You write out notes to yourself, little promises on what you’ll say and do and make them think. You rehearse the first class or two. You try, mercy how you try, to get over that painfully awkward business of name and hometown and major. And then you realize you still have to redo this and polish that and so on and on.
I decided to ask what was the most exciting thing about their individual summers. That’s how I’m going to start my first class tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes.
So I did physical therapy this morning, an exceedingly lonely exercise. The ladies that walk me through each individual thing generally leave me alone. They only seem to glance my way when I happen to be doing something wrong, which is good. They are very polite about those corrections, but you know what they are thinking: You will do this right in Hercules’ name!
Last week at some point I sat on a pull down machine backward. You would have thought I’d sacked her groceries wrong.
Everything is small talk because they know for how long everyone will be there. I walked in a short timer. No need to get attached to me. They are all very good and nice people who surely know their jobs. Today I saw one of the gentlemen there adjust his colleague. This happened while I was trapped in a chair doing a stretch that involves rope and pulley and counting and he just crunched the guy on a table that sounded like it was falling apart and I could not look away.
I get a massage and it takes two-thirds of the experience just to unclench. This guy did that like he was slinging a coat over his shoulder. It was almost jaunty.
Horribly, horribly jaunty.
So one of the ladies is beating up my bicep this morning for reasons that weren’t immediately obvious. I’ve complained about it there before, but not today as far as I recall. It seems that everything I complain about — and I try to tell them a different thing each visit, just to keep them hopping — is very standard. My neck is sore, that muscle connects here. My shoulder is sore, there are two muscles that attach right back there. My bicep aches, that is a pain radiating down … and so on. Today she ground it down like I broke in front of line to get tickets to the big concert.
“I know you’re only doing it because you care,” I laughed.
“I’m doing it because it is good for you,” was her immediate response.
Wow. And whoa. I appreciate professional detachment, but I know how to parse words too. And it was not me who dinged your car door. (I park way far away, just so I don’t give these people ammunition. They can hurt me.)
I’m kidding, of course. They are all very kind. I have a few more visits with them and then, hopefully, I won’t take up a spot in their calendar anymore. Also, I’m sneaking extra reps on the weights, because I think I am strong.
So that was the morning. The rest of the day was wrapped up in syllabi and emails and PowerPoint shows and old notes. What worked in that lecture? Which things did not? Can I get all this in an hour and change? This can all go on for a while, but the nice thing is that I’ve taught the class before. It gets better every time.
Oh, and also arranging meetings. I have meetings left and right. And then left again. Remarkably every meeting I’ll have this week will be one you wouldn’t mind attending. That’s how you know you have a great job, I think.
Football season is upon us. And since we went archive diving this weekend I thought I’d add a few photographs from Auburn University’s collection — everything on display peters out around 1983 for some odd reason — in honor of this most festive time of the year. We’ll have one each day. This kid is not me:
There was no name with the photograph, but I still wonder what has become of him. Where is he saying War Eagle from this week?
