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living the back in school dream
Tuesday, September 7 2004
For the past week or so Gretchen and I have been taking an intermediate Spanish class at SUNY-Ulster in Stone Ridge. It's not nearly as intensive as our summer course; it meets only for an hour each Tuesday and Thursday. Being that it's the school year, the class is full, and (except for us) all the students are in their late teens or early 20s. All that youthful vapidness and dewy skin can drive a guy in his late-mid 30s nuts. Our teacher is a native speaker who takes attendance every day and sometimes goes off on philosophical tangents in mildly scuffed-up English.
I'm finding it difficult adjusting to such a short class period. By the time the class is getting up to speed, it's over, and we're walking down the hall with the throng of other students as they talk about the meaningless things that are important to people that age. Aside from the abundance of raw nubility (something I took for granted back when I actually was in college), it's a pretty miserable scene. I said to Gretchen at one point, "It's a dream where we're back in school walking down the hall, but we're the age we are now!" By the way, I've actually stopped having those dreams, which I'd worried I'd be having well into old age. Usually these dreams would offer additional humiliations such as there being an exam but me not knowing what room to go to, or I'd somehow neglected to put on pants before setting out that morning (yet no one had yet noticed).
I was at a remote house up on Ohayo Mountain today installing a wireless network and when I went out to inspect the attachment of a cantilevered deck, a couple of Black Bears fled back into the woods. That's the kind of thing that happens if you feed bears, which these people do. The bears didn't seem especially threatening, but I wonder what happens when they come trick or treating and there are no treats.
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