A is for Absterge

I’m participating in the A-Z blog challenge for the first time ever.  If you want full details,click here, but the abbreviated version is that the challenge is to write a blog post every day of the week, except Sundays, and the posts need to correspond with a letter of the alphabet.

I work better with a theme so I picked vocabulary—each day I would learn a new vocabulary word and try to come up with a brief (always a challenge) post about it.

Which took me forever because then I got all into reading long lists of words and saying “Hey, I didn’t know there was a word for that!”

Like abacinate. Which means to blind by putting a red hot metal near the eyes. Who knew we needed a word for that particular practice? I didn’t even know that was a thing. I didn’t even know you could blind someone in that fashion. I mean, it says NEAR the eye. How near are we talking? How close do you have to get to the eyeball with hot metal to blind someone.

Honestly, considering my issues with eyes, I’m getting a little sick just thinking about it.

So, after working my way through list after list, almost feeling a sense of aboulomania (pathological inability to make a decision), I decided on absterge.

Absterge – A verb, to wipe clean; expunge; purge.

And the last time I really had to absterge was when Opie and I were engaged and we were combining our households as I moved to Oklahoma.

At which point, I made the insane decision to have a garage sale.

Which may not sound like an insane decision…if, perhaps, you have never had a garage sale or seen the kind of people who frequent garage sales.

I mean I go to garage sales and I'm fairly normal but apparently I am in the minority (or maybe I'm not as normal as I think.)

I'm talking about people like the woman showed up at my house at 9:45 PM the night before the sale said she'd seen a sign on the corner and was wondering if she could get come in and "get an early peek at the merchandise."

"No," I said.

“Why not?” she demanded, edging closer and closer to the front door like she was trying to get me to back away.

“Because I you don't even know you,” I said. “And I'm generally opposed to letting strangers come into my house and go through my things.”

And she got really offended. I mean not so offended that she didn’t stand there saying “Oh come on, please” three or four more times. And not so offended that she didn’t show up ten minutes before I opened the garage door the next morning, knocking again on the front door and asking again to come in early.

Then she started pointing at things that were CLEARLY marked Not For Sale and saying “What about that? I’ll give you a dollar for that.”

And it was only because I had two friends with me and we’d fortified ourselves with mimosas for just such a situation that I managed not to throw caution to the winds and punch that woman in the face.

She was the worst of the lunatics but not the only lunatic.  We had a couple of would be shoplifters, a lot of people who tried to bargain down from a quarter, a couple of realtors who thought this would be the perfect moment to aggressively try to convince me to list with them when I moved...basically, even though we got rid of a lot of stuff and made a little cash, it was a lot more trouble than it was worth.

So, the next time I need to absterge the house, I think we’ll just take everything to Goodwill.

Stay tuned for more letter related posts! 

And the crazies keep on coming….

I was hoping that the lunatics in my life could be confined to the weird old guy who wanders around my neighborhood talking to himself but it looks like the full moon this week is bringing them out in droves…

See, we just finished midterm week at the university where I teach and students are beginning to sign up for second semester.  Which seems like a relatively un-lunatic type of task.

Except that this is also the time in which a surprising number of students realize that they won’t get their financial aid checks for second semester if, in fact, they aren’t passing enough classes to actually enroll in more classes second semester.

Which was the case with my latest lunatic encounter.

It happened on Tuesday; this girl stormed into my Comp I class just before it started, as I was putting a few notes for the day on the whiteboard.   And it startled me because, at first, I had no idea who she was…because she hasn’t been in my class since the first week of school.  She showed up the 3 days in which the financial aid office checks enrollment before issuing first semester checks and has never returned.

I had assumed she was one of those students who signs up for a full load, gets the check from the government, and drops a few classes before the deadline so she can pocket the difference between the tuition and her check.

“I need to pass this class to get my financial aid for next semester!”  She said without preamble.

Which means I was wrong…she was one of those students who signs up for a full load, gets the check from the government, and drops a few classes before the deadline so she can pocket the difference between the tuition and her check BUT plans to pass all of the classes she didn’t drop so she can repeat the cycle second semester.

Except, of course, it’s difficult to pass when you never actually show up for class.

A fact I pointed out to her immediately.  “You haven’t been here for NINE WEEKS,” I said.

“I had to babysit my friend’s kid,” she agreed.

“For NINE WEEKS?”

And she nodded.  “But I’ll do anything,” she said.  “Anything at all.”

“Except come to class and actually do the work?”  I asked.

But THAT flew right over her head.  “So, what can I do to pass?”  She asked.

Please keep in mind that, in order for this little scenario to work out in her favor, she would have to have a passing grade by the end of the class period in question.  And I think I’m pretty good at my job but I don’t think I’m good enough to reteach an entire half semester in the five minutes before class actually started.

“What can I do?”  She asked again.

Since my earlier sarcasm had flown right over her head, I decided against saying “Turn back time” and uncharacteristically went for the direct, logical response.  “Nothing,” I said.   “You haven’t been here for nine weeks;  you haven’t made any effort to contact me and work something out—“

“I couldn’t!” She shouted triumphantly, like she’d been waiting for me to say that exact thing.  “See?”

Then she showed me her iPhone—which looked suspiciously brand new except for the fact that the screen was cracked.

And that just irritated me because I was pretty sure she probably bought the phone with her financial aid money…which comes from MY  tax dollars…which means, essentially, that was MY new iPhone…and she broke it.

She broke my iPhone!

But I really didn’t have time to get into an argument so I just said “Yah, it looks like it’s had some rough treatment.”

And, oddly, that’s the thing that pissed her off.  She shoved the iPhone back in her pocket and shouted “I wasn’t rough with it!  I take care of my things!”

Which made me wonder if the screen was really cracked or if there’s some sort of screensaver you can get that makes it look like the screen is cracked or if the friend she was babysitting for gave her a cracked iPhone as payment or if she was just smoking crack or what…

All of which was too much to be thinking about since I was still trying to get ready for class…so, I just turned around and finished putting my notes on the board.

Many people would choose this time to make a silent getaway…of course, many people would realize that missing nine straight weeks of a sixteen week class was a pretty clear path to failure.

Not this girl.

She sat down in the front row and spent the next twenty minutes AGGRESSIVELY participating in the class discussion.

It was bizarre.

I put an essay up on the smartboard and asked the students to identify strengths and weaknesses in it…she began shouting out suggestions and comments like Rainman on speed. 

“Good descriptions!”  she shouted.  “Nice images!”

Except it was a persuasive paper and there really weren’t any descriptions or images in it…which she may have realized if she had been in class AT ALL the past nine weeks. 

“Can anyone identify the author’s main logical fallacy?”  I asked.

“Order of importance!”  She yelled (and no, for you non-Comp teachers, that’s NOT a logical fallacy…it has NOTHING TO DO with logical fallacies).

And so on…until I finally said, “Lana!  You need to stop that…just, STOP.”

That’s when, at long last, she stormed out in a huff, slamming the door behind her…

But, honestly, I’m a little afraid I haven’t seen the last of her!

  

kimbo325 is a teacher and writer who is laughing her way through life.  She actually loves her job and loves helping kids learn to write…but she thinks it’s hard to learn when you’re not in class.  For more stories from her crazy life, like her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ItIsInterestingToNote?ref=hl#!/ItIsInterestingToNote

or follow her on Twitter @kimbo325

 

</