May 31

We have just two weeks of school left. Already the students in “vacation mode.” They complain with real indignation if I ask them to do any work. They just want to play soccer in the little rooftop playground in the 110 degree heat. Today the art teacher said that she is so excited about the end of the school year and going home. I nodded, but for some reason I don’t feel much of that countdown kind of excitement. A group of us had gone in to spend a little time at school. I was planning to swim some laps in the school pool, but it was being cleaned, so I just did a few things in my room. I cleaned the fishbowl. Isabella is dead, by the way. I came in one Sunday morning and the room was about a hundred degrees and smelled very bad indeed. The fishbowl was cloudy with putrescence. Isabella, who had been the star attraction of the fishbowl with her brilliant orange color and bulbous physique, was floating on her side in the middle, swollen even larger than she should have been, and cooked to a dull beige hue. Poor George and Cupcake were squeezing themselves as tightly as they could get into the little plastic seaweed plant, trying not to look at her. I cleaned it all up, got fresh cool water for the survivors, and emailed my director for permission to leave the AC on over the weekend. Now I can enter a nice cool room when I get to school. I am supposed to be getting a head start on phase umpteen of the interminable assessment revision process, but I can’t face it anymore. An old Texan tuba-player I used to know had the expression, “I am so done with that.” And that is how I am feeling too. I am so done. I guess I can’t blame the kids for balking at the idea of more work right now.

I couldn’t swim laps, couldn’t deal with assessment revisions, so I decided to lift weights. But the lights in the weight room are, for some strange reason, controlled by a switch in the business office, and they were off. It has been a long time since I had the feeling of “nothing to do.” I actually picked up a basketball that had been left on the gym floor and shot a few baskets. If I am all alone, in a dark gym, far from ridicule and expectation, I can actually enjoy the little diversion of trying to make a basket. A little while later I rambled upstairs to see what the art teacher was up to. She was absorbed in the serious task of tying pieces felt-covered toilet-paper rolls and paper tubes together with rubber bands to make Scooby-Doo collapse-puppets for her second graders. The art teacher’s idea book makes it look easy, but it’s way too hard for 2nd graders, so the teacher has to do all the work and just let the kids glue on the eyes and ears. I helped her do that for about an hour, during which time I completed two Scooby Doo’s. I pondered the fact that I was originally hired to be the art teacher, and it was probably a good thing that they jerked me into the English department. I don't think I could handle doing goofy little projects like that with learning disabled kids. It's no wonder she can't wait to get the hell out of Kuwait. I suppose some excitement about our upcoming exodus will kick in for me too some time soon.

Last night we had a great pot-luck feast to honor our teaching assistants, who have all invited us to their places for fabulous Indian lunches or dinners at one time or another. The challenge was to cook vegetarian. I was vegetarian from about 1989 to 1995... something like that. I used to enjoy the challenge of putting together a satisfying vegie meal, and I thought I was pretty good at it. Well, I am obviously out of practice. Anyhow, I’ve come to the conclusion that pot-lucks are not a good way to enjoy food. They invariably produce combinations of things that don’t go well together. After we ate, I introduced the game. We played a simple game that involves guessing “password-style” at hints from a partner to determine names written on little pieces of paper. I got the game from the same guy who used to say “I am so done with that.” He could play anything on a tuba. Now he works at Sea World. I tried to make the game as multi-cultural as I could. I avoided the names of American celebrities. I should have known it was going to be difficult when the first comment, made before we even started, was “I hope it’s not an educational game.” People were completely perplexed. Names I thought were known by every living person on earth were regarded with bewilderment. Freud - was he a philosopher? Elizabeth Taylor - she was a model or something, wasn’t she? These were the comments that I heard. One of the Indian husbands is particularly quirky. His hint for Adolf Hitler was, “This was that hot-headed German fellow.”

It is now after 10 PM; just a couple of hours, and it will be June. I already went to bed once, and I got up when the doorbell rang. It’s not really a bell, it’s a button that makes a tweet-tweet-tweet sound like a little bird. It was the lady from the across the lobby. She is getting rid of everything and going home to Texas to get married. I told her I wanted to buy her small wooden table and clothes hamper, and she came to tell me I should take them now. As we moved the stuff through tight doorway spaces in her apartment, she told me about the misbehavior of the seniors in her school. The night after their senior dinner, they snuck into the school and threw dead fish all over the place, and tossed in a dead cat for good measure. “It’s a good time to leave Kuwait,” she said. I was actually a bit surprised to hear her tell me all that, because I have a tendency to blame a lot of our school’s behavior problems on the fact that we have kids with all kinds of learning disabilities and disorders. The big controversy for us this year was when a senior boy peed inside somebody’s backpack. Throwing dead fish and dead cats around the school reminds of something I might have expected in a public school in the U.S.

I was going to get a haircut and beard trim tonight. Forgot. Oh, by the way, I bought one of those red-plaid head scarfs with a black ring to hold it on my head. If I take my glasses off and grin real big I look a little bit like Yasser Arafat. Come to think of it, I should have put his name in the name game. People here think I’m Syrian. I’ve learned how to say, “Do I look like an Arab?” in Arabic. It’s “Ana shekli Arabi?” I was thinking it might be funny to put on my head rag when I meet my brother at Toronto airport, but unfortunately the joke would probably not go over very well in an international airport. Too bad about that.