Ah such is Hope! as changeful and as fair!
Now dimly peering on the wistful sight;
Now hid behind the dragon-wing'd Despair;
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Sonnet: to the Autumnal Moon"
the fucking neighbors kept me up most of the night. this was the last night i would tolerate it. i would phone management in the morning, i decided. not that i wanted to do it.
the thing is, the head of my bed must always face east. it is my lucky direction. if it faces west, it will bring financial ruin; if it faces south, it will bring ill health. so it has to always face east. even though that means having my head almost right up against the wall between my bedroom and my neighbors' apartment.
my entire unit has been painfully arranged to perfect feng shui specifications. for example, although most people would be tempted to place a plant in the southwest corner of my living room, i know that doing so would result in an influx of overwhelming energy which would cause insomnia and anxiety. instead, i have a spider plant hanging in the west window of my kitchen, which creates a great sense of peace and well being when i am sitting at my dining room table because, although i am facing east and the plant is behind me, i can feel the flow of positive chi from the plant washing over my body as it passes around and through me.
i can tell without looking that my neighbors had not been so scrupulous in selecting furniture, much less arranging it in a positive way. i can tell just by the loud volume of their voices that they have not arranged their items as carefully as i. this is why i am constantly sweeping the sidewalk to my place while my neighbors have mounds of fermenting cigarette butts piled in front of theirs.
it is only my tolerance for my neighbors' lack of a proper education regarding furniture selection and arrangement that allowed me to let the problem go for so long. but tonight i decided i would no longer suffer due to their ignorance. management would be called.
pouring myself a glass of water, i sat cross-legged on my living room floor. my eyes were sleepless and bleary. when i finally focused, i could see by the clock on my vcr that it was after one a.m. this annoyed me further still, and though i tried to relax my mind, i was unable to set aside the reality that i was wide awake at one in the morning, and that i would be teaching classes at eight. middle school. you can't be tired when you teach middle school.
softly growling, i got up, went to the kitchen, and juiced myself a grapefruit. this helps battle insomnia, and acts as a general tonic for good health. i try to eat as much grapefruit and drink as much grapefruit juice as i can. my students leave grapefruits on my desk instead of apples. i eat them before school lets out.
quickly downing my glass of juice to avoid the oxidation of enzymes, i immediately felt better. by the time i grabbed a pillow and pulled my sleeping bag out of my closet, i was starting to feel quite relaxed and tired. i lay down on the living room floor with my tv remote, and flipped through all the channels, evaluating each bit of programming in a dreamlike stupor.
i was vaguely aware of an infomercial for a type of personal blender, a reality show with a loud man on a corner shouting obnoxious things, a local program involving two adults and a child walking through the desert with a gps device. finally, i settled on a weird religious program in which a conservative minister was giving impromptu answers to letters sent in by viewers. this ought to do the trick, i thought. and it didn't take long before i drifted off to sleep.
upon waking, i could see that there was a fair amount of light shining through my living room window. my second thought was that the tv was still on, and had been creating chaotic energy in the room all night as i slept. the third thing i realized was that my head had been pointing west the whole night, instead of east. on tv, a woman was kneading bread dough. annoyed, i turned the tv off and sat up.
6:36
good. so i still had time. but i was running about an hour late and would have to miss my morning run and yoga. no problem. i did thirty push-ups and thirty crunches; made myself a banana/soymilk smoothie; combed my hair; shaved; put on a shirt, tie, and jacket, and headed for the door.
7:40
shit. where did the time go in the morning? it took at least ten minutes to drive to work, and i was supposed to be there by 7:45. oh well, couldn't be helped.
i stepped outside. it immediately struck me that something was slightly irregular about the world today. or rather, something was completely off, sending everything else slightly, almost imperceptibly off balance. was it a new smell rising up from the earth? was it the sun's position in the sky? it did seem that the pattern of the sun's rays falling over the sidewalk was imperceptibly askew. but neither of these things explained just what i felt at that moment, the sensation of finding myself in a completely foreign land.
regardless of its cause, this unexpected change in the atmosphere struck me for several seconds. it was like visiting hong kong and finding a friend you hadn't seen in years. just this sudden, inexplicable sense of surreality.
blinking, i turned around to lock the door. i then realized i had forgotten to grab the keys.
7:42
by the time i stepped back outside, one of the neighbors was standing in front, carelessly overweight, wearing shabby pajama pants and a t-shirt that was stained and torn. the breeze was blowing just so the cloud of smoke from her cigarette wafted right in my path. not that it normally bothers me, but because i was constantly picking up her butts and sweeping stray ones from the sidewalk, i immediately grew contemptuous. although i gave her a friendly nod, i couldn't help feeling that i glowered at her at the same time.
7:53
i stepped out of my car and walked through the gate of the school. immediately, i realized today i was scheduled to monitor the front sidewalk.
what made me realize this was the sixth grade teacher approaching me, saying, "mr. storly, did you forget that you had sidewalk duty?"
of course, the teacher scheduled for sidewalk duty is supposed to arrive at 7:30, which meant i was exactly twenty-three minutes late for my job. the requisite apology given, i took my post. the sixth grade teacher walked away, muttering something about knowing who to ask the next time he needed his duty covered.
"mr. storly?" fantastic. it was the sixth grade language arts teacher who is always trying to get students entered into my reading program even though they don't qualify. i honest-to-god hope that as she approached, my eyes didn't roll. "mr. storly, i placed a note in your box about that student. you know, the one i had talked to you about. i talked to the principal. i hope you don't mind."
"no, of course not." of course i did mind! if the student doesn't qualify, he doesn't qualify. how is talking to the principal going to change this?
