telescope, or kaleidoscope?

It is literally the middle of the semester, and this past week has been filled with not only trying to meet the deadlines I have imposed for all of my students (which means the stack of papers and one stack of exams were, at one point, up to the ceiling), but also my own struggle to meet the ones of the university and the its committees. Everything needs to be in by mid-October so that something can be done with it before the semester ends.

People zoom from floor to floor, elevator to elevator, room to room, building to building with their own stacks of paper, clipboards, handouts, and a wild sense of how important it is to accomplish something. I enter classrooms with dry-erase markers and a sense of daring, demanding that we try something new, shake things up, learn differently. I experience a dream-like sense of time that telescopes into and out of itself, making Monday mornings through Thursday afternoons one, long complicated day. Friday seems like its own day, as do the days of the weekend, but the rest of the week becomes a kaleidoscope of hundreds of different human encounters that turn in my head, in the evenings, for my contemplation:

We sat in a circle of thirty-five.
The flourescent light danced on his balding scalp.
I smelled beer on her breath.
He puzzled over the color scarlet.
He talked on his cell phone in a bathroom stall.
I asked too many questions.
She cried because she failed.
There was silence in the room and I had to remember not to fill it.
I knocked on his door but he wasn't in.
We discussed the difference between guilt and shame.
She grabbed a set of keys and unlocked the door of an office I had never seen before.
He left because the film was too upsetting.
She slipped a demanding note under my door.
She rushed past my office and yelled, "Go home, Chuck! It's late!"

Different people and different rooms and different times of day. I am impressed with the quotidian and banal because both seem to be freakishly human.