Lucky Jane

I’ve done no research on the subject, but my impression is that many a pedant has weighed in on the abominable use of “gift” as a verb. Reader, I too dislike it.

But what really grinds my gears today is that there isn’t an equivalent for the opposite action: taking. Sure (and I’m not going to do any research on this, either), “gift” probably derives from an antiquated past participle (now superseded by “given”) of “to give,” itself probably Anglo-Saxon enough to warm the cockles of George Orwell’s cold, dead heart. The past participle of the equally Anglo-Saxon “to take” is, of course, “taken,” which functions just fine as a noun. However, I want a word that immediately conveys its materiality. Hence, takft.

Now, while it’s been a long time since I took Old English—a child born at the time would be shaving by now, I suspect—I know takft doesn’t jibe with any real verb forms. I just find its unwieldy concatenation of consonants expressive of something that someone takes from you.

Today’s takft involves an annoyance that I blogged about at the beginning of the week. My rent hadn’t posted, and the property management company that owns my apartment charges a 10% penalty per day the rent is late. Given the possibility of “owing” over $1000 in penalty “rent,” I worried about it for five days, before the bookkeeper called me, on a Sunday, to tell me all was well.

Well, folks, my rent still hasn’t posted. Yesterday, the bookkeeper called me and told me she couldn’t find my rent check. When she talked to me on Sunday, she was sure she had seen it, and it may have been stapled to another document and misfiled. Or maybe it went to the wrong account. She hadn’t handled the rent checks since before she left for the Hamptons. Blah blah blah blah. The upshot is that I had to stop payment on the original check, and that I’ll have to submit my checking account statement showing that I did stop payment before I’d be reimbursed for the charge. You’re an excellent tenant whose rent is always early. Yet for bookkeeping purposes she needed documentation for the stop-payment fee. So sorry. Of course we trust you. And did I mention I spent my fourth of July in the Hamptons? So yes, my replacement check needs to be for the full amount of the rent. And lady, the Hamptons weren’t fabulous even when the Sex and the City crew summered there. Just my opinion.

To her credit, she brought over a SASE yesterday, and on a Post-It told me I could just drop the new check in the mail; there’s no hard date due, and she couldn’t say when she’d be going into the P.O. again, anyhow.

Well, I’m off to the P.O. now with the replacement rent. I have to post stuff for Amazon, anyway. (More on that later, perhaps.) While I was writing it out, I also wrote out checks for the August bills I’ve received that don’t accept online payments. Among these was August’s rent check, which I’ll be “mailing” next week. And you know what I will be including with it? A letter terminating my tenancy when my lease expires next June. That same month, barring any catastrophes, I should be bidding a fond farewell to Sallie Mae. To celebrate that much-anticipated occasion, what better gift could I give myself than to declare freedom from the takers?

The editors of the collection to which I contributed the essay that occasioned my recent Greyhound adventure have evidently been eating their Wheaties, because the proofs came in at the end of last week, and I am girding myself to do my usual half-assed job of indexing. Here’s a secret that no one who knows me IRL knows: I didn’t figure out what index cards were really for until I indexed my book. I have tried the indexing function on MS Word, but the one and only time I used it, it was more trouble than it was worth.

I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the likelihood that no publisher will ever consider me worthy of paying for my indexing. I will forever be my own Bartleby. I’m sure some find indexing therapeutic, but my undiagnosed ADHD or whatever remains unconvinced, so I have to turn on something mindless. My NPR station is spinning its lite classics show, but I don’t admire even good performances of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, so off with the radio.

Then I had a brainstorm. What is more mindless than daytime TV?

I blew the dust off my remote control. (I’m actually not one of those people who claim to watch no TV but PBS: my house is a dusty third-world country, and then I keep the TV in the laundry room, because it doesn’t go with the decor in any of the other rooms. Under the right circumstances, I love TV.) I clicked “POWER.” (I love power, though I know what it is only in theory.) What comes onto the screen? Is that The View? Is that still on? I remember when that show was launched; I had augured a swift demise. Well, I never claimed I should be a TV exec. (To this day, I have never had the patience to sit through an entire episode—nay, more than three minutes—of American Idol.) Still, I can’t help being dispirited that I, who am supposedly an expert on the equivalent of pop culture from another time and place, am so incompetent at gauging what will go over in the time and place in which I live.

