I’m trying to do more of my medium-form writing these days with an end toward getting it publish, so I suppose that I’ve been doing more listicle-ing over here as I try to balance blogging and publishing.
I’m preparing to take my sophomore honors students to Madrid for a week. It’s a great trip and I’m looking forward to it a lot, but it also means being responsible for the health and safety of 30 19-year-olds for a week, and I tend to end up having anxiety dreams for weeks ahead of time. Usually they’ve been the very standard sort of I’m stuck on a train platform and I can’t move my feet and the train is leaving kind of thing that comes from knowing it takes a lot of extra time to move a group of people anywhere. This year, though, my subconscious has been keeping me entertained with far more elaborate scenarios:
Was put on a special diet with only ten foods allowed. Amongst those were ham, eggs, and lavender tea. No vegetables anywhere on the list. I decided it was stupid and I was going to eat some romanesco.- Was chased through the streets of Ávila by two big black dogs.
- Was chased through the streets of Ávila by several of my senior colleagues.
- Was in Ávila and couldn’t get back to the train station because people kept giving me directions in Italian and I couldn’t understand the street numbers. (This was kind of cool because it’s the first time I dreamed in Italian, and of course I understood what people were saying, but somehow in my dream it was as if I didn’t. We are not, I should mention here, taking the students to Ávila.)
- Arrived in Madrid with such a large blister on the base of my thumb that I couldn’t hold anything or hand out itineraries to the students.
- And as a bonus but unrelated travel-and-teaching combo anxiety dream: Was stuck in Poughkeepsie in the late afternoon on a Sunday and couldn’t rent a car to leave because the only open car rental place was run by a guy who had seen my tweets about alt-right appropriation of the Middle Ages and didn’t approve of my opinions. (I’ve been thinking about participating in NYU’s prison education program, which would require my taking Metro North to Poughkeepsie once a week and getting a zip car to go from there to Wallkill.)