Today, my friends, I finished the admissions portfolios. [heavens open, angels sing.] That was a JOB. I had a wee-hours admissions anxiety dream, in which I was sitting in the committee meeting noting how far my ratings diverged from everyone else's ratings. I suppose it was better, though, than the professor anxiety dreams in which I have forgotten to write the syllabus and also I am late for the first day of class which is in a building I have never been to. It was definitely better than the professor anxiety dreams where I have to lecture about the French Revolution for 75 minutes or the ones where I forgot to write the final exam.
Wait, I just had a happy thought! Maybe all the times that you dreamed you were going to take an exam for a course you had never attended, you were actually going to my classroom, where I was kicking myself because I hadn't written the exam yet and the students were showing up to take it! Maybe neither one of us needs to worry in those dreams, because we are each other's best-case scenarios.
Tonight I did a thing I haven't done since before the pandemic: I went to a play indoors. Elwood misses Life With Activities more keenly than I do, and he asked if I would go with him tonight. Their website said they required either a vaccination card or a negative test for admission, and (somewhat surprisingly) they were checking them at the door. They also required masks in the theater, regardless of vaccination status, and the actors were all vaccinated AND freshly tested AND masked.
They wore a kind of mask I'd never seen before: made entirely of clear plastic, cupping the chin, open at the top. Like this, only a little snugger-fitting. It seems unlikely to make much of a dent in aerosol transmission, but it covered their lower faces without much interference at all in the sound of their voices and no barriers at all to seeing facial expressions.
It was an odd play, but I'm glad we went anyway.
I am thinking a little nostalgically about the concert we went to in February 2020. Elwood had given me the tickets for Christmas, and we crammed into a local venue to hear a bluegrass-flavored band. I've been to classical concerts since then on campus -- everybody masked and quiet -- but I haven't been to a raucous concert since then: a couple hundred strangers, coming together to enjoy a carefree evening, cheering and calling out requests.
Someday! Not this month, but someday.
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