The TV is off now. The hosts’ discussion gave way to them talking over each other. It was undignified. (And what is it with Barbara Walters? First that gratuitously tell-all book, and now this? It’s not as if her talking over her less distinguished interlocutrixes makes her any more convincing.) It gave me a headache, not unlike the sort of cacophony these ladies are prone to generating:

The difference is that free-range hens are quite calming to watch. They peck at the ground, brood, clean themselves, all without a care in the world, oblivious to humans snatching up their eggs and to their fate as soup once they have outlived their egg-laying months.

So party on without me, darlings. I have indexing to do.

Home again, home again, with, oh, thirty souvenirs from Interesting City: thirty mosquito bites, more or less evenly distributed, on my legs. But one standout stands out from the rest, ruining my uniformly poxy pattern of calamine patches. Yeah, calamine. I’m old school. On my right calf, one welt is so engorged that my leg would be worthy of a portrait of aristocratic manhood from that long heyday of men in tights, when a “finely turned calf” signaled what a very fine physical specimen you were, even though you belonged to such a stratospheric social class that the physical exertion required to develop such a muscle was beneath you.

Oh, the conference and the trip were fabulous, though I’ll have to rethink attending a conference with a long-lost buddy again, because doing so may have prevented me from circulating as much as I would have liked among People I Should Know. I am a crappy friend, but can’t I blame the profession, just a little? So much of what we do is about cultivating a reputation. Just as we will always be writing recommendations, so we will always need one from someone more powerful than we are. After all, the reason my university guarantees travel funding only during the probationary period is that that is when we need to be developing a reputation, not least by networking.

And it was in fact while networking that I achieved my even-more-than-usually ridiculous state. We were enjoying an incredible dinner in a gray eminence’s back garden. Citronella candles guarded the table, but they did not prevent the mosquitoes from feasting below. Among the party of a dozen, I got the most bites! That means I win! Heh. As a feminist, I suppose I should defend the little critters. Only the females bite, needing protein in order to lay their eggs. Parturition costs, and every creature does its part to keep the planet in balance. Om.

Just kidding: if I could make them infertile extinct, I would. DIE, BITCHES!

The other thing that made my trip less pleasant than it should have been was a less literal, but more insidious, bloodsucker. I’m referring, of course, to my property management company, what most other people would call a landlord, because they can actually name the person responsible for the property. The 2.5 readers of this blog may recall that I live in my own third-world country. Sure, it’s charming and close to campus, in a neighborhood that has an enviable walk score of 90, which is so convenient that I haven’t filled my gas tank since the ides of March! Also, I have my own washer and dryer to myself, plus the rent is about $200 below average for the location. The students afford the neighborhood by living in apartments populated like clown cars.

As of today, 14 July—allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé, btw—my rent check, due 1 July, has not posted. It’s not even pending. I first discovered this fact the Wednesday before I left for Interesting City, while I was checking my checking account (heh) to determine just how interesting a time I would be able to have. Imagine my horror when I discovered that my rent check hadn’t posted. OK, maybe the fourth of July had caused the delay. Still, according to my past bank statements, the latest any of my rent checks had ever posted was the 7th.

