Saturday Meditation: Loose Screws

This past week a lens fell out of M’s glasses. A screw had loosened, so I put the lens back in and tightened the screw.

“So that’s what was rattling when I went jogging,” M said. “I thought it was my back.”

Yes, we are jogging these days, usually in turns. I get up bright and early and head out, and then M takes her jog.

It’s good we’re doing this, since my lunch today consisted of nearly 1,800 Burger King calories. Truth be told, however, jogging has nothing to do with those numbers; their justification is that we’d just finished hoeing corn at the nearby volunteer farm (the food goes to the area food bank) with our youth group. (Well, we’d just finished hoeing with one member of our youth group–the other two who showed up stood around and threw rocks into the pond and then made fun of the farm staffer who twice told them to stop.)

But at least half of my calories came from the soda I drank quite lustily, considering I hadn’t had enough water all morning, and those calories were caffeine-laden, which makes it relevant to everything happening since then, herein and hitherto, forthwith, and so-on-and-so-forth.

My condition of hyper-inebriation, although not unique in the greater scheme of things, has caused me to feel about myself as one young daring swimmer’s mother said at the pool earlier this week: “Darling, you’re crossing the line of my comfort zone.” It’s not that I’m uncomfortable. After all, what can be more terrific on a hot afternoon than sitting in front of a fan, in the air conditioning, using (in Windows mode–sorry, Ubuntu people) my super-cool computer with super-cool partitioning. It’s just that I never know what’s going to spill out from inside my sparking, crisscrossed brain wires. Tighten the screws! Tighten the screws!

Speaking of spillage, we may end up pouring half of the juice from each of yesterday’s canned jars of bread and butter pickles. I’d called my dear mother–bless her heart now and forever–last night to ask her about the recipe, and today she called back to warn us that it occurred to her (probably in the middle of the night, and well into the morning) that if we used too many cucumbers and too little vinegar (which I think we did), our pickles will quickly become little botulism stills and before we know it we, her dear family–bless our hearts at least for now–would need pickling ourselves. (Just in case: Don’t take me to a funeral “parlor.” Instead, donate my body to science or organ wanters, when I die, if they take botulism victims.) So we may have to replace some of the weak brine with new, but we’re not thinking about that now, since both M, who only partook in about an inch of my soda, and N, who partook in none, are napping. It’s only me who’s thinking.

If I survive this caffeine induced stupor and any pickles I might eat, I’ll be back in school in a few short weeks. My new classroom is mostly ready, although I still need to hang a few pictures on the walls, and I’m beginning to read through a couple of the many novels I can choose from to teach. I think I understand correctly that my students are required to read for half an hour every day, during class, which means–yippee!–I’ll only have actually to teach for about three hours a day. While this may be too good to be true, it is at least potentially true, and so I am hoping to join the students and read a lot during those class reading times. I’m going to try to, anyway. At any rate, I need to try to, since my pleasure reading has suffered ever since I’ve started blogging, playing with N, and working hard with the youth group.

Which, I am now noting, has caused my back to hurt a little. But at least it’s not rattling.