I rarely get anything back from them, so that’s hardly the reason why – there’s no monetary motivation behind it – it’s just that, deep down, I really like filling in things, forms, blanks. I like putting things where they go, seeing them meld into the template of the 1040EZ, or the W-2, or the New York Times Crossword.

I like it because when things fit, I’m pleased.

I like it because, when it’s all said and done, it looks neat.

And I like it because it looks intimidating:  To think that all the hard work you’ve done throughout the year can be reduced to nothing more than a small collection of rows and shaded squares, all neatly labeled and cross-referenced by the IRS and national bank chains.

There’s a part of me, a part I do admit mostly trying to deny, though, that craves organization.

It’s true. 

One of my favorite games to play growing up was Beleaguered Librarian, for crying out loud.

I think 26 Down is "Loser."

And before you ask, here’s how it’s played: Melinda, a favorite childhood friend, and I would spend hours in her house, going room-to-room collecting all the books we could find; they’d been mis-shelved, obviously. We’d have to settle down at the kitchen table (the office), and take out all the postcard-sized bits of paper we’d previously put inside them (carrying the title of each book and Return Date, clearly legible), complain (quietly) how time-consuming doing this was and gossip about how rude it was that “most of the people who come in here don’t even bother to look at the return date, anyway,” which meant we would have to charge them overdue fees.

Groan.

This, of course, required more paperwork: more pieces of paper cut checkbook-size, which would then have to been written out with the amount of the fee expected. This would have to wait until we’d re-shelved the books, obviously, because “so few people who come in here put the books back, they just leave them lying anywhere.”

No one ever came to our library.

And yet, there was always a ridiculous load of work to be done. Before you knew it, a whole Sunday afternoon had passed.

I’m not even sure there’s room in the definition of Nerd to describe this game, but play it we did. And we loved it. And I don’t think we’re one bit ashamed about loving it either.

It satisfied a deep need I had for order, as a child. Yet, I rebel against this same sense of order today, for reasons I cannot explain fully—though in part, I have more than an ample girth of opinion.

I'm still Kris with a "K."

I think it has something to do with a fear of conformity, with the surrendering of our uniqueness to the One-Size-Fill-in-the-Blank Philosophy of capitalism.

They force us to become One by not letting us be one, you know?

Our entire careers, taxes, insurance claims, retirements, bank accounts, you name it, are all sitting, in duplicate, stuffed in large, collective boxes, stored in back rooms, looking exactly the same to the naked eye, from the shelf…when the naked eye cares to look.

You have no Name with these constructs, just a Number. And the back room itself is a last-resort, at that. The glory-holder of anonymity these days is without doubt, the computer.

Heck, it’s like that at my school, and we’re in the middle of somewhere even Verizon can’t find.

Half the people I teach, when it’s time to record grades, are faceless, student ID numbers scrolling across my computer screen. There’s very little humanity in it…but it certainly is neat, contained, and orderly, which is something of an improvement over, ahem, humanity.

And in attempt at appeasing Big Brother: I kinda like it, I have to say.

No, now, I’m not saying I don’t want to know or care about my students, I certainly do, but even more than that, I like ease and convenience. I like knowing that I can pull these obligations out of my own mind and dump them in some software whose sole purpose is not to care; a problem of mine, personally, is caring a little too much.

That’s got to stop, to some degree. Especially as I get ready to do two things: teach online and bravely face this mammoth of a Program Review Report, due by Friday (I’ve just been told).

Online teaching has its own challenges: The severity of setting a deadline is hard to manage in the physical classroom. When it’s online, however, either you do it by 3:00 PM on Thursday, or you don’t do it at all, e.g. I’m OK with that, as a professor, even if I’m more than a little bothered by it, as a human, but then, I’m not paid to be a human.

Touché, huh.

It will take some adjustment, I know.  Doing your taxes still requires intimacy. Teaching students whom you’ll never meet doesn’t.  That’s the part that I will struggle with, even against the alleged ease of online education.

Because starting next semester, my words are going to count for a hell of a lot more than they do right now.

This mammoth Program Review is a different devil. I’ve only been here for four months; this report doesn’t care, though. I’m now, among other things, responsible for figuring out who spent what monies badly over the last three years…and Why.  I’ve been staring at this thick, multipage document all morning; I may or may not have had a stroke around 11:38. I have little to no intimacy for it. Scratch that: I hate the damn thing.

But, considering that, a couple of things come to mind: either I can be afraid of it, of losing myself to and behind a computer screen (who respects a computer screen?), or I can take pride in filling out these forms, tooting my horn whatever note comes out, and creating lessons and assignments and syllabi that are creative and challenging – on my own terms.

I’ve chosen to re-institute my sense of pride in the latter; it’s less unknown.

Try to reach $1.00 without going over.

I’m intent on making my words matter. On the shelf in that back room, I might look like any other overindulgent Rolodex entry; on the bank’s computer or the hospital’s, I might be nothing more than a statistic or a blood count, but when you pull my name out of the piles to read about my medical history or educational philosophy, I better make sure what I’ve written down can stand alone…and speak for itself.

(People do still read, right)?  

No, rather than be upset by the New World Order, I plan on going down (at least on paper) in a blaze of glory. I’m determined to be a “good read,” if I’m nothing else from now ‘til kingdom come.

Which, according to some popular opinion, is December 20, 2012.

…and I can last another two years, easy.

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They taste about the same, don't worry.

