If you are looking for a way to win my heart today, a bouquet of sharpened pencils would do the trick. School supplies are crack cocaine. Do I need all new notebooks for every class even though there is plenty of paper from last semester’s notebooks? No. Do I need new pencils with fresh erasers and pens with matching tops? No. Three ring binders? No. Lisa Frank folders? No. But I want it all. Tom Hanks too, nay the charmingly dreaded Joe Fox in You’ve Got Mail.
Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.
I know January isn’t fall and Auburn isn’t New York, but despite the browning trees, today’s mid 50′s sun stirred the same ardor as, say, a September 1st at P.S. 22 might. I wish I could make bouquets for you all, made of macaroni yellow pencils with perfect erasers and tiny #2′s pressed into their microscopically octagonal necks.
Nonetheless, for those of you who returned to the classroom this week, I hope you love your classes because college is too expensive not to. And I hope you have teachers like Dr. Jim McKelly who simultaneously make you feel feebleminded in comparison and significant for wanting to learn. And I hope they are the kind of professors that curse on the first day of class and make someone feel uncomfortably noticed in hopes of making them feel comfortable… like today during roll call for Dr. McKelly’s film class (mind you, roll call took almost 40 minutes because Jim McKelly is a poet of a storyteller with a fire in his belly).
McKelly: Katie Knight? <katie is sitting in front of me and we have never met>
Katie: Here.
McK: Katie, my roster says you are a sophomore.
Katie: Yes, sir. <she’s looking nervous.>
McK: Ah, you are a minnow among sharks. But you have Holly <this is my 3rd semester in his classroom> behind you. She will take care of you. Holly, give Katie a pat on the back every now and then and tell her it’s going to be okay. <playing me, he squats down like he is sitting in a desk and pats the invisible minnow to his front on the shoulder. In a whisper,> Don’t worry, he’s a bastard. He’s just a jackass.
Of course, most of the class doesn’t laugh at first because no one wants to be the first person to make any kind of noise. Everyone feels slightly uncomfortable in a new room with these new people who they either think they are smarter than and are waiting for an opportunity to prove it or who they think they are less smart than and are hoping to not be called on. Or because they don’t want to say the wrong thing in front of that person that they picked out on the first day of class. You know, the most attractive member of the opposite sex in the room that you want to strategically and discreetly sit by next time. The person doesn’t even have to be that attractive, maybe just wearing something cool or carrying an interesting book or an obscure newspaper. You know you do it. It’s why there is a little pressure to look slightly better than normal for the first day of class. Why did I wear funky earrings to my 8:00am today? We all want to be that person.
It’s science. Like fall and pencil bouquets.
[...] a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils [...]
he probably meant minnow…. like the fish.
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