucky.

Saved!

Almost Legal

It's time to make the trip downstate to visit the big law school. I really want gf to come to the open house, to feel like it is our decision and our adventure. She cancels class for the day. She is very busy and very stressed. I assure her that she can bail at the last minute if she needs to, that I will go myself and be Completely Understanding, that I won't sulk or be passive aggressive or store it up as a Wrong in the Emotional Arsenal. But I really, really want her to come.

I make a reservation at the Holiday Inn Express. I arrive home from teaching to find a tiny pile of her clothing on the bed, ready to pack. She prides herself on packing light, which I can't seem to manage, ever. She takes one turtleneck cotton sweater, one pair of underwear, and one pair of socks for an overnight trip. I imagine blizzards requiring layers of socks, colonic disasters necessitating twelve pairs of underwear, and sudden climate changes requiring t-shirts, sweaters, maybe a fez. I am happy when I see her tiny pile, because it means she is coming with me.

It threatens to snow. Far away, rush hour traffic is piling up. We manage to pat the cats and dash to the car. The drive is long and boring. The highway is really, really boring. The blonde, bland fields go from straw to gray, and gray to black, and darkness falls with its raw red heaviness, and we are still driving, driving down the country, through all the towns tired of winter.

We find the Holiday Inn Express, finally, off one exit that looks like all the others. The Holiday Inn looks like all the others. But it is brand new, the room smells like new carpet, and the bed--lo! the bed!--is free of the usual scratchy germ-ridden polyester bedspread. Instead, it has a white cotton duvet cover encasing the puffy goodness of a real duvet. The bed is puffy goodness. The pillows are legion, not the one or two creepy flat things you lump hopelessly under your head on a brick of a cheap mattress. Gf looks around, sighs, sits down happily, and asks why we ever have to go home.

Even dinner is a miracle. Driving around looking for restaurants, I spot the sign for a steakhouse. Inside are two big pits in the middle of the floor, around which people, mostly beefy heartlandish boys, are gruffly poking steaks, which they are cooking themselves. In a refrigerator nearby sit piles of thick red cuts, strips and porterhouses and filets and T-bones. Two middle-aged ladies with fading bobs cackle happily together at one of the grills, clutching big mugs of flourescent pink Mai Tais. We are loving them. We are loving this place. We are loving the cool taste of beer in a glass, and the charred burnt of grilled beef you can cook yourself even in the middle of winter.

Love Story is on the TV when we get back to the room. "We can't watch this movie because it will make me cry, " says gf. We watch it. She cries. We are happy.

Next day we get up and face the orientation. I get a packet of information, apartment listings, maps, and a couple of thick plastic orange pens that say "Class of 2009." I am Class of 2009. Omygod. We go to the opening remarks, and the Dean remarks on the diversity and achievements of this admitted class. He mentions Engineers, PhDs, an English Professor.

English Professor? Did he just say that?

We get a tour of the law school from two incredibly radiant, enthusiastic, lovely law students. They are happy. They love it here. We are happy. This is an incredible place. The building is panelled and beautiful. The foyer is airy, nice. The classrooms are big and plush. There is a new courtroom. The Law Library is breathtaking, with its hundred lovely little reading lamps and long tables and dark rich stacks of books.

We watch a class in criminal procedure. The professor is young and hip and smart. The students are a mixed batch of lame and aggressive. Like many classes, I suspect in here the ones not talking are the best students, quietly taking notes. Then we notice someone is playing Solitaire on her computer. The guy next to her is playing Solitaire. All the best students are playing Solitaire.

Still, the professor manages to keep their attention, to steer them kindly through the material. He is still awkward, just getting his footing. Afterwards we tell him we liked his class. He asks what we do and it comes out. He is suddenly shy. It is his first year as an Assistant Professor. Luckily, we have to go to another panel. I wonder if it will be like this, feeling strange about revealing myself to professors who should be colleagues. How can I be a student, be under the radar? I don't want to set people off, feel shame, be a target, or come off as arrogant. I am a student now, in this field, not a colleague. I tuck this away to think about more.