"well, have you had a chance to look at his records?" she looked up at me with thickly painted eyes. my eyes felt as heavy as hers looked. i felt tired and irritable.
"yes, i reviewed the student's test scores, and i am afraid he doesn't qualify for my program." the sun was in my eyes. i had to pee. i heard the bell ring. it was five after eight, and i didn't have my room ready yet. students would be waiting in the hall as we spoke.
the language arts teacher was just beginning to ask what she was supposed to do with this ill-behaved student in her classroom, when i felt a tug on the sleeve of my jacket and my name enthusiastically repeated in a sing-song voice. it was jorge, one of my sixth grade students. he had fashioned origami freddy krueger fingers from sheets of notebook paper, placed one on each finger of his right hand, and was now shoving them in my face, manipulating the tips of his fingers while speaking incoherently in what he apparently thought to be an exact likeness of freddy's voice. the teacher continued to speak at the same time. i watched my first hour students filing into the hall on their way to my classroom. turning to jorge, i exploded.
"excuse me! would you stop annoying me!"
jorge withdrew his fingers. his face drooped, and he walked sadly away. jorge was sort of a misfit, and i felt it was important to give him positive reinforcement. some positive reinforcement. he had created something, and i had blown up at him.
at least the language arts teacher was finally silent. she said something like, "well, we can talk about this later," and walked away.
well, whatever. at least i had given myself something to agonize over for the rest of the day.
i arrived late for my first period class. the door to my classroom had already been opened, apparently by another teacher. fortunately, i had a trustworthy group first period, and nothing appeared to be missing or damaged. there was even a grapefruit already on my desk by the time i arrived. good kids.
"mr. storly?" the principal stood in the door with an adult i did not recognize. "sorry to interrupt, but this is ms. adams. she will be shadowing you today." he gave me a look that said, we'll talk later, as i shook ms. adams' hand. i noticed she was dressed professionally, in blacks and grays, hair nicely styled, carrying a clipboard under the same arm that held a stylish tweed handbag. yet, her eyes seemed strange, distant. it seems rude to say it, but her eyes seemed vacant.
after introducing her to my seventh grade class, ms. adams took a seat at an empty table in the back of my room and immediately commenced to writing on her tablet, jotting down notes. it is always slightly unnerving to have an adult in your classroom jotting down notes about you, especially when you are not completely certain of her intentions. i proceeded with class as normal, with the usual middle school mixture of the academic and the insane.
ms. adams continued to sit at the back table, legs crossed, jotting down who-knows-what in that notebook of hers. she never looked up. not once. it occurred to me that she was not writing about me or my class at all. she couldn't be. she wasn't even looking up. as i circulated around the room, helping students, i kept glancing out of the corner of my eye at ms. adams. she had a vague smile on her face, and she never looked up. not even once.
at one point, after questioning a group of students, i called on ms. adams -- you know, to try to get her involved. she did not seem to hear me, so i tried again. "ms. adams?"
"hm?" her tone was pleasant, and she looked toward me expectantly. you have my full, undivided attention, that look seemed to say.
"i was just asking this group of students where they would look in a book to find the year of publication, on what page." i looked expectantly at ms. adams, whose face continued to peer expectantly back at me.
"oh," she said, and looking back down at her tablet, resumed her writing.
speechless, i returned to working with my group of students, ignoring a few chuckles as i helped my students locate the title page.
later that day, ms. adams sat reading a copy of alice's adventures in wonderland. at least she was doing so as class started for my eighth grade group. my ea, ms. macgregor, red-faced and imposing, came into the room from playground duty with a flourish, holding a small styrofoam cup of coffee. "what's the matter, ms. adams?" she declared with great cheer.
this is when i noticed that ms. adams was sitting at a table across from one of my eighth-grade students, who was quietly and uncontrollably laughing. ms. adams had both hands pressed against the table top, her eyes fixed on its surface. of course, the entire room soon noticed this as she announced, "oh, nothing. i'm looking at the pattern," she stuttered. "the pattern on the table is so interesting."
indeed, the burled printed wood veneer made many twists and turns, repeated as the cheap print repeated itself. interesting? the entire room grew silent with the strained suppression of laughter as ms. adams raised herself from the chair to exact a closer view. "ms. adams," said jose as he walked by, "that one looks just like a flower."
what was happening to me? did i walk through the looking glass, or had the looking glass passed through me? the afternoon was slow. the air conditioning was cold. it was 100 degrees outside, and i could be wearing gloves.
as my last class left the room, i called jorge to my desk and offered a quick apology for telling him he was annoying as he tossed my grapefruit from hand to hand. i had forgotten to eat it for lunch. "do you like those things?" i asked.
"i lo-o-o-ove grapefruit," said jorge.
"it's yours," i said.
jorge happily took the grapefruit and left the room, i had a strange urge to call him back and warn him to sleep with his head pointed in his lucky direction. but instead i sat at my desk sipping a cup of tea, lukewarm and bland. i was exhausted. i had forgotten to call management about my neighbors, but no longer felt inspired to do so.
the room was empty. i slowly stood and walked to the table ms. adams had examined earlier that day. jose was right. it did look like a flower. as i looked more closely, i could also see the shape of my entire day outlined in the repeated pattern of cheap burl. here was the white rabbit, here was the cigarette butt i had noticed on the sidewalk this morning, here was the shape of the teacher who had spoken to me earlier, here indeed was me. you can see anything in that table that you want. if you look long enough, shapes may begin to appear, connections made, that are not really there at all. or perhaps they are there, and the illusion is deeper than it seems, the shape of unreality concealing reality, the tough rind of the grapefruit not showing the truth beneath.
