Beauty / Pain
Beauty / Pain
You have two choices for your Vocab Word o'th'Week. They're not long or erudite words, but each is pretty complex when you take a moment and think about it.
Pain is Beauty
(Or, Beauty is Pain)
This is a little day-in-the-life snippet of musings from back in the Before Times, when I was teaching one class in downtown Denver, living mostly in downtown Boulder, and teaching two classes in Longmont. All three, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I used solely public transportation (bus + light rail), and was only periodically staying with my partner in Centennial—usually once a week. I was recalling this schedule the other day to him, and he shook his head and said, “I have no idea how you ever did that.”
Sometimes, we do superhuman, even impossible, things for only the simple reason that we have to. Ever have that experience, looking back at your past and going, “Jeeeeeezus…”? Yeah. Well, hey. Good job, you. You lived.
This little piece was from 2017, in the Fall. Enjoy!
As I hurry as fast as my heels allow me, down Larimer Square to my first of three classes today, a woman opening up a fashionable boutiquey clothing and accessories shop calls out to my departing back, “Really cute skirt!”
Huh. Me?
“Thank you!” I reply over my shoulder, even as I feel my underwear sag down to a level that would make a teenaged gang member blush if it were his jeans. Should have bought a size down.
I need to get insoles for these shoes, too, as I have worn them to sharply painful levels inside the already-used-when-I-bought them heels of each. Particularly the right one; I must favor my dominant foot as I walk. Today it feels like Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid character, her new legs stabbing like knives each time she takes a step. Ah well, I’ve got to get to class, I’m already running late…
After class that afternoon, to rest my blistering feet and decompress before traveling an hour and a half north for class two of three, I sit at the aesthetically pleasing speakeasy style bar near the bus terminal. Bartender Adrian, smooth as butter, remembers my name and my order. I pray my debit card won’t get declined as I get as comfortable as (what I’m assuming are) menstrual cramps allow, and settle in to read with a professor’s eye the new section of my partner’s book on pessimism.
I am interrupted by a young man with a stylish haircut, asking me how I am.
See, this is something that doesn’t often occur to men when they go sit at a bar alone, methinks. The moment this young man asks how I am, I know that he’s going to begin chatting me up, and that he’s chatting me up because he’s hitting on me. Sure, he may be a naturally friendly guy, but as a woman in this culture, wearing a skirt that falls a certain way around my long, lean legs as I sit, I know he’s not just making friendly conversation. He remarks he’s seen me here before and asks if I work nearby. My belly twinges, and I wince, tearing my eyes away from my tiny phone screen, where waits the acerbic wit of my beloved.
I’m not in a social mood—I came here to decompress, not fend off the attentions of an amiable young crane operator named (I soon find out) Floyd. I don’t have the heart to tell him to fuck off. He doesn’t deserve that, I don’t think—he’s being quite sweet and respectful, and to be fair, I’m not wearing a ring on my wedding finger as I often do when I want to appear “taken.” But still. More things a man wouldn’t necessarily have to worry about, or even would cross his mind in most cases: the safety protocol of needing to appear already claimed.
Dear little Floyd lives in Vegas but work in his field is mostly here in Denver, he says. I believe him, judging from all the construction all over here, all the time. He’s impressed by my profession (though I aver he makes a lot more money than me), and declares English was the only subject he was good at and enjoyed in school. Dropped out in 7th grade, did Floyd. I tell him that school isn’t for everybody.
This is actually something I strongly believe in, my career notwithstanding: academia isn’t for everyone. The morphing of universities into trade schools, college degrees into required job credentials, is a damaging evolution of the university into something that does a disservice to both job skills training and higher education alike. Not saying that ne’er the twain should meet (hopefully they do meet, and even share nodes or bridges), but they ain’t the same thing. More and more, though, I feel like I’m the only one who thinks this.*
However, I don’t bother telling Baby Face Floyd any of this, nor the possibly hypocritical fact that anyone short of a heightened intellectual is not going to get the romantic time of day from me. Let alone the fact that nobody but my partner will be getting any sort of attention in that vein ever again to begin with, and so the point is double moot, and his manly efforts doubly futile.
But I’m too tired to pull the social gymnastics all women learn to do (at a younger age than you might dare think): the I Have A Boyfriend deflection. Floyd won’t take the hint that I’m absorbed in my phone, but I’m done with my iced coffee anyway and my bus comes soon enough. I make my exit.
I feel a bit guilty that I’ve allowed wee Floyd to, with slumped disappointed shoulders, watch me walk away and fantasize what destiny will do for him next time he runs into me there, but only a bit. It’s not my problem, and I’m still in a little physical pain plus a grandiose depression hangover and so I truly don’t have the extra energy to care. Is that cold? Callous? Oh well. It’s what I got.
Cheers, Floyd. May your crane operating bring you prosperity. I’m off to attempt to teach critical thinking to a group of people who’ve never read a book all the way through. And get paid nearly nothing for my pains.
All’s fair and etc., right?
*Now that we’re on something like the other side of the Covid Plague, I can see more and more people across several demographics that think the way that I do about higher education. Some combination of the forced online learning during lockdown, the financial and labor and interconnected crises that soon followed, all put together made for many people beginning to ask many questions about the necessity of college. At the time of the above writing there was no sign of what would, three years later, be a sweeping and terrifying global pandemic that would send me all online (having been summarily axed from the Longmont gig before that), and living in lockdown with my partner. All bars and other third places were shut down for we knew not how long. My diction starting to sound like an epic adventure tale? Yeah well I kind of do feel a bit like Frodo, home after a long painful (albeit successful) quest, only to find that home isn’t at all what it used to be, and I am not, nor ever will be, the same. I think many students, potential students, and certainly nearly all teachers at all levels are at this point too.