The reason an unposted rent check is problematic is that I do not trust these people, who keep their street address so secret that they must have lots of enemies, or at least reasons to hide. The September after my arrival in Funky City, my rent was supposedly late, though I had put it in the blue USPS box outside my department’s building a week before the check was due. Two weeks later I received a letter informing me that my “September 2005″ (the year was 2006) rent had arrived on the 2nd, and that, according to the terms of the 24-page lease on which I was required to initial every paragraph, I would need to add 10% to my October rent. According to ¶46b, the penalty counts as rent, and omitting it would prolong my delinquency, resulting in damage to my credit and possibly eviction for nonpayment. When I called the business office inquiring about the error in the date and seeking evidence that my rent was indeed late, I had to leave a message. (No one ever answers the phone, I would learn.) Three days later, the bookkeeper replies with a patronizing yet nervous, giggling, hemming-and-hawing voicemail explaining that I should send my rent at least a week before it is due, because they’ll never deposit our checks before the first of the month, so we need not worry about checks bouncing before payday. She didn’t understand my confusion about the date. I don’t see what’s the problem. Heehee.

Whatever. I was in a new job and didn’t have time to consult a lawyer or extract evidence of my “delinquency,” so I paid the penalty. Since then I have been bringing my rent checks to the post office that houses the management company’s P.O. box, where I buy a stamp that a clerk cancels before walking the envelope ten feet. It’s absurd. I guess I’m glad to do my part to support the USPS, though my efforts will not be enough to prevent postal rates from increasing again next year.

Since Wednesday I have been leaving a message each day asking someone at the management company to get back to me about my rent check. I received no reply. Until yesterday, at Interesting City International Airport, as I was about to shut off my phone. It was the bookkeeper, apologizing profusely for not returning my (and dozens of other tenants’) calls. She had wandered into the office on a Sunday, and goodness gracious, what were all these messages about? So my rent had arrived on time, and everything was just fine. See, she had to depart at the last minute for her fourth of July holiday in the Hamptons, and in her hurry she didn’t get a chance to deposit the checks. Oops. So sorry!

If I could have reached through the phone and strangled her, I would have. Instead, I hung up, went to the airport bar, and bought myself a watered-down margarita, followed by a surprisingly decent martini. Then my flight was called.

As relieved as her call made me, I couldn’t help wishing there were some way to exact restitution for the anxiety her delay had caused. The prospect of owing over $1000 extra “rent”—and that’s if I got back to Funky City on time and the bookkeeper received my check today—weighed on me, distracting me as I tried to pay attention to what should have been an exhilarating, perhaps career-changing conference. Instead of hanging out with Amanda and other colleagues till dawn, I went to the hotel business office to check my bank balance and find contact info for JPU’s and Funky City’s renters’ rights organizations. Instead of brainstorming how to incorporate into my book what I had learned that day, I was plotting my defense. I would need to get an affidavit from the clerk who had canceled the postage and whom I had trusted to deliver my check to its destination ten feet away. Would she remember? I was drafting an email to one of the university’s lawyers, when it occurred to me: I had done nothing wrong.

All the same, I cringe at all the mental energy I wasted on trying to protect myself from being scammed. I imagined that the management company needed to raise revenue to recoup whatever they may have lost in other real estate by charging some quick late rent of their more high-maintenance tenants. (In the past year, both my bathtub faucet and water heater exploded, and my bathroom ceiling caved in. Twice.) Until my lease ends, would I have to get signature confirmation on rent checks sent from and to the same post office? Could I ever be safe from worry? For five days I was frantic.

But now I want my pound of flesh. Oh look, there’s one on my right leg. It, too, is unduly distracting. Sucks, I tellya.

I am neither disconsolate nor implacable, apparently.

In grad school I suffered the misfortune of being required to teach Jane Eyre three semesters in a row, because I had been assigned the intro to the major three semesters in a row, and in my grad program, the intro to the major was standardized to the extent of using the same syllabus. Now, Jane is a perfectly understandable choice; she’s up for anything: feminist, psychoanalytic, reader[I married him]-response, Marxist readings—you name it. But to this day I loathe Jane Eyre and resent Charlotte Brontë’s self-indulgent disingenuousness. I get that the novel was a thinly veiled sexual and social fantasy by someone in a dead-end job in the sticks. A horny Cinderella for the un-beautiful. I get it. But no thanks.

