Suppose you're hard at work in your office on a Sunday afternoon in a quiet campus building; you have to step just a few doors down the empty hallway to the ladies' room and you don't even bother putting on a mask because you're convinced that you're the only person in the building, but then you open the door to the ladies' room and see a man staring at you.
A strange man!
In the ladies' room!
I may have been a little bit startled. Okay, there may have been a modicum of yelling and jumping involved, but you'd be startled too if you saw a strange man where he didn't belong in a building you thought was empty.
A very strange man, in fact. It took me a moment to register that he was not a living, breathing human being at all but a cardboard cutout of Robert Pattinson--not someone I'd expect to encounter in the ladies' room of my campus building. Not sure what he was doing there but this morning he was gone. Maybe the yelling scared him away.
The thing is, I really wanted to do some yelling in my office Sunday afternoon. After years and months and days of working very hard to coordinate the efforts of more than 30 scholars, I finally put the finishing touches on the collection of essays I'm editing on teaching comedy, and I sent the whole mess off to the publisher with a very satisfying click. At that moment I might have appreciated a whole lot of hurrahs and confetti and drum rolls and applause, but it's hard to get appreciation from an empty building.
In fact it's hard to get anything from an empty building except bored, so I suppose I should be grateful for the brief break in my dull routine that brought Robert Pattinson so unexpectedly into my life. Yes, there was yelling, but not quite the kind I'd expected.
No comments:
Post a Comment