A New Recurring Motif

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," where Friday nights suddenly mean something! Wow, I have been working hard. But I like to work. So there you are. Give me a brick wall to build, I'll start mixing the mortar.

I have landed a full-time teaching job without the certification people need to be school teachers. This means that I have to attend night school. One evening a week I have to drive to a town in the shadow of the Walt Whitman Bridge and go to class to learn how to do the job I'm already doing. At the end of this year-long class, I'll get a piece of paper that will show that I know how to do the job I've already been doing for a year.

And by the way, Barack Obama wants moms to go back to school, but they have to pay for it themselves. At least I do.

The man who is teaching this mandatory night course needs a whole name to himself. I will reserve judgment for exactly one more week, and then I'll give him a name. Or maybe you will. We will devise a name for this dude. Because I have a feeling he's going to be a recurring motif here at TGAB.

The first night of class he talked for an hour, gave us a five minute break, talked for half an hour, and dismissed us.

This past Wednesday, he talked for an hour, gave us a five minute break, talked for another hour, gave us another five minute break, talked for a half hour, and took questions that he answered at length for another half hour.

For. The. Love. Of. Fruit flies. I've never heard a bigger windbag in my life! And that's saying a lot. I went to Johns Hopkins University, which was chock-a-block with conceited professors. But at least when they started talking from the podium, it was about something interesting, like James Joyce or Australopithecus afarensis. It wasn't about how wonderful they were, or how wonderful their big boat is, or what a great professor they'd always been.

The thought of spending every Wednesday night in a right-handed desk in a stuffy little classroom in a Catholic school with this dude is seriously making me wring my mittens!

My mother, now asleep with the Confederate dead, had a favorite saying: "Brevity is the soul of wit." (It's no doubt from Shakespeare. My mom was nuts about Shakespeare. Or just plain nuts, or both.)

"Brevity is the soul of wit." So I'll be brief when I say that night school bites under any circumstances, but to have a conceited bore for a teacher is the worst of biting. It's like being swarmed by 17,000 thirsty mosquitoes, all with that ear-piercing hum.