Kafkaesque

Kaf·ka·esque (käf'kə-ěsk') adj.
Of or relating to Franz Kafka or his writings.
Marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger: "Kafkaesque fantasies of the impassive interrogation, the false trial, the confiscated passport . . . haunt his innocence" (New Yorker).

Lunch again. The original two Guests have swelled to about twenty regulars, those hilarious students who come in during lunch to laugh, flirt, and talk, play cards and guitars, and beg me to intervene in squabbles over anything from relationship disputes to the occasional marker-on-face incident. Sometimes I feel like a sibling, sometimes a mother, and seldom a teacher in these wild half-hours. Mostly, I sit and read the paper, drink tea, and try to relax as well as possible against the colorful, moving background of faces and voices.

Today, I look up from a newspaper article, about a typo vigilante who corrects restaurant menues with chalk and white-out all around the country, when a small word is shoved between my eyes and the paper.

Actually rather a long word, Kafkaesque is printed on a rectangular magnet in 13-point font, and now one of my students is holding it out with concern.

"What's this mean?" he queries.

I smile. I wondered when this would happen. Two days ago, I brought the magnetic poetry set from my old house's refrigerator and put it on the side of the file cabinet next to my desk. Since the magnets were getting no use at my old house, I doubted that we could want them at the new place. So I scooped the whole collection into a plastic bag, then spent twenty minutes on Monday sticking them to the black cabinet while my docile first period worked on chapter questions. I had liked the effect of the white magnets on the black metal, but I anticipated a problem.

You see, this set of magnetic words was the "Genius Edition," given to me by some wry family member years ago in response to my penchant for ridiculously and unneccesarily large words. I tend to use "purchase" instead of "buy," or "indeed" instead of "yes," so they got these words to mock me. And they are long words. Wild words. Words that I don't even always recognize. On Monday, I considered the consequences of having a student ask for a definition that I was unable to give. It would be humbling. But humanizing. They can't really think I'm a genius, anyway. Not after this long.

Fortunately, I do know this word. Hopefully, lunch will end before he finds ersatz or salient.

"Ms. D?" he prods, as I take my time looking up from the typo-bandit article. "KAFF-KAIS-CUE?"

While I know that the normal teacher response is something snide like, "Look it up, why don't you, and learn something?" I'm also vaguely aware that the cruel dictionary expects some knowledge that Kafka is a person, not a Ukranian village or a Russian car or a drink made from vodka.

"OK, so there's this author named Kafka, and he writes crazy books. Like, really crazy. You don't know what's going on crazy. So, if you call something 'KAF-KA-esque,' you're saying it's weird, bizarre, wacked out, out of control..." (I always speak in italics and fragments at lunch. Class is the time for well-planned, rhetorical speech. This is the time for passion.)

"OK, OK, I get it," he nods, deep in comprehension. He disappears behind the overhead screen, while his friends begin handing me more magnets to define. I scrape definitons together from past reading, roots, context, and synonyms, none of which would probably have stood the Webster test.

As the bell rings for lunch, the first student pulls up the overhead screen to reveal the whiteboard behind it.

"Look what I wrote!" he is saying to anyone who will listen as they shuffle off to fifth period. His claims are proud, expansive, and extremely proper. "In my own words, this is what I believe about my teacher. This is how I can best describe her."

His scholarly syntax catches my ear; this is a student who will say "don't" when he shouldn't, and adds infinite "ed"s to actions in the very distant past. I look back at the board to see what he's talking about.

There, written in large, neat letters on the length of my whiteboard, is a simple and perfectly correct sentence.

"Ms. D is Kafkaesque."

A View to a Death

Simon is dying again.

In the late afternoon, as I fold my legs up and sit on top of a table at the back of the classroom, I again reach page 152, that horrible page, and young Simon is again stabbed, beaten, and kicked to death by a mob of terrified and demented little boys. This is the fifth time today I have read Chapter 9 of William Golding's Lord of the Flies aloud, and even now it is awful, too awful to breeze by or to read without some measure of solemnity. As the stranded boys form a phalanx of spears, sticks, and clubs, as they dance and chant and descend into a dark and stormy world of instinct and appetite, I force myself to continue crying their vicious chant: Kill the beast! Spill his blood! Cut his throat! Do him in! It's horrible, but I don't stammer or stumble, for the words are catchy, their spondaic insistency pounding on us like waves or the percussive end of a spear. Even in our classroom in Seattle, we are aware somehow of the thunder, the hunger, and the primal terror back there on the beach. With the lights off, only the half-light of a cloudy April day filtering through the windows, our imaginations are dragged into this fiendish scene.

