Thursdays I do not have to go to school! Thursdays are beautiful, glorious days on which I sleep until the comfortable hour of nine-thirty, then get up, wander around my apartment in my underwear, yawning sleepily and sneezing three times (why do I sneeze every morning, three times? why?), drinking lemonade. Then I wander into my office, still in my underwear, and do morning-time office-things such as check my mail and see what I have to do for the rest of the day, which is usually nothing, except write. Luckily writing can be done in one’s underwear, with lemonade nearby.
I am telling you all of this so you may get a sense of the rhythm and tenor of my Thursday mornings, all the more to appreciate the fact that it was all horribly, horribly disrupted mere hours ago. Only now am I calm enough to imagine writing about it. I’ll just go get some lemonade.
Everything went essentially as planned this morning, up until the point after mail-checking when I arose from my desk, in my underwear, to wander off in the direction of the bathroom. As I stood up, casting my glance out the window overlooking the front yard/street/sidewalk/parking area, what should meet my sleepy eye but the eye of another person! Another person, walking up my walk, carrying some kind of rake or other gardening implement! Another person who was not, in fact, just some other person at all, but rather a person currently enrolled in my class! A current student, making eye contact with me, his teacher, as I was standing in my office, in my underwear, on a motherfucking Thursday morning.
They were not even nice underwear; they were more like the underwear one resorts to when one hasn’t done any laundry in some time and one finds this pair at the back of the drawer. You know the type. Not to imply that this would have been okay had I been wearing a spiffier pair of drawers–not at all. The truly appalling fact is that students, apparently, are given jobs landscaping in this apartment complex, which is where graduate students live, and work, and grade their papers and plan their classes and write their articles and walk around their apartments, windows open, mostly undressed. I mean, I assume that is what my neighbors are doing, too, right? Who wears pants at home? This is the twenty-first century, people; we should be living in a completely pantsless society by now!
If the undergraduates need jobs so badly, please hire them at the power plant where they can work to convert discarded pants into a clean energy source for freer butt cheeks and a more perfect tomorrow.
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