Crazy Christmas 3D Glasses Claim Two Victims

I am sleeping in the library on an air mattress that takes up the entire core of room. Every spare inch of the room is otherwise occupied with books, luggage, or boxes. I think there’s a chair in the corner, but it’s beneath a pile of clothes that could clothe the residents of Manchester.

This library has obviously doubled as a storage room. I guess it still does, only the stores kept here now include a 42-year-old English teacher and his bag.

I lie in the bed and stare up at long shelves of paperback spy thrillers, National Geographics, classic novels, yellow DIY books. Occasionally, I reach out and pluck one from the shelf, give it a quick perusal or read it to the end.

I’d get up, but getting out of the air mattress is more arduous than it should be. It’s sort of like trying to get out of a bowl of Jell-O without using your arms. Also, every time I manage to get out of the bed, I stub my toe. Every. Time. By the weekend my toes are bloodied and bruised stumps that once were utilized in helping me walk. Now they are slightly hairy pain sticks that jut out of my feet.

It doesn’t matter if I get up or not, I am on holiday, so my routine has been shattered, it no longer exists. I keep up my workout, read a lot, do some writing. But otherwise, my days are long and short, dark and light, and filled with family or very few people.

By the following week, I realize that my handle on reality has become slightly, well, tentative.

This failing grasp is not strengthened by the fact that I wear pajamas all the time and have eaten so many carbs that I would die of bread poisoning if that was a thing. I can’t remember what fruit tastes like. I reach greedily for a vegetable in the fridge, but it turns out to be a green bag of Christmas fudge.

Since my dad has a famous sweet tooth and his patients and colleagues love him, the house is overflowing with cookies, chocolates, and sweets. The quantity and variety are such that each room in the house could have a theme: the living room is nutted chocolates, the dining room is pralines and caramels, the kitchen is caramelized figs and pound cakes. I walk throughout the house simply dipping my hands into baskets of sweets and pushing them into my face.

I don’t want to say that I start to go a little insane, but I start to go a little insane. No routine, no days, no structure, no goals. It’s as though without the parameters of my routine and schedule I allow everything to slip away. I always thought it would take something rather monumental to drive a person nuts, but in my case it only took seven days without a routine. I can now fully understand the men I knew who became pitiful alcoholics or recluses after retirement.

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I am prone, having pressed myself against a wall near the bathroom. I have taken on the physical and personality characteristics of a salamander ninja. In the hallway nearby, three students are chatting and if I move, I will draw attention to myself.

I do not want to do that. One of the students is mine, and if he sees me conversation will commence and I’ll be forced to commit seppuku.

Before you start judging me as a bad teacher, let’s get a few things clear. I love my students. And I even enjoy seeing students in public, where the classroom roles have been shed and we are just a couple of people. The student I am hiding from (in salamander ninja form) is a student who does not attend classes and does not do his coursework.

If you are a teacher at a university, I needn’t explain further. If you aren’t, then read the next few sentences. On the list of all the people you don’t want to see in public, students who don’t come to class are at the top. Why? Because they have 1. an exceptionally low-level of self-awareness, 2. a tiny nugget of some inexplicable feeling in their belly which will eventually introduce itself in their mid-30s as “guilt,” and 3. they unconsciously want to quell that nugget by talking about class and coursework with a teacher whose class they never visit.

These students have a way of moseying up with a What the Hell, Why Not? look on their faces and doing one of several things. First off, they might explain their chronic absence. Sickness. Business. Bureaucracy. I have found that sickly grandmothers feature in these explanations about 59% of the time, with visa problems coming in second at about 34% of the time. They also might simply ask “Did you do anything important in class recently?” to which I usually answer, “Nah, we just sit around and talk about how you’re not there.” Sometimes they get the joke, sometimes they don’t. Either way, a little of me dies every time I use it.

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We start out at Demínka. It’s a classic Czech joint near I.P Pavlova. High ceilings, chandeliers, and, tonight, about 350 people. This is weird. Demínka is usually a relatively quiet place. What is also weird is the fact that three nanoseconds after I walk in the place and begin cutting through the crowd, the waiter is on me like John Goodman on a taco.

If you have ever been to the Czech republic or have had any experience with any Czech waiter, you know they are not the most attentive breed. If a Czech waiter approaches you immediately, it’s because he wants to deliver bad news. And this one does with a smile on his faux-hawked face.

“Nemáte reservace?” Do you have a reservation?

“Ne.” No. I already know where this is going. The place is jammed.

“Ah, bohužel…” Unfortunately, he shakes his head and tries to hide the smile from his face. It’s all I have to hear. I somehow try to resist the urge to give him a Merry Christmas headbutt in the throat.

Here’s the thing, there is nothing a Czech waiter likes more than to say “no” or “unfortunately” or “I’m sorry” and then follow that with bad news. Nothing. And as I walk out of Demínka, I know it’s going to be a Czech waiter kind of evening. And this prediction is spot frickin’ on.