I can't stop us from getting there, to the bottom of the page, when the boys turn on one of their own. When "the circle became a horseshoe" and the mouth of jagged spears devours Simon, the compassionate, gentle boy who had discovered the secret of the island, that they had nothing to fear but the evil of their own dark natures. As Golding takes us through the murder, his subtle prose is lost on some of my students, who are either on the wrong page or are gazing at the clock, which has stalled, as it does every day, on 2:00 PM. But one girl is more astute; as soon as the small figure comes out of the forest to them, she knows what will happen.

"No!" she wails as I continue reading. She lays her book cover-down on the desk, folds her arms over her head like Simon. "Not Simon! That's awful! This is awful!"

I can relate. Ever since losing Beth in Little Women, I haven't been above grieving for fictional characters. There is something intimate about reading, about getting to know these characters through their actions and words, especially for someone who has lived as long in imagination as I have. I've brought them along, this time, in learning to love Simon, the child who helps others, whose common sense and bravery set him apart from the savagery of his peers. "He's the best character we've got, you guys," I've told them, wondering how obliquely I can describe a Christ figure without actually mentioning the name.

But I keep reading. I feel callous as I read these horrible words aloud, almost as if I were somehow complicit in this terrible crime, merely by bearing the news of it to my students. I try to find a tone that is solemn enough, respectful enough, for the gravity of this moment. I read the rest of the chapter, my voice and Golding's words eventually carrying Simon out to sea with the tide, among waves glowing with phosphorescence. It's beautiful, a dignified end for this saintly, sacrificed character.

As we pack up, my students express various levels of horror at the state of things, and I wish I could tell them that it got better. The truth, as I recall now, is that Simon's death won't fix things. Killed like so many innocents, perhaps Simon is Golding's cynical memorial to those lost in the two world wars which preceded his publishing of Lord of the Flies. At the end of this book, I think glumly, I'll have told them that people are basically bad. What am I doing to them?

One of the themes we've encountered in the novel has been the loss of innocence that gradually meets all of the boys. I think about Simon's last act, after his disillusioning encounter with the Devil, an act of compassion. I remind the kids that even after innocence is lost, goodness and compassion remain. "He's still Simon," I say. "Even after everything horrible he's seen today, he's still a helper. He's still good. Just not innocent."

Like them, I think now. Yes, if they believe it this book will take some of the luster off of the world, some of the inherent goodness to which perhaps some of them still hold. Today has been a rubbing away of innocence for me, even, as I have five times recited the details of a murder, engraving images into my mind that I may never wholly forget. I remember that literature is often gruesome, that violence is real and the truth of it must be revealed. Even when the truth is dark and dreadful, like today.

On the other side, I know, is the hope that they will grow up, even as they shed the naivete of childhood, into people capable of striving for truth and working compassion, courageously good against the evil they find in the world around them.

its the internet. get over it

The sentence is buried in about a zillion comments to the latest post on the clever blog Stuff White People Like, a recent stop on my lunchtime reading on the Internet, when the Seattle Times, delivered daily, seems just too earnest.

The comments had veered away from the topic at hand--socialized medicine--and into a bizarre world of name-calling and personal attacks that strike me as truly ridiculous, even embarrassing. It's all so awful, but I don't tear myself away, as I probably should have. I wonder, as I read, how old are the posters, especially since I believe only a narrow demographic of age, education and geographic and ethnic background would find this blog funny enough--but not too offensive--to read. The comments spiral into juvenile assaults, until at last someone tells a string of personal anecdotes vaguely relating back to medicine (something about tanning). The stories, though mercifully more on topic, are all written in a manner free from the boundaries of spelling, punctuation, and usage, and I scan them mildly. I've seen worse, after all.

The next comment, however, is from an irate and less hardened Standard English defender, coolly criticizing the previous poster's lack of skill. This merits the above response: "its the internet. get over it"

That's all. And though the technique is not noticeably different than any of the other posts or than much of the writing that I read daily, it made me think. Is this true? Has the Internet become a zone of international language anarchy? Am I so backwards to still read these comments as if they were written by junior high kids who don't know any better? Or are these comments written by tech-savvy graduate students, accountants, and business owners who simply can't be bothered to write whole words anymore?

