Was it all the Billy Ocean?
Today I got to start my morning with a visit from a former student,
Mae (I think Mae doesn’t mind if I mention her; also, Mae is very cool and brave and smart and hilarious and I am so proud to know Mae personally).
It always makes me happy when former “kids” want to come hang out with my elderly ass.
(Am I elderly? I feel elderly.)
And ever since I started teaching at FALA
I got to have the kind of “kids” (they’ll always be kids to me, even when they’re grown up — as many are — and friends)
who I wanted to BE FRIENDS WITH after
they were done being my student. In the best case scenarios,
the students I wanted to BE FRIENDS WITH decided
they wanted to BE FRIENDS WITH ME, ALSO.
So I have all these cool young people in my life,
thanks to my years at FALA and also my shorter tenure
in Milwaukee. Like, I have this big network of “kids”:
even here in Tucson, I have a ton of FALA kids who keep an eye on me and who drop by to visit and that’s the biggest honor, as an educator, that I can imagine.
I did NOT want to hang out with ANY of my teachers after high school was over. Well one, I thought was cool and then she got Trump brainwashed and — it’s a very sad story I wish not to relive now.
I DID want to hang out with many of my undergrad professors,
and one of them is a close friend and confidant to this day.
Anyway, I’m glad FALA gave me a chance to know so many cool young people. I can’t wait to meet the cool young people who inhabit Tucson.
Truth is: I like students everywhere I go because truth is,
despite how absolutely, tragically insane this sounds:
I like other people.
Yes, I also like animals and the prickly pears and shit,
but I really like people.
People make me insane, but I like them.
True misanthropes are probably the only sane humans among us
and yet they’re utterly warped and totally missing out.
“I’m a fucking weirdo,” I told Mae.
Mae is no longer my student, but my young friend now, and I can talk like this with Mae. “And that’s why Tucson is perfect. Tucson is a weirdo, too.”
Mae agreed. We were both fucking weirdos and in the perfectly apt, fucking weird, place in America: Tucson, Arizona.
Once, when I was new to Flagstaff, I described a woman as “some lady doing weird calisthenics” and guess what, fuckers? I’ve become the “lady doing weird calisthenics.”
In the yard which — if you knew our home on Humphreys in Flagstaff — is a PROPER yard with, like, privacy and quiet and no one is driving by screaming “Hey, Ms. Gruber!” (though secretly I often miss this phenomenon of being an educator in such a close knit, small community).
Anyway, I do this sunbath stretching shit. I have based the routine on absolutely nothing other than the fact that I cannot pray on my knees and I need to pray.
Not to god. I don’t believe in god.
But I believe — in fact know — there are plenty of THINGS that are far bigger and more powerful than me. I mean good things. Things of the earth.
So I go outside and do my weird calisthetics while trying to talk to the vast, infinite universe with my INSIDE MY BRAIN voice like that fucking Flashdance gorilla.
And today after my sunbath/meditation/prayer, weird as hell, I came inside and made myself tea and got really excited by the prospect of blending a mint bag with an Earl Grey bag. This is my life now. The most rock and roll things I did all day
were use a magnificent amount of “f-bombs” from the moment I awoke until now, and put on a Pink Floyd t-shirt that belonged to one of my sister’s ex-boyfriends.
(Circle of life.)
(Still have never seen Lion King or Frozen. So long as this remains true, I remain a little familiar to myself.)
The Earl Grey/Moroccan Mint blend is nice, fyi.
Tomorrow, some students will be returning to FALA’s campus.
Because of my busted eye (it’s still busted, but a bit less so every day)
I am not to go into altitude right now.
So I can’t go up the mountain just yet.
My goal is to get up there for the last week of school:
the graduating class is a group of students I’ve been teaching since they were twelve.
I have to see them before they go into the next chapter
of their gorgeous, fragile, young lives.
My eyeball is tired.
Time to wrap it up.
This partial blindness thing is really starting to cramp
my writing style. I am smirking as I write this, also inwardly screaming.
Sometimes life is like that: smirk on the outside, scream on the inside.
My wife introduced me to a quote by a writer — I can’t remember the name of the writer, but will try to find proper attribution — and the writer wrote something to this end: “Boys freak out; girls freak in.” I think boys freak in, too. And some girls freak out. But the concept of “freaking in” resonated so with me. I think I’ve been “freaking in” since I was in kindergarten. Fortunately, for such thoughts, I have a good therapist.
Spotify playlist: not a fan of what Spotify has chosen for me today. Inexplicably includes George Michael/Aretha Franklin collab “Knew You Were Waitin’” or whatever that song was called.
Why do you think I enjoy this, Spotify?
Was it all the Billy Ocean?
