Wierdest Chapstick Incident Ever.

I am a chapstick addict. Have been since high school. I've even come up with a nickname for the stuff: I call it "Chappy." It's fun and vaguely British. Anyway, I have tubes of it placed strategically around my house, and the tube involved in the incident in question is the one that is on my nightstand.

So last night, I'm getting ready for bed. I hop under the covers, reach over and apply some mint Chapstick, and do a little reading. When I feel my eyelids getting heavy--bingo!!--time to put down the book and fall immediately asleep. But when I turned to put my book down, I noticed that I didn't put the cap back on the chappy! What the hell! So I'm looking around in the covers, trying to find the cap, but there's nothing doing. I was perturbed, obviously, but I twisted it down as low as it would go and switched off the light, figuring that I'd find the cap in the morning.

The next thing I know, I'm having a crazy dream. No, don't ask me; I don't remember what it was about. I do remember that it wasn't all that fun, and when I awoke suddenly, I had something in my hand, but I thought it was something from the dream. But then I realized that it wasn't, indeed, something from the dream, it was, indeed...

The Chapstick cap!!

I'm dead serious here. Somehow, in my dream state, I found the missing cap! This wasn't a dream, either, because I consciously and fully woke myself up knowing full well that this was a story that was meant to be told.

I'm happy to report that when I woke in the morning, the cap was back on the chappy, confirming that at the most, I have an amazingly astute subsconscious mind, and, at the least, I had a terrible, restless night of sleep last night.

At the Amazing Grace...

...there are still people who eat the muffins with a fork. When I was in high school, a friend of mine used to eat his muffin with a knife. Just the knife. What a moron.

The Art of Argument

There is a bar in Grand Forks that serves peanuts-in-the-shell in those little white paper boats. It’s expected that you throw the shells on the floor when mowing through your peanut-boat, so I’m sure it was incredibly gratifying to sweep at bar close; a person would really be able to see the results.

I was sitting in just this bar with a few friends and a few more friends of those friends (it’s always weird when that happens, like two universes clashing) drinking something exotic, like Guinness (that crazy semi-warm beer! So dark!!), and throwing peanut shells on the floor. One of the women with us fit the blonde stereotype pretty well, yet she had an inexplicably strong political opinion. She was a die-hard Republican.

Now, despite the fact that we were in Grand Forks (North Dakota being a notorious red state) and conservatism was the rule, not the exception, you’d have to know the people I was with to understand just how much of a cardinal sin it was to be a Rightie. Of course, one of my friends starts grilling her. Why was she a Republican? How could she?? Her answers were thus:

1. Everyone else in her family is a Republican, sooo…
2. She likes her gun and doesn’t like people who don’t want her to have it.

Well, the family thing is annoying but understandable, but we didn’t get the gun thing. Like a hunting rifle? No, indeed; she had a handgun.

A handgun? What for?

Protection.

Do you have this handgun on you?

Nope, it’s in the car (parked about three blocks away in scary “downtown” Grand Forks).

Okay, well…yeah. I sat back and started listening at this point. I kept thinking that if she had a gun for protection, she’d damn well better be packing it now because there’s nothing stopping me from breaking my beer bottle on the side of the table and lunging at her with it, but I’m a lover, not a fighter, and that’s beside the point. I didn’t have to say anything even if I wanted to because my friend lit into her for me.

The problem was I didn’t like how he did it.

My masters degree is in rhetoric and applied writing, and if you don’t know, rhetoric essentially means “the art of argument” (or, the art of bullshitting—either way, it’s handy). This doesn’t mean that I’m personally a skilled arguer, but it does mean that I have been trained to be critical of argument.

Obviously, I couldn’t help but be critical of the argument that was going on in front of me. Unfortunately, what it turned into was a full frontal assault courtesy of my friend on this poor hapless young woman. The problem was that she was going by personal opinion, and only personal opinion. My friend, however, wanted her opinion to be backed up by research, literally. He kept asking her where she got her information, where she read that, how did she know, etc. He couldn’t accept that her opinion was solely her own. Unfortunately, she came across as an ignoramus and he came across as a pompous ass.

This entire situation reminds me of The American People In General. You’re either an ignoramus or a pompous ass, and the ignoramuses won’t read a friggin’ newspaper and the pompous asses cannot accept the fact that even an uninformed opinion might have some validity. Neither one of them can keep their traps shut, either, which is the real problem here.