All the same, the first time I read Jane Eyre, I was in the fifth grade, and I was strangely moved by a detail early in the novel, when Jane is convalescing after falling ill in the Red Room, where her uncle had died and his evil caricature of a widow imprisons Jane. Bessie, the family’s maid, brings Jane a slice of cake on a pretty plate that, until then, she had been forbidden to handle. As Brontë reminds us ad nauseam, plain little Jane had always been a sucker for beauty, but in her misery she is unmoved by either the plate or the treat.

I know why that scene (all of maybe two sentences) resonated with me: when I was ten, one of my teachers had contacted the 1980s’ equivalent of Child Protective Services about me. My parents were investigated. I was required to work with a social worker until I left that school. My parents punished me for snitching on them and airing dirty family laundry—which I didn’t do, although I just blogged about it. In retrospect, I believe my perpetually pregnant mom was also suffering perpetual postpartum depression. Anyway, when I first read that passage in Jane Eyre, I kept rereading it and tearing up. I understand well now why it resonated with me so then. Although I disagree with Nabokov, who asserted that the worst way to engage with literature is to identify with a character, I did not identify with Jane.

No. It was all about the plate, baby!

These past weeks, I’ve been devoting way too much of my time and attention to something utterly stupid and unbloggable (as you might have guessed from my silence). Blogging about it would not only identify me, but also potentially expose me to the possibility of a lawsuit. It’s a very remote possibility, but I don’t want my “What I Did This Summer” essay to be about being sued. That would suck. I mean, my essay would be awesome; the lawsuit would suck.

So this evening, I was my own Bessie to my own Jane. (From time to time, such absurdities befall those who live alone.) As I don’t have a sweet tooth, I didn’t make cake. I made Joan Nathan’s insanely good falafel and had it with chai-spiced green tea in this:

Yeah, my phone takes awful pictures, but I have no batteries in the house for my camera, so take my word for it that the cup and saucer are pretty. They’re mismatched, acquired from the Wedgewood factory store in Dover for a total of 75p, if I recall correctly. Two years ago I had bought a bunch of them, all different, all mismatched, for the bed-and-breakfast I will never open, because I’m too inhospitable to work in hospitality. Oh, and Dover’s well worth a visit, as well as your respect. They had the crap bombed out of them during the Blitz, yet unlike so many British port cities have not “enjoyed” the millennial development of glass-and-brushed-metal tourist malls.

But I digress. This evening I was all ready to whimper into my tea and blog obliquely about how bummed I am. But you know what? I no longer am. Everything’s fine, and things can only get better, cause I’m leaving on a jet plane tomorrow for Interesting City. I do know when I’ll be back again, when things will continue to be fine. Was it the falafel or the tea that did the trick? Unlike that other Jane, I am a simple animal. Indeed, the only thing that could distress me now would be to have to read Jane Eyre.

Nary a week into summer, and already it’s wasting away as I prepare for my one summer conference, a gift from your children and our future selves the Bush XLIII administration. For once, I am not presenting, and I am just about going mad with anticipation at the prospect of listening to what other people are working on and exploring Interesting City—you know, what normal people do at conferences.

Among the other reasons I’m excited about this conference is that I will be meeting up with Amanda, a former colleague I haven’t seen since my “visiting” days at Happy SLAC. We just spent at least two hours on the phone plotting our adventures. Between travel plans and reminiscences, our conversation made me as happy as a little girl.

The more we talked, though, the more chagrined I was to discover how profoundly I missed Happy SLAC and even Mayberry, home to Happy SLAC. Sure, I now have access to many more cultural amenities in Funky City, and JPU offers resources unimaginable at Happy SLAC. But all the same, I am becoming convinced that Happy SLAC was The One.

