a daydream log
I’m completely drained, exhausted mentally and physically. Work stress, life stress, extra-curricular stress. It’s nonstop whining and handholding at work, a stack of papers to grade that make me realize that we’re in a
post-literate world, I’m getting no work on my
thesis done, and my life sucks. On Wednesday, I forgot to set my alarm and woke up three hours late. I’m also eating like shit, getting no sleep, I don’t have time or energy to play
racquetball, and I’m drinking so much
coffee that I’m
dehydrated all the time. And I have to spend tomorrow driving up to
Chattanoooga for
dorkus bowl all weekend.
It’s 4pm, and I’m staggering around near the front desk with an empty water bottle when she walks in. I’d seen her before, but now I knew I was in love. I have no idea, nor do I care, how high she’d score on
amihotornot.com, but there was just something about her, that mane of magenta hair swept back from her head, those
Lisa Loeb glasses, with a little bit of that
riot grrrl thing going on, I was hopeless. I wouldn’t do anything so unprofessional or so gauche as to hit on her in the office, or at all really. A few days of rest and daydreaming will clear this right up.
Like so many people I see, she didn’t know what to do with her life. Teaching maybe, and of course the state of
Florida makes it as difficult as possible for students to become teachers with their inane and irrelevant requirements and then it whines about the teacher shortage. A science lab for a foreign language teacher? That makes sense. And then the College of Education is staffed with idiots who spell worse than my students, if their memos are any indication. She thought she might want to teach theater, but of course
USF did away with the theater education program, and she wasn’t sure what else she might want to do, and was feeling enormous pressure to find her way. So beautiful, and so lost.
She left shortly after five, and when I finally staggered out of my office at 6:30, I saw her on the way to the garage, walking with two of her friends, I guess. I wanted to talk to her and ask her to get in my car and we’d drive to Tennessee up into the mountains with a bottle of wine and we’ll dance under the
moonlight and drink until our problems disappear and we smile again.
"Sara Smile
Oh, won't you smile a while for me, Sara…"