bear with me here & I’ll come around to the dieting point eventually.
So I’d planned to have what I call “open lab hours” for my students today…it’s the last weekend before they have to turn in all their work and most of my students work during the week, so why not open up our computer classroom on a Sunday & make myself available for conferences or help or whatever? Anyway, it’s worked out well in the past.
So I head into campus, getting there at 11:30 to open the lab at noon when I see campus police locking the front door of my building. No problem cause I told my classes the back door is usually open on Sundays, but I head in the back door & figure I’d better find the cop to let him know he can’t lock those back doors quite yet.
He beats me to the punch: just as I’m walking in the door, he’s there with the key to lock them. “are you locking these?” “yes, do you work here?” “I’m faculty, but I have students coming in today for meetings,” I tell him. “not today,” he says, “the campus is locking down today and tomorrow.” & when I ask why, all he’ll tell me is to check my email when I get home.
Turns out our campus isn’t immune from the crazy crappola happening in Illinois right now & someone has scribbled threatening messages on the walls of several men’s rooms on campus. So we’re closed…the campus that won’t close unless we get over 2 feet of snow in just under 2 hours is closed today and Monday. Don’t get me wrong…it’s the right thing to do, but I think my students are in much more danger of getting into accidents driving on snowy streets…
So I went home to email the news to my classes, packed the dog into the car & headed for the dog park. But the whole way there, all I can think is “cigarette”. & on the way home, “cigarette.” I didn’t buy any, but the minute I got home I ate my evening pudding snack and some spinach with lite cream cheese and pretzels pretty much all at once & without the slightest hunger as motivation…and then I settled in for a long & forgetful nap.
Aaaarrrrgggghhh! In my intro classes we focus on “fear” all semester. Those crazy old fears like ebola, day care abuse, and communists, new fears like West Nile virus and cyber predators, and perennial fears like rising crime rates (they’ve been falling for 30 years now), teen pregnancy (at its lowest rate ever), and stranger danger (children still have more to fear from the people who claim to love them than from strangers). We look at what terrible things happened to schools after Columbine when suddenly all of our nation’s children were looked upon and treated like murderous psychopaths, like public enemy #1. We look at what these exaggerated fears do to distract our nation’s attention from the really scarey shit like child poverty, women still earning on 78% of what men earn, the number of people without health insurance, the percentage of black men who won’t live to see their 25th birthdays, etc. So much better to talk about flesh-eating viruses and cyber-predators than to tackle and solve the real problems.
I want them to learn to be skeptical of how the media and politicians manipulate us by manipulating data. I want them to stop just assuming violent crime is on the rise & start consulting the FBI Crime Bureau Statistics to see how much it has actually fallen. If I do things right, they start sorting through the garbage & getting to the facts. In short, I hope they become more critical consumers of information and more adept and skeptical researchers.
And then shit like this happens. No matter how reasonable you are…even though you know you’re in more danger of dying every time you step out of your own bathtub than you are stepping onto campus, even though you know the incredible risk you’re taking every time you drive down the highway (and glory be, no one’s going to stop showering or driving when they hear the actual statistics), it’s still hard to reason your way out of fear when it’s happening on your own damn campus…the place most of these kids move to immediately after leaving the (relative) safety of their own homes.
& living in fear is such a time and energy sucker…it’s taken me years to realize that every time the evening news tells me “that soda you’re drinking could kill you, tune in at 11 & we’ll tell you which brand is deadly,” they don’t actually have my best interest at heart. It’s the one thing I hope my students walk away from our class understanding: that they need to be their own best judges…and then our campus gets locked down because of some punk who didn’t get enough attention when he was growing up. F#@% it!
Cigarettes! No? Beer! No? Okay, FOOD! No? You’re not leaving me with much to work with here! All my usual go-tos for stress have forsaken me (read: made me fat or tried to kill me). Why do the real stress busters like food and beer have to be so calorie-laden & if they can send a man to the moon, why can’t they make a cigarette that won’t kill me? For crap’s sake!
Oh, I know, I know. I should go for a walk, isn’t it just lovely out? Or why don’t I go to the Y and get my run in now rather than tomorrow? Hey, I have that great mystery I’ve been dying to read…why not lose myself in that? All good ideas…but none has quite the Siren’s song appeal, quite the quieting effect of “cigarettes, ” “chocolate,” “chips,” and “beer.”