I had arrived in Mayberry after my first job post-PhD—nine grueling months as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Notwilliams, another well-regarded SLAC where everyone seemed to be either in therapy or under the influence or both in an effort to maintain the façade that the place was just as “good” as, well, Williams. Only after I left did I realize how intensely I hated the place and the job. While at Notwilliams, I filled a Moleskine with lamentations about how there must have been something horribly wrong with me, since I was so far from enjoying what my grad advisors had continually described as a “dream job,” and in such an idyllic setting, too! Several entries consisted of inventories of reasons to be grateful for my situation. I pity the woman who wrote them. She wasn’t fooling anyone, not even herself. Soon she no longer had to try.

OK, writing about my past self in the third person was weird, in a Bob Dole kind of way. That was when? 1996? God, I’m old.

Right. The instant I arrived at Happy SLAC, even the air felt different. My new colleagues immediately reached out to me, and to the end made me a part of their community. My going-away festivities lasted a month. The students made my job easy. Even Mayberry’s menfolk found me attractive enough to annoy and frighten me on at least a weekly basis. Otherwise, Happy SLAC restored my faith, which had been so battered at Notwilliams, that I was born to be a professor. The only problem was that the job was not tenure track. Perpetually “visiting” means perpetually being on the market, so I had, paradoxically, to go on the market to secure a tenure-track perch, where ideally I would never have to go on the market again. Had I stayed at Happy SLAC, I would still be “visiting”: going on three years after my departure, the department has still not been able to run a search in any of my specializations.

Besides, JPU seemed an even better match for me. So I thought. I turned down two other offers because I admired JPU’s emphasis on stellar teaching, despite an R1 status predicated on science programs that make the humanities the university’s ugly stepchildren. Even so, my department’s achievements greatly attracted me to JPU. I regularly read (and still read) one of our journals, and I already knew and respected several of my colleagues from interacting with them at conferences and reading their publications. Smart and supportive, they have never disappointed me. They have gone out of their way to mitigate the absurd indignities of the school’s bureaucracy. At the end of the day, even the bureaucracy has gone out of its way to mitigate its own absurdity. I often worry that they are better colleagues to me than I am to them.

I am neither anti-social nor uncollegial. And I like my job. Sometimes I love it. It’s just that I’m not feeling it. “It” is that feeling that was my usual state at Happy SLAC, a feeling I believed I could easily experience elsewhere. But now I wonder: Could Happy SLAC have been my academic-career equivalent of a (Oh, avert your eyes! Save yourself from the stupidity!) soul-mate?

This possibility is the logical extension of an utterly illogical metaphor so common that it approaches cliché. At least it is one I kept hearing as I was finishing up grad school: the academic job market is (yawn) like dating. Thus,

• sending out applications and their concomitant cycle of recommendations, writing samples, etc. || getting to know someone through phone conversations, e-mail, chats, etc., and being introduced and recommended by mutual friends
• the screening interview via phone or convention || the first date. The fact that in many disciplines these occur in hotel rooms is apt commentary on the desperation of the candidates.
• the on-campus interview || going away together for the weekend
• being hired as an adjunct or a VAP || realizing that the cliché is true: why buy the cow when you’re getting the milk for free? Note how gendered this cliché is.
• being hired onto the tenure track || moving in together or perhaps marriage with a prenup that is super-disadvantageous to the candidate
• tenure || true love forever and ever. Either that or you don’t want to die alone, so you might as well stay.

In the parlor game I play all by myself, JPU is Charles Bovary or Jude Fawley, only more ambitious and smarter, which is to say it isn’t at all like either Charles Bovary or Jude Fawley. Perhaps someone from the twentieth century would be more dysfunctionally appropriate, but the more likely case is that Charles and Jude spring to mind because I’m like their wives, shrews who create their own crazy melodramas. Emma Bovary et Sue Bridehead, ce sont moi! By no coincidence were they imagined by men.

Perhaps Happy SLAC is the one that got away, the one that didn’t love me as much as I loved it—and everyone knows that the one who loves less controls the relationship. I often feel that the tables are turned at JPU, yet I don’t feel any more in control. More likely, I’ve gotten caught up in the way the academy socializes us. It’s just a job, after all. You teach your classes, write your books, bore the crap out of yourself at meetings, collect your paycheck, and if you do it all right, you get to retire in Latin. What’s love got to do with it? What a shame it would be if “nothing” were the answer.