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Meta: Blogger Writing Blog.

On Monday, I felt a bit sick and left work early, missing the second half of my office hours. Normally, my office hours are as deserted as an office building on Christmas morning. I usually spend the two hours doing paperwork or watching videos of animals who think they’re human.

So when I left a bit early Monday, I figured nobody would be wise. I tramped home, slipped mindfully into a matching sweatsuit and began reading on my couch with a cup of tea nearby and a cat irritating me with her tail.

There are some universal constants in the minutiae of academic life. For example, by the time you arrive at the Christmas party, the good juicy pork nibblers will be gone. The day you do something rather unconventional in class, is the day the class is interrupted by a high level administrator who just walked into the wrong room. Printers, projectors, and scanners all have brains, are vindictive, and hate people with advanced degrees.

But the biggest of all the truths is this: students don’t come to office hours, except for the day you can’t be at them, and then they show up in droves, with a desperate need to talk to you about something they could have easily taken care of by just coming to class or by applying 11 seconds of critical thinking.

So when I received an email from a student later that day, claiming that he had arrived at my office hours at 11:20 a.m. and was distressed to find that I was not there, I grumbled. Then I hoped that his arrival, frustration, and subsequent desperation had not been witnessed by someone responsible for my employment or for the successful transfer of cash to my account in return for services.

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Herbst Man Cave, Not Pictured: Security Guard (behind me)

It’s Thursday, my first full day in Łódź, Poland, and the weather outside is as frightful as a Sammy Cahn tune. It’s a day of rain, followed by a day of snow, and the roads outside are one big unflavored slushy.

Fortunately, the conference organizers arranged for a tour today of a few local indoor sights. I am walking around the Herbst Palace Museum, the preserved and renovated home of a 19^th century textile baron and his family. As the home has a study, a library, and a game room (the original “man cave”), for the first time in my life I am imagining myself as a 19^th century textile baron. There are eight conference participants on the tour.

The fact that I am on a tour of a textile baron’s home in Poland, when I would normally be in the middle of a three class day sends the playing hooky thrill up my spine. I am holding a museum brochure and enjoying social history. Life is so good.

OK, life would be better if I didn’t have to fart so badly.

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Like most devotees of the comfort zone, my off time and weekends are sacrosanct. If an entity or human touches, threatens to invade or misuse, or even addresses it directly in any way with which I am mildly uncomfortable, I will mentally build a muppet of their likeness and stab that fucker full of fork-tine sized holes.

So when the linguistics professor for whom I do research said “in December, you need to go to a conference in Poland…” I bit the inside of my cheek and mentally translated his measurements into original GI-Joe dimensions and grabbed my mental fork.

Outwardly, I said: “Oh OK.”

Academic conferences are a novel concept to me. This is partially due to the fact that the university has a peculiar way of encouraging/demanding that we take part in them right before they force us to fill out enough paperwork to build a tree fort. And then they quibble over and contest each Koruna like Ebenezer Scrooge in a spice market. I have been to three academic conferences in the last six years, and each time I have sworn never to go to one again.

Still, conferences have an attractive side. This side is primarily built of free food, free booze, and the allowance to say the phrase: “I am going to a conference in December.” It sounds so official and professional. Also, it is the only time I use the word “conference” without collocating it to Big East or National Football. At first I enjoy this novelty.

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There’s an impulse buy streak that runs through my family. My father is notorious for his impulse buy tendency, or he used to be anyway. He’d walk out of the house to get a doughnut and a cup of coffee and come home with a flat screen TV. Once, while shopping in Dick’s Sporting Goods for a birthday gift for my brother, he somehow came home with a dog.

While walking the streets in Naples years ago, my mother and I would look around to find that he was no longer with us. He’d then stumble out of a random tailor’s with three shirts and an ascot, or a hidden deli with a warehouse sized jar of olives. This happened so often that my mother’s bemoan “Where’s your father gone this time? Jesus Christ, if he buys one more tiny shirt….” was heard on several Neapolitan roads that week.

My mom could run the household on $10 a week. $5 if she only had to feed herself and the dog. She has the ability to stretch cash, get the most of her money, and logically deduce whether she truly needs something. If she were head of the Office of Management and Budget, the budget would be balanced and the whole country would be eating corned beef and cabbage.

I am not an impulse buy guy. Well, not anymore. Well, not usually. In college and in my early twenties, I simply had no concept of how money worked or what it was. Every week saw the purchase of another sweater I didn’t need, a book I knew I wouldn’t read, or a kitchen appliance I didn’t know how to use. I’d walk into my house wondering exactly how I’d ended up with an $80 beard trimming and cologne kit when I still hadn’t paid my electric bill. But, really, who needs lights and cooked food when you smell good and have a well-groomed goatee?

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