PTSD

but what would you say when you were with them

Okay, so what happens when Priya and I meet in person is this (no whining, Loyal reader. Present tense is your friend):

1. We spend 20 minutes talking about haircuts and how I manage to get my hair to stand up in defiance of the humidity and the ungodly DC heat.

(Answer: a complicated mixture of three kinds of gel and a touch of this green waxy stuff that makes it looks like I rolled out of bed and forgot to comb it. It looks cool, but depresses me because I get such enjoyment out of ridiculing people with high maintenance styles.

In point of fact, it looks *exactly* like this when I roll out of bed and don’t comb it. Unfortunately, it also sticks flat to my head after an hour. So hello, styling products.)

Priya’s haircut is cute and requires no environmentally-unsound treatment. But I’m not bitter about that.

2. We spend 10 minutes discussing the poster for the upcoming conference (we’ll be the ones with the pretty, pretty diagrams and the colorful blogposts. Come visit!)

3. And follow that with 30 minutes wondering why the new freshmen look so terrifyingly young. And snarking about TUWSNBN’s efforts to recreate the fun and fabulous Route 66. Unsuccessfully.

4. Priya wonders if she’s employed for the semester, given that she’s not been sent anything resembling a contract. Decision: she has a roster, therefore she is, in fact, a professor. Of sorts.

5. We contemplate pestering WeberMan as an alternative to doing useful work. Useful work wins by a narrow margin. And only because it’s more of a theoretical possibility than an actual game plan. Result: continued sitting on a bench in front of The Department.

6. Random Student stops by to catch up. Two people in our cohort are married, one is defending next week, one is still somewhere around DC, and one was (last we heard) trying to get into Lebanon. We assume that he managed to do so, probably while carrying a camera.

Our lives are not very exciting, but at least no one is shooting at us.

7. New plan: we need dinner and beer. On the bus, we discuss boys in eyeliner. On the walk to the restaurant, we discuss syllabi and the sociological understanding of knowledge in the hard sciences.

And eyeliner.

No, really.

8. People in their grandmother’s skirts should not ridicule the sartorial choices of teenagers. Or so Priya claims; I think that’s exactly what they should do. Loudly, and at length. But maybe that’s just me?

9. S is late to meet us. As usual. We kill time evaluating the relative merits of informality as a teaching style. Some are successful at it, others less so. Priya politely ignores my “flit about the classroom tossing Random Grenades of Information at the students” method.

10. At dinner, there is more discussion of boys in eyeliner, much showing of recent photos (including the Sprout and the Genius Nephew) and some drawing on the tablecloth. I once again talk about how GN resembles Sid Vicious in his soccer outfit. The other children look like normal children. GN will grow up to be a brilliant iconoclast with colorful hair, I think. The other children will grow up to play sports, as they demonstrate the ability to both run and kick a ball at the same time.

Genius Nephew falls down while jogging laps around the field. No one looked surprised at this.

Over a brownie sundae (we flipped a coin, and then ignored it) I win the dubious honor of posting the Guide to Academic Eyeliner. Or Guide to Academics in Eyeliner. Or something. Either way, I'm working on it.

posted by Elizabeth @ 7:33 PM