. . . but I missed my “blogoversary” yesterday. No matter, since, as I’ve written here before, this blog was actually created on April 1, 2007, a fitting date after which I posted a few entries (indeed, I was quite more prolific than I have been lately—sorry) before I was embarrassed enough about them to delete them. However, I was not too embarrassed to get a button on my “About” page that looks like this:

At no time, however, was I thinking of getting one of those nifty, tasteful, a-DOR-able (cough cough) progress bars for baby or release from prison or whatever else is in the works. Like a book manuscript.

Those were the days. And you knew who you were then. Girls were girls and men were men.

And perhaps we could even use a man like Herbert Hoover again. In some ways we might be living in an era like his, but I recall that, before he became president, Hoover was an intelligent, otherwise competent man overwhelmed by the factors that contributed to the Depression. But I’m neither an Americanist nor a historian.

Anyway, I’ll stop “singing” now that I can finally explain to my parents why I’m still unmarried. According to this highly scientific test (found chez Notorious Ph.D., whose lackluster scores nevertheless put mine to shame), I was destined to be a husband. From the 1930s.

-1 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Poor (Failure) Take the test!

As I’m too often told, I’ve apparently missed my calling. See?

128 As a 1930s husband, I am Very Superior Take the test!

Could I have made Trixie a very happy little woman? Actually I don’t care. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must stop typing, because I’ve just painted my nails red—a sure sign of a bad wife.

The other day I posted about my hellacious recent journey to Weird City via Greyhound. When I booked the ticket, I congratulated myself for my frugality in saving more than $700 in airfare, not to mention the immeasurable hassle of driving. But 54+ hours aboard the Chariot of the People made me think twice: I had always believed I was frugal, but had I now crossed the line into being cheap? I needed an answer.

Thank goodness Time Out New York came to the rescue with a cheapness quiz. My cheapness quotient was 11, with the following explanation:

You steal cable from your neighbor and buy day-old bagels, but you’re not as bad as you look. Like Luther from Coach, you’ll spring if you really have to. You just hope that never happens.

Perhaps the quiz would be eerily accurate if I were in NYC. I don’t have cable, and I make my own bagels. I’ve never seen Coach, and I hope I never really have to. Meanwhile, I’ll just have to assume that Luther is a junior faculty member and not the show’s (unless it’s a movie) eponym. At JPU, the last coach’s salary I noticed went into seven figures. I didn’t even know those were allowed here.

After months of ratcheting up fares to keep up with fuel costs, the airlines are now contritely rescinding their most recent increases. Such was not the case two weeks ago, when I realized I had no choice but to go to Weird City to inspect some papers at one of the world’s most gloriously excellent and greedily acquisitive libraries. Not only was I up against a deadline, but I also had to see the papers firsthand, because I couldn’t quite articulate what I was looking for, so I couldn’t direct anyone I knew on site to look for it. I did find it, as well as the celebrated much much more, but at what cost?

Two weeks ago it was still May. Remember how young and carefree we were then? Yeah. And the cheapest airfare kayak.com could find to Weird City was $839. Fine: I had spent so many hours in airports in the past nine months that, I told myself, I was relieved not to be flying.

After all, my favorite way to travel is by train. Though Amtrak seems to be perpetually trimming its itineraries while raising its fares, I remain smitten with rail travel and would choose it at any opportunity. As “evidenced” by that episode of Sex and the City in which Carrie and Samantha suffer the indignities of showering over a toilet and sharing a club car with children as well as paunchy Midwestern dudes sporting wedding rings and unironic facial hair, trains are emphatically not fabulous. However, they are civilized: passengers can get up and walk around; they are all but forced to relax, an activity that may or may not include using one’s laptop or reading. (On a smaller scale, I remain convinced that cities with extensive mass rail systems have better-informed and -educated populations. Sure, you’ll see Blackberries sprouting up in every ear, but many passengers are also reading; even if they’re not, they necessarily demonstrate an awareness of etiquette unknowable to freeway drivers who risk offending no one but themselves.) What is more, trains take us through an America that we wouldn’t otherwise see: the back yards of Appalachia, eerie rocks once submerged in the ocean along the Pacific coast, graffiti sprayed apparently just for us in Chicago.

