The Amazing Baby Lizard Lady
You know those days when you feel like the most brilliant person on earth, or at least in your school? Multiply that by five and you’ll have my past week. I feel like all of my sleepless nights and bottles of red wine have finally paid off.
I’m beginning to feel like an actual teacher, writer, and graduate student. Before I was just going through some weird choreography that someone attempted to teach me not knowing what a horrible dancer I am. Seriously, my dance moves of choice can all be found in the music video of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.” So I stumbled around campus for five weeks, barely keeping up; until, I hit week six and everything started working. And the weird thing is is that I wasn’t doing anything differently. I still stayed up until 2am grading terrible papers, I worried about my upcoming fiction workshop, I cried when I thought about how Ryan Gosling would never marry me. Not really that last one. The picture above? That is from an actual student paper and, although nobody else has attempted to use text-speak since then, they really aren’t improving all that much. Side note: it would be interesting to hear a student’s argument on the legitimacy of text-speak as an acceptable form of academic composition. See, I even make teacherly jokes now, which aren’t funny to anybody except teachers. So I’m not really sure what happened. Everything just suddenly felt right.
I didn’t dread teaching today because I knew what I wanted to teach and how I wanted to do it and I knew that my students, or at least the ones who give a damn, would get something out of it. On Wednesday, I was proud of my story and it stood up against the work of students who have been doing this for three years. I received affirmation that what I’m doing and the thing I choose to write about are not silly and contrived.
I’m hoping that this string of optimism, or perhaps karma, isn’t cut short. It’s been tough moving here and, true to form, I’m not making friends fast so I’ve been forced to look to myself as a source of happiness, which is usually difficult because I’m so critical of myself. And it’s not that I’ve stopped that, but something weird happened between last Sunday night and Monday morning. A radioactive baby lizard—for those of you who don’t know, I see at least eighty of these every day in Boca—bit me in my sleep and turned me into a superhero.
Her legs scurry so fast it looks like she’s hovering. With the abilities to turn C- students into B- students, read stories…out loud, and bring the hard fist of justice down on plagiarism, she is The Amazing Baby Lizard Lady!
