The message came down from on high: in times of financial austerity, it behooves us to eschew frivolous spending, so no departments were allowed to spend College money on holiday lunches this year.
Fine: so we'll bring our own food. Instead of grading finals and papers, I've spent the past hour and a half sitting in the department reading room and sampling delectable dishes made by my wonderful colleagues. Artichoke dip! Persian rice! Kale and pomegranate salad! Rum cake! The kind of food that encourages relaxation, storytelling, and laughter.
And I'll tell you: I really needed that gleeful break from grading. I thought I was having a fun grading break yesterday, but instead I had one of those days that made me wonder why I ever bothered getting out of bed.
I managed to mail the last two Christmas packages... but caught my hand in the door on the way out of the post office (ouch!).
I was driving to Jackson to visit a friend and stopped on the way to shop at the only store where I can get this fabulous locally-made yogurt...but dropped a four-pound sack of sugar on my foot (double ouch!).
And I stopped at a rest area to use the facilities but had a moment of inattention while pulling out, looking away briefly to locate my glasses, and the car in front of me at the stop sign, which I thought was turning, wasn't, and so I slammed into him. It was a slow-speed crash; my air bag didn't even deploy, and you can barely see the minor damage on the front of my car. The license-plate holder cracked, but Ohio doesn't even require front license plates any more so who cares? This is damage I don't intend to report to my insurance company.
If the other guy had been driving a junker, we probably would have shaken hands and walked away, but his car was both much nicer and more damaged than mine. So we did the whole dance with calling the state patrol, filling out paperwork, and waiting waiting waiting while this patrol dude who looked like he was barely old enough to ride a tricycle took photos of the nearly invisible damage and filed reports.
And wrote up a ticket. For me. Because the whole thing was entirely my fault. When he asked me what I could have done to avoid the accident, I said, "Well, I guess I could have put on my glasses before I started the car." The thing is, I don't even need my glasses for distance anymore, but if I leave them off for too long I get a headache, and by that time I'd been driving more than an hour.
So I got cited for failure to maintain assured clear distance, and since it's been 14 years since I last got any kind of ticket, I'm not complaining. But I also got cited for distracted driving, which adds $100 to the fine unless I complete a 45-minute online training program about how to avoid distracted driving, which I guess I will be happy to do if it'll save me $100 but I'll bet I already know what it's going to say: keep your eyes on the road and your glasses on your eyes.
The accident left me undamaged but flustered, so that last night when I made pasta salad for today's department lunch, I left out some of the usual ingredients. But nobody cared. We were having too much fun talking and laughing and eating just one more slice of rum cake, which I'm sure will make us even more equipped to grade that flood of final papers and exams. And hey, there's lots of food left--come and get some!
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