This past year, I had to arrange my eight (yes, eight) trips around my teaching schedule, and since I’ve never been on a train that departed on time—after all, they figure if you’re traveling by train, time is no object—I flew each time. Not surprisingly, then, I had fallen out of the habit of seeking out train schedules. By the time the train crossed my mind (heh), it was sold out.

Never mind, for what came to my rescue but the Chariot of the People, the Big Gray Dog? Yes, folks, I voluntarily took a bus on an overnight trip, twenty-seven hours each way.

My unsolicited advice to those seeking to save a few shekels by going Greyhound? Don’t do it!

When I was a grad student all of, um, four years ago, I used not to think twice about taking a bus on fairly long trips. It could be that I’ve become too old to sit still for that long, deprived of sleep. It could be that life on the fringes of the professoriate has finally coaxed my inner snob out into the open. But this last bus ride was my last, because hell really is other people.

.These other people were, I’m not proud to admit, truly other to me. My route to Weird City took me through the Deep South, where I had never been before. (I know: I’m as pure as the driven snow.) The bus seemed to stop at every little town, pop. 525, where teenaged mothers would board with their newborns—that is, if there was space. What with exorbitant airfares and unprecedented gas prices, Greyhound was (un)surprisingly popular. Every other leg (and there were many) of the trip was oversold, and a second bus had to be called into service, involving a delay of up to five hours. Not once did I have a pair of seats to myself. Indeed, I arguably never had a single seat to myself, since the person who plonked herself or himself down next to me inevitably either weighed upwards of 300 pounds or was laden with baggage. One particularly memorable seatmate was thus burdened in both senses of the term. This young woman had apparently brought the contents of her entire apartment with her and spent the whole five-hour journey with a blanket over her head as she sobbed into her cellphone at the boyfriend she had just left.

I had learned long before then not to ask anyone to mind the boundaries of their seat. Some ten hours before, a woman of robustly ample figure got in the seat in front of me and promptly reclined it as close to 180° as possible. She was practically in my lap, and since her head was only three inches away from mine, I thought I might as well ask her to move her seat upright just a smidge. She replied, not to me but to no one in particular, “If she bothers me again I’ll turn around and knock the shit out of her. I need my rest and I need my space.” Were I more certain of her grasp on civility, I would have retorted, “And if you do so I’ll have you arrested for assault.”

Of course she could have been bluffing, but then again she could have knocked the shit out of me before I could dial the authorities, who may or may not have taken seriously a call from a bus, so I wasn’t taking my chances. Throughout the trip I had overheard multiple passengers—all male—talking on cellphones to or about their parole officers, and I had sat next to one very young Army reservist on her way to her base. She was sobbing not because she was being deployed, but because it was her first bus trip ever, and it was frightening her. I tried to reassure her, though I couldn’t help being frightened about the frightened, inexperienced kids we are sending out to fight.

But then I couldn’t fault this young woman for her fright. It turns out that the police do in fact heed calls from buses, and for good reason: one man kept fondling his seatmate, so the driver pulled over onto the shoulder of an abandoned, possibly unmapped highway, where the police boarded the bus and arrested Mr. Hands. Astonishingly enough (well, I was astonished), this was not the only instance in which the driver was motivated to throw passengers off the bus. As we were pulling up to yet another bus station, a shouting-and-shoving match erupted between a skinny teenager with a bad complexion and a heavy-set, mullet-coiffed woman with a large, gelatinous forehead:

Skinny Teenager with Bad Complexion (STBC): Move the fuck over!

