C'est la vie!

As I sat in front of the fuzzy TV screen, barely able to make out Freddie Prinze, Jr.'s simian features, and scoured my mind for the tu conjugation of "faire: to do," I realized: My capacity for procrastination is insatiable and revolting.

I was conjugating irregular verbs in my School Planning notebook, people. Recreationally.

Frenchies out there: it's tu fais, right? Maird. Come to think of it, I don't even know if faire is an irregular verb. But I know avoir is.

je vais nous allons
tu vas vous allez
il vails vont
elle va elles vont

Teaching high school provides endless and interesting navel-gazing fodder -- that is, when I have the energy to focus my eyes on my navel -- especially for an ex-nerd. Like, while conjugating, it hit me how much perverse pleasure I used to find in the drudgeriest of exercises, like trying to make my 8-segmented conjugation table perfectly symmetrical; how I'd dutifully check each spelling against the textbook, or carry around a rubber-banded pack of flashcards to drill myself throughout the day on my SAT words. They weren't even for the SAT, but for a weekly vocabulary quiz at which I became absolutely famous for beating everyone else in AP English, and wasn't about to relinquish my title to Leah Hill, thank you very much.

Good god, was I a freakin' dork. (You've heard about the "freakin'/freaking/friggin/fricken" embarassment, right?)

Why did I do this? Fear of parental disapproval if I failed, desire to get into A Good College so I could escape the island to which I'd then long to return for 10 years, the need to fill my mind with something other than how awkward, weirdly dressed, and non-party-going I was? Was I a nerd because I had a deep love of learning, the outgrowth of a beautiful mind, or because I had nothing better to do, and was afraid to be anything else, like a stoner or a band geek? Oops, I was also a band geek.

And now I'm teaching those very hordes of kids whose attention I tried to duck behind my copy of The American Pageant. As I conjugated my verbs and tried to weave "obfuscate" into my speech at recess, I was pretending I didn't care that I had no idea who'd slept with whom over the weekend, that I wasn't in the drunk pictures being passed around, that I didn't snicker when someone made a pot reference because I had no idea what they were talking about. Okay, I got the pot references. But the oral sex ones? Didn't have a clue.

At least I didn't get pregnant. But now, to return to the school that was the site of my most direly angstful moments, and to be thwarted in my attempt to minister to the nerds who I know still wander its halls, it's just frustrating sometimes, that's all. Somewhere in my school, there are teenagers studying for the SAT. If only they knew that the secrets to a fairly high verbal and middling math were within their grasp down at room F-102. Flashcards would be litteringthis school, motherbleepers!