Episode 17: Albania!

“Or, should I say, ‘Al – Ba – Ni – A?!’”

Say this word to a good percentage of persons of a certain age (and younger ones, thanks to re-runs), and you may hear these syllables repeated in rising crescendo, roughly to the tune of “The Saints Come Marching In”:

“Al – Ba – Ni –A!”  followed by the line, “You border on the A – Dri – A –

tic!”

The clip from an early season of Cheers can be found on YouTube.  Coach is helping Sam study.  With his characteristic seriousness-cum-goofiness, Coach employs a well-known mnemonic device, creating a song to help Sam remember the facts for his test.  The song, however, employs none of the musical techniques that help us retain facts, such as rhythm or rhyme.  Which, in addition to some fine acting, is why this bit is so darned funny.  See it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxMF9SsaZns.

Episode 16: FAIL!!! Part Deux

See Part One for the prequel.

The first time I noticed something wrong, I was working part-time at a community college and commuted over an hour to the closest university with graduate programs in English.  There, I took two courses and taught two sections of Freshman English.  Of course, I was also a single mom with two boys, the older one just entering his teens.  My schedule was tough.  I described it in a Christmas letter, to which one person responded, "It sounded like a cry for help."

But I was thrilled.  I was doing what I was meant to do.  Yes, teaching caused me extreme anxiety, but over time I got more comfortable in the classroom and even had some amazing classes.  But I was feeling awfully tired.  "My stamina is so bad," I thought, but I had no idea why.  I was only thirty-seven.  I wasn't overweight and, as far as I knew, I was perfectly healthy.  Why did I feel as if I were walking under water most of the time?

Episode 15: On Being an Underling

I spent a lot of years in college to get away from being the “underling” in an organization.  I’d experienced that subtle apartheid as a secretary in a corporate DC law firm, and I did not like it.  Here I am experiencing it again, some twenty-five years later after two master’s degrees, and I still do not like it.  But the question is:  How important is my ego?  Not nearly as important as it was when I was twenty-eight, naïve, and idealistic—important enough then for me to enroll as a freshman at a state university when I was thirty.  Now, I have to be practical.  I can’t tell them to kiss my rosy red ass and quit.  Obviously, the “Little Me” inside me is annoyed and somewhat aghast.  The “Big Me” sees it as an interesting point in my career—and my life--and a time to reflect on my own reactions to this ego hit.

Episode 14: FAIL!!!

A better ending for the previous year could not have been had.  In my mailbox today lay the last sentence of a bitter chapter (Chapter 7) in my life: a court order granting my bankruptcy.  Oh, the consequences of the triggering event are not over with and never will be, but now at least I can look toward a brighter day with a hope that has been difficult to conjure since September 2008.  I’m starting over financially—not completely with a clean state, as I’ll still be paying student loans—but I’m okay with that, other than the interest gauging me every minute.  Somehow it seems apt that higher education and I remain tied together, despite our bitter divorce.  I owe so much to ol' H.E., personally and intellectually. Yet higher education is why I’m bankrupt in the first place ... one of those dichotomies in life than can never fully be reconciled, so to speak.