Second to last day. It is 7:45 a.m. and I am in my office. My TAs are trickling in to finish grading the make-up finals and do the elaborate math necessary to come up with a student’s final grade in the class (one step involves multiplying a percentage of 100 by 6.66, I’ll just note). At 8:30 or 9:00 I will go get a box of coffee for everyone. Then we will eat bagels and submit our final grades to the hideous website. Tomorrow I will give my last final. It is all happening.
Yesterday was not the coolest day in my book. I had a million errands I had to run, including baking an apple pie for my hard-working TAs who I love so much. I was just starting to clean the kitchen when my phone rang. It was my office mate, saying a stressed out student was here to take his final. Checking my past emails with him, I realized I’d given him the wrong date for his make-up final. Since the mistake was mine, I felt I could not in good conscience ask him to reschedule OR do some sort of weird take-home situation, so I threw on some clothes and raced to campus. Gave him the test (blasting the listening examples off my computer while all my TAs were trying to grade). Raced back home, still time to make my pie. Made a beautiful pie, the best one I’ve made yet. Set it on the stovetop to cool. Started cooking dinner. Suddenly while I was standing right there at the stove, the pie EXPLODED. I have never seen anything like it. The pie plate just shattered into a billion pieces that shot instantly everywhere, covering the entire kitchen. I screamed. The dog ran downstairs, the old man ran after the dog and took him back upstairs to lock him in the office so he wouldn’t walk on glass. I just stood there, shocked, for a full minute, staring at what I had done. What I had done was turn on the wrong burner on our stupid shitty electric stove, so instead of starting the kale I heated up my pie plate until it went off like a goddamn bomb.
There was glass in the kale. Glass in the apple gallettes I’d made in addition. Glass covering the floor. Glass underneath all the stove burners. Glass on my clothes and in my hair. Glass in the kitchen sink. Glass as far away as the living room. We swept and swept and swept and vacuumed and got down on our hands and knees and picked up slivers but I know that kitchen is just a disaster waiting to happen. I found more glass this morning.
And needless to say, the pie was ruined. My beautiful pie!! I felt like crying. I have been wanting to show my TAs how much I love them, by giving them the fruit of some sort of loving labor. Now all went in the garbage and we ate heated up leftover lasagna with no kale. WOE
So I am interested to see what today will bring.
We have been sleeping so hard, which for me is actually a good sign, it means I’m not consumed with angst right now. So huzzah to all and to all a goodnight