So, the other day I was in Piggly Wiggly (or as U.L. calls it, The Pig) to purchase an eggplant, and while fondling the produce, legally – i.e., all fruits and vegetables were at least 18 days or older – I overheard two people, down by the locally grown peanuts bin (the peanuts were locally grown, not the bin – it was cardboard) discussing the stupid behavior of one of their other friends…I imagined the friend was the topic of conversation as the result of some weekend revelry.

One said, “And I was like, God, this is stupid. You’re being so eighth grade about it. Grow up.”

The other said, “Yeah, she needs to grow up.”

The banter didn’t register much higher on the Good Ways to Converse Chart.  Then again, maybe they weren’t people. Maybe they were kids.

I selected my eggplant, it weighed 1.3 pounds which was good enough for my experimental ragout (this is the correct way to spell this word, FYI, not ragu). And unlike Aggy’s pronouncement, it’s way more than just plain spaghetti sauce.

As I put the eggplant in my basket, I had this thought: What the heck has happened to people that eighth grade should be so maligned? I can’t tell you how often I hear people refer to bad behavior, or misjudgment, or rudeness, and so forth and so on, as “being eighth grade” of them.

Personally, I loved eighth grade. Seventh grade (and even fourth) for me were the ones that were, for lack of a better term, stinky.

Yet, in my rather unusual circles of socialization (both from strangerous people and those I know well), time and again, I hear eighth grade used as the butt of all things petty and ridiculous. By the way, strangerous is another word I made up. Sorry.

I guess it’s because, for the majority of us, eighth grade is the peak of hormonal shifting?

I really don’t know.

So, on the drive back to my house, I thought long and hard about my eighth grade year.  Actually, eighth grade pretty much dominated my thinking right on through to what, if I do say so myself (another confusing parenthetical), was a delicious ragout. NOTE: I’d forgotten to purchase chickpeas, and so if you’re interested in knowing what I substituted for them, I’ll just go right ahead and tell you: black-eyed peas.

(They were a delicious replacement).

So, for me, eighth grade, was not a bad year. I mean, not school-wide, publicly…personally, though, I can see a resemblance between the approach to unruly behavior in eighth grade as well as those of us entering our 30s – a.k.a Real Life.

For time’s sake, let’s take advantage of the concept of Summary, here, in discussing my eighth grade year: sexually confused the entire time (that’s not really faded, yet); I’d just returned from trying to live with my father in Germany (that’s not really faded yet, either); I was playing tennis; I was not doing well in Math, though, we were still learning to write checks in class, for some reason – how obsolete; I was in T.A.G, which stood for talented and gifted – we got to skip a whole day of class each week to do smarter things like leave the school and eat at Pizza Hut, a cultural field trip of sorts; I made fun of Band People; I knew a white girl named LaShara; I had headaches constantly; started shaving for real, my whole body; wanted to be a girl, really badly; brought my lunch, almost everyday; was a librarian’s assistant which basically involved a two-voiced woman (reverse tracheotomy) who made me re-bind books and regaled me with stories of the two natural disasters she’d survived, one on the Coast and the other in Kansas; I had serious dreams like the time I dreamed a teacher’s father drowned and then he did, Firestarter, anyone?; also, my sister taught at the same school which I’m sure had a lot to do with tempering my behavior.

You can't travel the world without a good spine.

So, you see, it was an interesting time to be in school. Avoiding truancy, but still, when in the middle of statewide standardized testing, looking out the window and wishing with all your heart that you were the guy on the lawnmower, because at any minute, he could decide enough was enough and stop, and have some Gatorade or something.

Despite the relatively low-key eighth grade year that I had, one thing affected all of us (maybe it was the heat, or the lack of uniforms) – Understanding Our Bodies and Emotions.

Oh, god, I mean any little thing was magnified a 1000% during junior high, depending on when you cut through the chrysalis.

Anger was a big one for me. We’ve never been the best of friends, as it is. As a matter of fact, anger has kept me from being truly close to a lot of people, I’m afraid. And I know myself well: my kind of anger isn’t a palpable one; it’s deeply seeded and hidden behind a great deal of social politics.

And humor.

I think, sometimes, it’s a lot easier to fool people than befriend them. Because I come from a school of thought where distance is a necessity. But, it takes less effort to hide in plain view, to hide right out in public than to shut every door and window.

That reads a lot sadder than it actually is. It’s not that I hate people; I try very hard to do the right thing. I try very hard to live the Golden Rule. But, there’s not a lot of reciprocation, these days.

And so, what are you left to do but to step back, as often as you can, and take a survey. What’s really important about living, not just about Life. 

I did that recently, post-argument, with a very close friend, a best friend, even, and I was glad that after the dust settled, we realized that we’d accidentally put a lot of “Importance” on things that were, honestly, a bit on the “Petty” side.

I think people do that a lot, because, whether or not you want to believe this, the Deep South is a rather repressed society. We don’t know how to argue; we know only how to acquiesce. We worry about keeping the peace, not establishing it. Unless you’re U.L. who just worries himself right through a fairly good heart, for his age.

You know, they really ought to teach this stuff in Civics. (If they still taught Civics, that is). Or Home Ec. (Again, if it hadn’t gone the way of the abacus).

The beginning of the end.

And, I guess, though I didn’t know it then, that this is something I learned in eighth grade, and I think it’s a good thing to know, to have learned: How to Argue; How to Fight; and How to Recognize the Difference.  Those are forms of Mercy, after all.

Yeah, that and How to Write a Check, those are, like, the two things I learned in eighth grade.

And to tell the truth, I kinda miss it.

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