Mullet-Coiffed Woman with Large, Gelatinous Forehead (MCWLGF): You move the fuck over!

STBC: It’s not my problem your ass is so big.

MCWLGF: I’m not in your seat. Just put your bag on the floor. Then you’ll have more room.

STBC: No, then you’ll be sitting on me. Move the fuck over or I’ll beat the shit out of you.

MCWLGF: You move the fuck over, crack whore. I’m not your bitch.

Then the driver switches on the light and asks what’s going on, as if he couldn’t tell. The women reiterate their complaints in almost identically elegant language, except in the third person, and he threatens to throw them off the bus if they cannot behave themselves. Meanwhile, a voice from the back of the bus chants, “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!” to widespread snickers. I assume he was alluding to the Jerry Springer Show, which until then I had believed had gone off the air. (Note to self: there’s a pop culture tidbit that might prove useful in livening up a lecture on dull material, like scansion. Thus, “While ‘Jerry’ is an example of a trochee, ‘Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!’ is a series of spondees.” Yeah.)

It is hot out there. Heat makes people cranky. And smelly. Just ask the babies with sodden diapers. The crankiness and smelliness increase geometrically with the number of people. But these annoyances weren’t what dismayed me most. People were so inhumane to each other, and to my great surprise, I was. . . surprised. For years I’ve cultivated what I thought was a vivaciously curmudgeonly persona, but I wasn’t prepared to teeter off into full-blown misanthropy. Sure, I’ve encountered plenty of asshats on flights, but flights are relatively short, and not once has a flight shaken my defense of the so-called working classes. As if I didn’t already know, poverty is not ennobling. My fellow passengers may have fancier cellphones and handbags than I do, but these just exaggerated their performance of class. When brought beyond the abstract, I found my fellow passengers to be so irrevocably strange. The bus saved me more than $700, but at the cost of my liberal ignorance, my (yawn) faith in humanity.

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
‘Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’

‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.

‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’

[from W. B. Yeats, Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932)]

I haven’t posted a Friday poem in a while, and since I attempted a lame play on this one two weeks ago I thought I might as well post it. I must clarify, however, that my postal carrier has never commented on my breasts. To do so would be unseemly, especially for a federal employee. (Did that need clarification?) Besides, following a short working week for most Amurricans, this weekend just feels like it will be late Yeatsian. Yup, folks be going nutters.

While I’m on the topic of Yeats—who I recall wrote six Crazy Jane poems—when I was little I used to believe he and Andrew Jackson were separated at birth. I don’t think Yeats would have objected to this belief. Never mind the twenty years that separate the death of the one from the birth of the other. Still, theosophy (something about which I know nothing, except that I think “Blavatsky” sounds cool, with its savagely flat vowels and belligerent consonants; say it with me: “the Great Blavatsky”) notwithstanding, I doubt that Billy B would have appreciated being thought a reincarnation or a channeler of Old Hickory. But pictures don’t lie. Lookie:

In my dotage, I’ve continued to dig their crazy hair and to be fascinated with their woman problems. Jackson eloped with someone else’s wife, whom he eventually married, and when his Whig foes tried to dig up this sex scandal to use against the newly inaugurated president, she dropped dead. Boy howdy were they sorry, not least because everyone loves a grieving widower. And Yeats? He was obsessed with Maude Gonne and let her reject him repeatedly before moving on to her daughter Iseult, who also rebuffed him. At least his wife Georgie was a good amanuensis for the spirits, and I believe it was she for whom he was rumored to have had a monkey gland transplant to restore him to his youthful vigor. As for Jackson, he survived an assassination attempt, with what I for some reason recall being a cane gun, a marvelous concealed weapon that manages to combine the effete with the badass. (Otherwise, I disapprove of firearms.)

The non sequiturs are endless!

NB to student plagiarists: don’t even think of copying this entry for your papers. You’re looking at a blog, not Spark Notes, fer goodness’s sake. Besides, this stuff’s all from off the top of my head, and these days there’s not a whole lot up there.