One of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn during my short tenure in life is that it’s cool to admit that I don’t know things. Sounds simple, right? Yeah, right. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard a controversial topic come up in different circles and there’s inevitably someone who says, “Woa, woa, woa, I’m totally not even GOING there” when, in fact, it’s not that they don’t want to go there because it might offend someone, they don’t want to go there because they probably aren’t all that sure and don’t want to admit it. Hey, I try to avoid conversations about Walmart because even though I know that there’s something icky about it, I only have some vague statistics to back up my feelings and those aren’t good enough to convince someone in a debate. Instead of admitting that I don’t really know why I don’t like it, I avoid the subject altogether. We’re a society of know-it-alls, and copping out is the biggest know-it-all thing to do of all because it is a pure act of ego protection.

So here’s my plan. The next time Walmart comes up, I will not run, and when I just don’t know something that I probably should know, I’ll admit it knowing that an uninformed opinion is enough and I can always research it if I want to. Perhaps being unsure is the greatest wisdom of all; at the risk of sounding like a tree-hugging hippie, it at least leaves the mind open to possibility.

Leave. Now.

So, today I go to class with a plan. I’m handing back papers, and they were, unfortunately, not so good. Not that they were terrible. But they weren’t great. I went into the classroom, which has a bank of 25 computers at one end and the desks at the other end. There’s a random lady at the computers, which isn’t a huge deal. Sometimes people finish things up from the class before, so that was cool. I was getting stuff together to start class, thinking about these papers that I need to hand back, wondering if there’s going to be any rage from the students (there’s never rage, but the grim look of defeat is just as difficult). I notice that the random lady isn’t leaving, so when I tell my students to gather their stuff from the desks and move to the computers, I beat ass over to the random lady and tell her in a quiet voice that she needed to please leave the classroom. She starts to gather her stuff, and I think we’re kosher.

By this time, my students are getting settled in their seats and I’m getting my stuff organized. What am I going to say to them? I need to be stern, but I want them to know that I take a small bit of responsibility for their difficulty. What could I have done better? It shakes my three-legged stool of self-confidence as a teacher when the quality of student work is low. Yep, I take it on. The lady has her stuff together and I mouth, “Thank you!” to her. She hands me a piece of notebook paper and walks out. I am literally mid-sentence: “Folks, I’m going to do something tonight that’s unprecedented. I’m going to give you back your papers at the beginning of class because we need to work through some issues I found.” I glanced down at the note, which I got the gist of before moving quickly on.

Later on, I read the note in full: “I’m sorry that I didn’t realize I was being disruptive. I wanted to let you know how much you hurt my feelings by so rudely kicking me out of the class. Thanks for putting a damper on my birthday.”

Okay, so maybe that’s not verbatim. But there were feelings being hurt and me causing a shitty birthday. Remember, I tend to take responsibility for things that aren’t my responsibility: I’m very hard on myself. So I am trying to think. Was I really that big of a jerk? Is it somehow rude of me to expect that a random stranger would leave my classroom when I was clearly going to start class? Was there a rip in the space/time continuum and I actually told her to get the hell out of the classroom before I called security, but didn’t remember it?

Then I realized what the problem was. I was not, indeed, nice. I wasn’t nice at all. I was, however, being professional. Businesslike. After all, I’m being paid to teach a class. When I’m in a classroom, that classroom belongs to me and my students. No one else. I tend to be protective of the particular vibe I cultivate in my classroom. The vibe is delicate. Random strangers screw up the vibe. So yeah, I wanted her out. So I asked her. I even said please. So I’m not to blame here, and the question then becomes, who writes a mean note, anyway? No one writes mean notes, at least no one out of high school writes mean notes. And this lady was middle-aged. I think when it comes down to it, we can safely blame this on social inappropriateness. That’s fair, right?

The interesting thing is, though, that this mean note still made me feel bad, bad enough to have the patience of a saint when I finally asked my students to rework their Works Cited pages because they were, essentially, bad. Man I was nice tonight. Really, really nice. As a matter of fact, it ended up feeling really good. Sometimes I am not as patient. Answering literally twenty questions (at least) about MLA documentation in about twenty minutes is not simple, and I am proud of helping everyone who needed it. And with a calm, patient voice. Sometimes nice pays, and some situations call for business, like when an outsider is trying to infringe on the sacred barrier of the classroom.