Dealing

I've been back from the conference for days now; just haven't had a chance to breathe. Catching up with teaching, with students' assignments, with prep, with my own paperwork, I have been back four days and I am still a week behind. How is this possible? I have not even caught up on the blogs yet.

The conference went well enough: my paper went well, as did mr. delagar's. On the way to and from the conference, we listened to True Grit, which was what I gave my paper on, and which both mr. delagar and I are teaching this semester in our freshman comp classes. Did you know you can download novels directly to your iPod Touch? It's very cool.

Anyway, in St. Louis, where I did not get a chance to visit Sugared Harpy (rats!), it rained and rained, and we drank and drank. No! Kidding! Worked and worked! Really!

But here's what I wanted to tell you about. One evening, mr. delagar and I were lying about in the hotel room, and I was trying to write my shitting paper, which I had to present the next day, and which I had not yet written (yep, that's the sort of scholar I am), and mr. delagar, helpful fella that he is, was channel surfing, and he stops on this bint on some news network, Faux News or CNN, who knows which, she's some famous bint, I could not tell you which, she had done something remarkable, sold a record or written a book or saved a baby from a dingo, who knows, anyway, what is she talking about?

You guessed it! Her weight!

How much she weighs! Her diet! How she regulates her daily intake of food so that she won't look like an utter cow! How she does this so that she will be healthy and FEEL GOOD ABOUT HERSELF and NOT because she is oppressed by the patriarchy!

No, she didn't say the last bit. The last bit never enters her sweet little radar.

"Will you turn this shit off?" I demanded of mr. delagar. "Now? Seriously?"

"I didn't book her," he said, changing the channel.

"That's all women are taught to do," I spat, "think about their bodies. That's all we are. Bodies. You want to know why we can't do science and math? That right there. Do you know how many calories are in an Oreo?"

"What?"

"Do you?"

"Uh...no...thirty?"

"Fifty-five. Do you know how many are in a carrot?"

He gaped at me.

"Twenty. How many are in a hot dog bun?"

"What in--"

"A hundred and fifty. How many in a pound of fat?"

"What's your--"

"Thirty-five hundred. I know all this and I couldn't do a quadratic equation with a gun to my head. Why is that? Why?" I snarled and turn over a page in my notebook. "I got one word for you, buddy."

He knew what it was, too.