I recently had the kids write essays about whether or not spelling matters in contemporary communication. I reminded them of spellcheck and advertizing's cavalier ways with words. I made them consider what areas really required proper spelling these days. I asked, "If I were a first grade teacher, should I even bother to teach spelling to the next generation." 90% said I should, which impressed me. Apparently, my urban, mostly poor students can find the holes in this technological web, along with the reputation gained by shoddy spelling. But still, as I read thousands of "ur"s instead of "you are" (or even "you're"!), and hundreds of students who answer questions with "IDK" ("I don't know") and call it good, I wonder if laziness, not innovation, is winning over our kids.

400 Meters of Rain

Hail begins to fall from the sky at the instant that the ten girls take off their sweats at the starting line for the 1600 meter run. It doesn't matter much, though, since it's already been pouring for twenty minutes. Water has seeped through the canvas of my multi-colored Converse sneakers--worn in honor of Rainbow Day for the pep assembly--and when I turn my head to see the starting gun, water flies in all directions, as if I were a shaggy Newfoundland emerging from a pond. The gun goes off and I curse my slow reflexes as I squeeze the stopwatch. It's the first track meet of the year.

I almost didn't stay. Beginning at 10:00 AM, a series of thoughtless pranks, ridiculously childish antics, and chaotic moments leeched away my faith in the youth of America. Even a pep assembly that featured performances by the musical theater class and the color guard--odd performances that usually fill me with delight in my unique urban school--did not cheer me. This Youth (in archetypal capitals) which I define by what I keep reminding myself is a narrow demographic in a difficult stage of life, had failed me once again, and I was tired of being walked on as I waited in line at the Starbucks four blocks from school.
I was tired of teaching and the invisible, degrading insignificance of it all, like when I played on a baseball team and they would send me way out into right field while the more talented kids played the exciting infield. Except, back then, there weren't twenty kids in the infield who were shouting at me because I wouldn't give their cell phones back at the end of the day. I'd unfortunately made it quite clear, though, that I would be attending the track meet. With a martyr sigh, I drove back, vowing to stay for two races only.

I watched all six heats of the Boys 110, then three of the girls 100. I was turning to leave, when I stopped by the concession stand, where the junior class, those students I taught as freshmen during both of our first years here. We chatted about fundraising and classes and the pep assembly. These are the kids who give me valentines and flowers at the end of the school year. They gave me dinner, not the usual hot dog and popcorn fare of high school sporting events, but delicious chicken and broccoli noodles that one of their mothers cooked for the occasion. Feeling warmed and cared for, dreaming that perhaps our country won't fall apart when I'm old, I walked across to the finish line, where a bevy of students and retired teachers were huddled with stopwatches. And that's how I became a timer and managed to stay at the track meet for two hours longer than I intended.

As the races run by--110 Men, 100 Women, 4X100 Men, 4X100 Women, 1600 Men, 1600 Women--I am visited by ghosts of my own track meets. For each race there is a memory, because I ran them all in three years on the track team, at least once for each race. The 100 meter I ran as a ninth grader, when I loved that it was fast and light, and it was over in less than twenty seconds. The same with the 4X100 relay, when I ran the first leg because Mr. Spann made me learn how to use starting blocks in middle school. Then the dreadful 1600 meters, the mile, for which these ten girls now waited. That one was junior year, when I was tired and really a cross country runner at heart, bored with laps and wishing that the track was more scenic. The whole afternoon, with the "last calls" on the PA system and the nervous jogging between football goal posts, recalled a part of high school I never think about. I can still remember the silly skits we performed in Language Arts class, or the zillions of flash cards I made to study for AP European History, because those classes--some of the best of my education--visit me every time I plan a lesson. But only this direct contact with a track meet can make me remember the nervous, poised excitement of the short time when I was an athlete.

Beside me stands one of my ninth graders, a girl from my first period class who seemed shy at first, and now slyly mocks the popular boys who always come in late, and recently turned in a colorful comic book account of moving to the United States from Ethiopia. My students and I are quiet in first period, which starts before most of my friends wake up, and our calm reserve often prevents me from becoming as acquainted with these students as the loud bundles of drama and noise that arrive in later hours. So I don't know her well, this girl standing next to me. In fact, I'm not even sure why she's waiting around.

"What's up?" I ask, turning to her.

"I'm next," she answers. She stands on one foot then the other, her neon orange spikes glowing in the grey afternoon.

"Really? What's next?"

"The 400," she sighs. A deep, mournful answer, and I understand.

The dreadful 400 was the race in which I truly became a runner, when the coaches convinced me, once and for all, that I was too short to be a long jumper like I wanted, but I could be a competent runner if I put my mind to it. "Here's a race," they prodded. "Just run this one. Only one lap. It'll be over before you know it." They didn't dwell long on the fact that it was twice as long as the longest race I'd ever run, and forty times as long as the long-jump strip which was my favorite. Just one lap.