At lunch we are joined by two professors. One is fierce and logorreic. She brings up a subject in order to lecture you about it. The other professor is innocuous, with thick gray hair that looks like a seventies hairpiece, but is real, and parted in the middle. He listens with dark, thoughtful eyes. I learn from the student sitting next to me that Professor Thoughtful sings opera and runs an a capella group. He is known for belting "Capital Gains," a song my father later tells me is from the musical "Don't Sleep in the Subway," in his intersession tax class. The students adore him. Professor Manic asks what brought me to law school. I take a deep breath and try to answer her. She cuts me off after two sentences, ready to talk. I nod and smile until it starts to hurt. Professor Thoughtful casts his mild eyes on me and starts speaking softly about how I might be interested in education and employment discrimination law. He tells me this is a growing field, and one urgently needed. I thank him. I may indeed be interested. I watch him as he leaves the table, a kind, accomplished, modest, jaunty man.

The Assistant Dean stops me and asks if I am coming. He tells me that my story jumped out at him from four thousand applications. I am glad, and a little uneasy. Who wants that kind of story? But I am glad to be wanted. Very glad.

At the end of the final panel they give us T-shirts with the law school name on it, and the words, "Class of 2009" on the left sleeve. I take one happily. I am the Class of 2009. In the parking lot we run into one of the other admitted students, and we tell her how much we like it here. She is not sure; she wants to meet women in another city. We shrug and tell her we hope she changes her mind. We are a we now, in this together, making decisions together, trying to figure out life together. This feels nice. We get in the car to drive home, each expressing to the other the hope that the cats haven't broken anything major this time in the apartment. It is a beautiful sunset. There will be lots more like it on this road in the next several years. We look forward to them all.

Civility Procedure

If you want to feel better about your life, check out the "Wanna Get Away?" story on today's AOL News and elsewhere about freshly-minted lawyer Dianna Abdala's "bla bla bla" email to a potential employer turning down his job offer. This email, which he circulated to teach her a lesson about the necessity of civility and small communities, has apparently gone around the world, and has even been featured on Nightline. Reading the exchange, I understood why she was initially pissed off at this guy, though I can't condone her incredibly rude and entitled act of dismissing their email exchange with the "bla bla bla" response.

Apparently the guy offered her a job as a criminal litigator, which she accepted, but then he later reneged on the salary offer, claiming he had decided to hire two attorneys instead of just one. She decided to break up with him, er, quit, by email, and he retaliated by calling her immature and unprofessional. Clearly, neither one of them cares much for mediation and alternative dispute resolution, a conclusion made obvious by her strategy of lecturing him about the necessity of contracts, and his retaliatory threat to forward her email to all his friends to teach her a lesson about collegiality in a small community.

Did these guys sleep together? The nastiness on both sides is downright weird. Tired of the exchange, she writes "bla bla bla" when he threatens to expose her, and he forwards her email everywhere. He shook his dick at her and she called his bluff. So he whacked her with it, as hard as he could. Now the world is laughing at her, not him.

Their story is now a parable about professional conduct and email. But it could just as easily be a story about misunderstood sexual and gender dynamics. First, it is about how careful you need to be if you are a woman not to piss men off. Second, it is about how careful you should be if you are a man to remember that women, especially young women, get talked down to all the time, and that it is a sheer effort of will for most of them, every day, not to kick the next man who disses them in the balls. Would he have have cut her salary and expected her not to quit on him if she was a guy? Would he have called her immature and unprofessional? Would she have been so indirect as to quit by voicemail and email? Blown him off with such withering contempt, like he was a geek at a bar who didn't get that she was too cool to date him?

She was young and angry. He was older and angry. She was pretty. He was the boss. She quit. He lectured her. She didn't take it, so he threatened her. She was too stupid to see how the world works. She can't even tell the difference between "sew" and "sow." Now the world is laughing at her, not him.

And there's the lesson.

Foucault was right

One of my jobs these days is writing entries for an encyclopedia of sex and gender. This means that on days I'm not grading freshman comp papers rife with spelling and grammar mistakes ("fist love" remains one of my favorites from this quarter so far), I'm trying to sound knowledgeable about gender dysphoria, or polymorphous perversity, or dildos. Which sounds like fun, and is actually kind of interesting, but sexy? No way. Producing serious discourse about fun objects is nerdy fun, but not hot at all. What's hot is the idea of getting money for writing about, say, "the various forms of lubricants and their sexual uses." Money is definitely hot. The older I get, the hotter it seems.

On the other hand, thinking about this stuff is fun. Gender Dysphoria, for example, was amazing to think about. After all, it's a word coined by doctors to pathologize people for being uncomfortable and anxious about gender--something most of us experience to some degree every day--in order to make it possible for those who can't live with a fracked-up sex-gender system anymore to be able to have access to health care, counseling, hormones, surgery, identities, and narratives. If discomfort with sex-gender is dysphoric, what would Gender Euphoria look like? Could one find perfect happiness somewhere being a woman or a man? Or--better yet--neither? Where is this place? How can I find it?

