Spring semester spin

First day of classes for the spring semester and my desk is already stacked: meeting announcements, posters for a student writing competition, requests for recommendation letters, glossy flyers advertising textbooks I'll never use, and a stack of paragraphs penned by my American Lit Survey students (is it cruel to make students analyze an unfamiliar poem at 9 a.m. on the first day of classes?). Above it all stands my new Mr. Potato Head, Darth Tater, light-saber at the ready and big bulgy eyes looking intently forward as if to say, "Luke, I am your tuber!" It's already been a crazy day and it's not half over yet.

I've been doing this for long enough to know what I'm doing, but I still get nervous the night before a new semester. Last night I woke up with that feeling of panic you get when the phone rings at 3 a.m., except it wasn't the phone: I just had an urgent feeling that my washing machine was trying to communicate with me. I rushed half-awake into the laundry room to see what kind of mayhem my major appliances might be manufacturing in the middle of the night, but the washer just sat there silently, which, when you think about it, is pretty much what a washing machine ought to be doing in 3 a.m., but somehow I found the silence even more disturbing than any message it might have sent. What would a washing machine want to say at 3 a.m. anyway? There are very few messages that merit waking someone up at 3 a.m. on a Monday; "The house is on fire" is one and "Mom? I'm at the hospital" is another, but "add fabric softener" does not quite cut the mustard.

I went back to bed confused and slept fitfully, and this morning I paid a return visit to the laundry room. I saw the usual mops, brooms, buckets, and stacks of dirty clothes, and standing against the wall the impressive white gleaming mass of the washing machine and dryer, silent as usual. I wanted to ask the washer questions, but "why" is not a question that can be satisfactorily answered by a major appliance whose repertoire of language pretty much starts and ends with "spin cycle complete." So I stuffed it full of dirty laundry and set it spinning.

Meanwhile, back on campus, I'm spinning through another cycle of teaching and learning. I only hope that today I can say something more coherent than "Luke, I am your tuber!"