I remembered setting the blocks and dreading it. Running out a few times, light and alert and even feeling graceful, but dreading it. Waiting for the gun and dreading every meter, dreading every long, slow curve. The first race was the hardest, of course, when I was shocked at how endless that one lap could seem. Later, when the 1600 meter was standard fare, I would run a 400 at the end of the day, in a relay, with the casual affection that I had for cross country and all other team running. But when I was a ninth-grade sprinter, like this anxious young lady awaiting her race, no race could be more intimidating.

"That's a hard one," I encourage. "I'm impressed. You're going to be incredible!"

"No. I get too tired. I start out OK, but then, at the end, that last stretch... I just get tired." She shakes her head in the rain, shrinks into her blue sweats a little.

"I know. I did, too." The girls are on their last lap, and the boys running the 400 meter are beginning to line up. One more race, only a minute or two long, and it'll be her turn. I try to think of something that will make her feel better about the race to come. "Hey, in five minutes, no matter what happens, or how hard it is, you'll be done! Pretty exciting, eh?"

She smiles and shrugs, jumps up and down to warm up. I remember, again, that horrible moment when you know that you have to leave the damp, warm thickness of cotton sweats and stand, tense and quickly soaked, in the pouring rain. So terrible and exhilarating, to be alone in a lane, to stare down its gentle curve and know that you can't escape it until you've run the length and arrived again where you began.

I wish, in the rain and the hail, that I could be philosophical and make this into a metaphor for teaching, how sometimes there are tiring straightaways which must simply be charged through to the end, how I need to remain, poised and alert and graceful, in this lane for now. But all I can think about is her race, and how now we share this experience, ninth grade and the 400 and the rain. And for now, after hours of breathtaking isolation, it's enough to redeem the day.

Skiing Alone

At 4:45 PM on Friday, just as my regular-job, seizing-their-youth contemporaries are snapping their MacBooks shut in sleek offices downtown and making thrilling plans for the evening, I am swinging onto a cold, creaking ski lift Snoqualmie Pass. At a cool 52 miles from Seattle, this is the pass of choice for the most frugal Seattle students, who can manage to afford passage for the season on the ski bus, but not the ski bus that takes them to Stevens Pass, which most of them prefer. So here we are, the last ski bus of the year, bussing all the way into March because of some avalanches and some breaks earlier in the season. It's still miraculously light as I slide away from the grim chaperone lounge and onto Holiday, a painfully slow lift designed for toddlers, which I only take once a Friday because I am too lazy to walk up the hill to the other lifts.

It's a soft, grey sort of day. The sky is every shade of wooly cloud, only shaded yellow toward the western bottom of it, and the air is above freezing and rain-free, which makes it feel warm, though probably it's not above 35 degrees. The snow is soft but not wet, much more forgiving than ice and far less trouble than powder. I sigh with relief on this wretched, crawling little lift. Though I usually complain about this ski bus chaperoning to an extent that reasonably exhausts everyone around me ("No, I wish I could go. But I have to go skiing. I know, so annoying. And it's like, every Friday, man!"), today I'm happy for several reasons.

I'm happy because this is my fifth time skiing this season. This is five times as much as I've ever skied in a single season before. This means that I am actually getting better at it, and that maybe next winter, when I try again to ski with my maniacal skiing dad, I won't be left as miserably in the dust as usual. I anticipate the next few hours with pleasure and even some confidence. The confidence, I confess, is related to the second reason I'm happy.

I'm happy because I'm alone. I not only have a skiing complex, this painful insecurity about this and a long list of other athletic activities, but I have a Friday complex. The details are sketchy, but they involve me being terribly taciturn and not terribly interesting on Fridays. I don't like to make friends on Fridays; on Fridays, I have trouble managing the ones that I already have. So here I am, skiing in solitude, with my iPod and my developing skills, living the picture of isolation that I lament in our society and loving it. This delight in solitude leads me to the final reason for being happy.

I'm happy because this day has been terrible so far. I suspect, also, that this has been mostly my fault.

Every day, I come to school with this invisible hat on my head. The hat is made of rubber, or maybe thick, quilted cloth, and it flexes and bends throughout the day, absorbing blows and muffling sounds and generally keeping me alive and laughing by the time the last bell rings. I have a long fuse and a higher tolerance level than most for the little annoying things that tend to drive my colleagues to distraction. The forgotten pencils, the repeated directions, the background chatter I take in stride, remembering that I was a kid once, too.