Are there outlet malls there?

Happy Birthday, Amy

Yesterday was Amy Lowell's birthday. I first discovered her poetry when I was a teenager. I was in that adolescent girl poetry place, and managed to get my hands on the Poetry magazine anthology that contains "Venus Transiens." The first time I read it, I couldn't believe it. At that time in my life I had public boyfriends and secret girlfriends. My secret girlfriends were divided between best friends I had crushes on but would never be able to manage to sleep with, and friends who I had sex with but didn't love. We knew we had to keep things secret, but we got a kick out of our down low bisexual lives, we with our long hair and our boyfriends. We didn't have to make decisions. We made out in the hayloft. And there, with all of life and its choices laid out before me, I found this chivalrous poem from 1915, where one woman looks at another and literally feels the earth move. Sure it's schmaltzy and romantic, with its Botticellisms and pretty details. But it's also so damn lesbian. Impersonal speaker aside and all that, when you read it you KNOW, with the hairs standing up just a little on the back of your neck, that it ain't no man that's supposed to be thinking this on some wave-crashed shore. You know it's a woman. And this poem stays in your head. It's the one you scribble down in a love letter when finally, at college, you let yourself fall in love for the first time.

I'm not saying this poem made me love women, but it sure made me love that I loved women. A lot. And it made it ok because it was poetry, and it was history, and it was heartfelt. So happy 102nd, Amy. Your poetry certainly lives on.

VENUS TRANSIENS

Tell me,
Was Venus more beautiful
Than you are,
When she topped
The crinkled waves,
Drifting shoreward
On her plaited shell?
Was Botticelli's vision
Fairer than mine;
And were the painted rosebuds
He tossed his lady,
Of better worth
Than the words I blow about you
To cover your too great loveliness
As with a gauze
Of misted silver?

For me
You stand poised
In the blue and buoyant air,
Cinctured by bright winds,
Treading the sunlight.
And the waves which precede you
Ripple and stir
The sands at my feet.

The End of the Trail

There's no better way to cure one's self of nostalgia for academia like adjuncting comp sections. Your students don't want to be there. You don't want to be there. This morning there were two major accidents on the way to work, so I took an alternate route. I might as well have walked. I arrived half an hour late, after calling someone to tell the kids to wait. Wait for what?

I tried to explain what an Evaluation argument was. They looked at me blankly. It wasn't that they didn't understand. They just didn't care. They are tired. Worn out. They don't want to see films. They don't want to read New York Times editorials. They don't want to study logical, ethical, or emotional appeals. They just want it to be over.

This is the composition two class. It is one of only two English classes they have to take on the way to their degree. A Bachelor's degree.

Their faces are drawn. My face feels like a transplant. I talk but it takes effort to make my eyes open, my mouth move. I am talking under water. I am half me, half someone else. I need antirejection drugs.

I answer individual questions. These days, I am best at one-on-one. I rely on the kindness that is my autopilot mode. Can't we get through this together? What do I have to do, besides count down the days?

Last week I went to a friend's class at Prestigious University. As I walked across the gothic quadrangles, I noticed how young everyone looked. How thin. How pretty. They all wore expensive-looking performance clothing. They mountaineered their way from one class to another.

In class, we all settled down for a leisurely afternoon. There was discussion, as we knew there would be. Ideas might come, slide away, reappear again. Faces might flicker and go dark, like an electrical storm. They don't know where they are going, but they know they are climbing somewhere, up, up.

I know what it is like to stay too long on a mountain, to start too late, try to make up time, then get below the treeline just as the sun goes out behind slate hills. You walk down in the dark with your companion if you have one, trying to be cheerful, trying not to quarrel. Someone is at fault for the late start. Someone is disrespectful of something--time, nature, human endurance. You can't talk about it. You can't be afraid of bears or fisher cats. When you hear a twig snap, you say it's a deer, or a chipmunk, or a raccoon. Keep talking to each other. Keep walking in the darkness. You know it will turn out all right if you put one foot in front of the other, carefully, talking calmly, peering ahead, and stopping, every now and then, to marvel at the moon.

Wednesday Punctuation Police

If you really were cheating on your girlfriend, would you bring her--or your other dates--here and allow this lost apostrophe to blow your cover?