That's My Bix!

My students are so amazing, every single day they just stun and humble me to the depths of my soul and I can’t believe how lucky I have been to get to talk to them as my “work” (it’s not work).

Today, was part two of my informal “here’s the truth about publishing” talk — the first day was all about how to submit to literary journals, because that’s what I know the best, but then on the second day, I opened it up to writing nonfiction stuff (which I also know a lot about but that’s not the point of a fiction workshop) and writing and submitting novels. And before I got started, I asked whether they wanted to get together during finals week, which is next week. Originally I hadn’t scheduled a class during finals week because typically I’m losing my mind that week, the students are frazzled and need some time to decompress, and also, I really thought we’d have people in town for graduation and also be really busy packing to relocate back to Wisconsin.

Plans. Such hubris.

So I asked them how they wanted to do things — we could just have this week be the last week of class or we could definitely meet one more time next week during our assigned finals slot. Many of them have other classes with real finals so we really couldn’t just declare a four hour Zoom party without excluding them — we were stuck in the weird timeslot that the university reserves based on when your class meets usually.

And one student piped up and said “What I care about most is that I have taken so many workshops, here and also through other organizations, and this is the best workshop by far. I want it to keep going as long as possible and is there a way we can keep doing class over the summer?” And in my Zoom account, I watched all of their earnest faces nod eagerly.

My heart!

The challenge will be not actually crying during our final official class.

I had a bit of a down brain over the last several days. Most of my frustration is around the housing market and also the fear of the pandemic in the pressure of “reopening the country.”

I kept thinking about the phrase “head shock” and how you can boil a frog to death by simply increasing the heat a little bit at a time. I kept doom scrolling. I’m using past tense as though these things aren’t going to continue happening, but let’s be real — they will.

On top of that, the biggest first world problems of all time happened and it kind of broke me.

I ordered stamps from the USPS about a month ago and I was weirdly really looking forward to them. Gwen Ifill! Muppets! Dragons! I got an email finally saying they were shipping in early April, so I thought it would arrive soon.

And it didn’t.

And it didn’t some more.

And then Esteban got the mail one day and I was sure that he must have thrown out my stamps accidentally so then I had to dig in the recycling bin but I didn’t see them and the bin was pretty empty so it was hard to get in there, plus dirty and gross, so I didn’t keep digging but then what if they were actually there? What if I had missed them?

And let’s face it, this is crazy thinking — it assumes that Esteban would mistake an envelope full of stamps for a piece of junk mail, and then it assumes that I wouldn’t have spotted them in a mostly empty bin. I logged back into my USPS account and saw a tracking number, and that said that they had been dropped at the mailbox on April 18th (!!!!). But of course, no stamps showed up, so I was certain that the mail carrier accidentally put the package in someone else’s mail slot in the neighborhood bank of boxes, and then the someone else opened it by accident. This has actually happened many times to us already — on both sides. We got someone’s passport once and had to go find their house and deliver it — our mail is delivered by third party contractors and they are frequently in trouble for stealing the mail, so as insane as this sounds, it has set my conspiracy theory brain going nuts but also, self doubt. I got upset about this and Esteban pointed out that it wasn’t worth being upset about $60 worth of stamps, and I pointed out that he was invalidating my feelings and basically the entire thing was awful and blown out of proportion inside my brain.

But the thing that finally broke me last night is this: I love sumo oranges. Like, LOVE them love them. I literally start checking out Whole Foods in November and December, since Whole Foods is the first place they show up and I want to have as many sumo oranges for as long as I possibly can before they’re gone. They’re only around for a few months and the season is almost over, but our grocery stores kept stocking them, so I keep ordering them in our pick up order.

So when I ordered five sumo oranges, it was with a hope that they’d still have a few in stock. At two bucks an orange, it’s a little luxury that I allow myself once a week, and I figure that I’m not going to Starbucks at all right now, so this is a cheap replacement for so many overpriced lattes.

So last night, I broke into the new batch of oranges and then noticed — fuck. There was one sumo orange and four Not!Sumo oranges in there. Our grocery store hasn’t been the greatest with picking things for our order — we get “whoopsies” a lot. Of course, sumo oranges are probably the most expensive orange, so not only did they rob me of my happiest snack, but they then overcharged me for bullshit generic oranges. Grumbling, I took two of the Not!Sumos to the cutting board to prep an afternoon snack before workshop and AAAAAAAAAH the Not!Sumos were the worst thing ever — Blood oranges. To me, blood oranges taste so sour that they might as well be grapefruit. I was screwed out of my afternoon snack so I went to workshop and just pouted for the first half of workshop. Then I checked Amazon Fresh and they had sumos, so I whipped up a super quick order full of some random bullshit to justify the order, tipped the delivery person ten bucks and set it to arrive between 9-11 pm that night, which was the only time slot available.

It was impetuous and stupid and while I’m weirdly embarrassed about having the minor (completely internal) temper tantrum, it also felt very empowering to correct the problem right then. Because otherwise it would have nagged and niggled and eaten at my brain, just like the stamps order, until it got totally blown out of proportion.

And the only person who suffers is me.

Mischief managed.

And these sumos are still worth every penny.