Today, though, the invisible hat was made out of aluminum. Every noise echoed. Every comment made a permanent dent. I spent the day in self-conscious irritation, both at them for being annoying, and at myself for letting them annoy me. I watched again and again, like a horrified spectator, the collision of absent-minded teenagers and their tired teacher, but seemed helpless to change it. I think most of us had a dreadful day.

So I ride the lifts all night, alone and contemplative and already penitent. I'm vowing to do better on Monday, and wondering how. Probably a weekend of rest will help. I'm listening to the banter of teenagers and getting irritated, but at the same time being thankful that my students, whatever their faults, are not as bad as these ones. Not the vile, vulgar rants, nor the shouting across rooms with wild motions and over-the-top theatrics. My students aren't like this. Or maybe they are sometimes, but I know them. I understand when they are just having a bad day or showing off for someone or genuinely making dreadful decisions, know that they are not awful all the time, or even most of the time. I know that most of them--all of them, actually--are bright and try to do the right thing, and are every day learning, whether or not they like it, what that right thing is and how to do it.

And I think, encouraged at the end of this defeating day, that they know me, also. Warmed by the hope of redemption, I turn up the music, look out at the dark, sleepy mountains, and slosh my way down the thick, wet slopes of spring.

What Brings Me Home

"So, what brings you to Hawaii, then?"

It was the question of the week, asked occasionally to those we met along the way. Most were obviously on vacation, as we were, soaking up the heat after months of winter in Minnesota, Oregon, or Alberta. We didn't hassle them, because their mission made sense to us. It made sense like it makes sense for my parents not to heat their house so well, but then to jump into the hot tub in the backyard at intervals throughout the winter, whenever the wool socks and sweaters no longer keep them warm enough. We were all just warming up, a dip into quiet and sunny days before plunging back into the dripping end of winter back home.

But there were others, those who didn't spend the daylight hours lounging on the beach, as we did. They did exciting things during the day, like spear fishing and sea kayaking. Nights they spent in restaurants and bars, both serving and frequenting, blithely advertising each other's events and attending each other's parties. "Laid back" seemed a bit too hurried a modifier for these extended visitors. Most had come from the mainland, and most had not been around for more than a few years.

"So, what brings you to Hawaii?"

The answers were enthusiastic but vague. "Well, this, you know?" most shrugged, waving their arms in broad, sweeping gestures at the whale-filled sea, glowing orange in the sunset, or at the lush green mountains, or at the miles of soft sand. "This."

How nice, I thought, to have such a ready visual to go with your life's purpose. I wondered what I would point to if such a question were directed to me. "What brings you to Seattle?" Or, rather, "What keeps you in Seattle?" As much as I love them, as much as they make this place feel like home, I would not sweep up the mountains, the trees, and the rain in my arms as my reasons. It would take some explaining.

This afternoon, the first day back from mid-winter break. I am sleepy today, but only because this was the first 5:00 AM I've seen in a while. Other than that, I am blissfully rested. I was ready to come home from Hawaii, ready as people never claim to be.

I am enjoying the way that the sun falls into my empty classroom, looking once again at the paper on the floor, the posters that I need to send home with my students, the tablecloth that is already askew on the table in the front. A colleague comes in and says, with a sigh of appreciation, "What a pleasant room!" It is pleasant, I think with a shrug. Pleasant like home. And for once, I'm affectionately replaying the amusing bits of the day instead of the harrowing ones, returning to them like favorite pages of the good books I read on vacation.

And I think, Room 120 would be somewhere I would point out in my reasons for being in Seattle. Not the only place, of course, but one of them, anyway. If I could magically show my Hawaiian friends, and they saw this place, maybe they wouldn't believe me. It's not as clear an argument as dramatic duo of sun and sea. But it's a picture, for me, worth returning to. Returning home to try again, knowing that spring is coming and that the season behind us might have been the darkest for a while.

Things My Students Say #2

Overheard at Lunch

D: What's the difference between a bum and a hobo?

J: There is no difference. They're both homeless.

C: No, a hobo moves around. On trains, and stuff. Like, they hop on trains.

D: Then what's a bum?

C: Just regular homeless. No trains.

Period Six Diversion

J: Hey, Ms. D, did you know that you find $10 worth of pennies in your life, but nobody ever picks them up?

Me: No, I didn't know that.

J: Yeah. Crazy, right? Wait, did I say dimes?

Me: No, pennies.

J: Oh, yeah. Pennies. Oh look, a dime on the floor!




Truly amazing.