Mayo-news

Today a student researching a medical topic said he thought a great source would be the Mayonnaise Clinic (what if the door is ajar?), and in another class a student wondered what kind of Yelp review Odysseus would write about, say, the Cyclops' cave or Circe's house. They make me laugh, these students of mine, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.

In my Nature class, students debated whether a certain poem is about eating apples or having sex (or both!), making good arguments on each side. In the Place class, on the other hand, only two people in the room really wanted to talk about poetry while the rest inspired me to say, "You know, I didn't assign these poems to torture to." I doubt that they believed me.

And then there was cake where no cake was supposed to be. How can I explain the bizarre series of events that resulted in the appearance of a birthday cake proclaiming Happy Birthday Bev in a large committee meeting on a day that is three months away from my birthday? Why do I have the remains of that cake in a large box in my office right now? Well, it's complicated. A few weeks ago, we were looking over the schedule for future meetings and I noticed that the final meeting on the schedule was slated for the final day of the fall semester, which is also, coincidentally, my birthday, and I said, jokingly, something like If we have to meet on my birthday, someone had better bring cake! And someone did...just not on my birthday.

So yeah, it's been an up-and-down kind of day, ranging from silliness to sweetness to torture, but I guess the bright side is that the work week is over and all I have to do before I go home is attend our departmental picnic (with cake!) and then go see the theatre department's production of Into the Woods, presented in a woodsy park next to the river in the dark, with mosquitos (but not cake).

Which goes to show, I guess, that academics is sometimes like a box of chocolates but more often like a jar of mayonnaise where no mayonnaise is expected to be.