If You Can Keep Your Head When All About You Are Determined to Split it in Half...

Oh, dear. I seem to have made an unfortunate global faux pas.

I blame the blinding headache that beset me around 2:30 a.m. I think it must have something to do with the atmosphere, seeing as how I had duty out in the parking lot yesterday morning at 34 degrees, and again after school at 56 degrees. It's sinus in nature, hits me in the evening, and is sometimes abated by a scalding shower. However, there is no scalding shower in my classroom. I must make do with the tools I have available. More on that later. Let's get back to my global faux pas.

After lunch, a colleague passed me as I stood at my post monitoring the hallway. "What's that illness where all your joints and muscles ache, and you don't have any energy? I want to tell my class, and I can't think of the name."

"Oh! Wait a minute! I just had it. Now it slipped away. I KNOW what you're talking about. I'll think of it in a minute. I'll call you."

She went on down the hall a few steps. Snagged a paraprofessional and interrogated her. "I think it starts with an 'F'. What IS it?"

Suddenly, the diagnosis came rushing back to me. I hollered down the hall, "That's it! Fibromalaysia!"

"Oh, yeah! Fibromyalgia! Thanks!"

I did not correct her. No need to emphasize the fact that I had just given an entire nation a medical disorder that is sometimes declared imaginary. That headache was really working on me. All I wanted was some peace and quiet. Not an easy wish to fulfill inside a secondary school. I thought I had achieved my P and Q during my plan time second hour. A belief which lasted approximately two minutes.

All I wanted was to be alone with my vibrator. HEY! Not THAT kind of vibrator. The flat, egg-shaped black plastic vibrator I ripped out of an airplane neck massage bean-baggy collar thingy. Blue. I hold it against my forehead and the headache goes away. Unfortunately, like standing in a scalding shower, that act is not conducive to learning. So I have to do it on the sly. In stolen moments, like my plan time.

So I whipped it out and went to town. Ah...the absence of pain. If I had a hind leg, I would have been twitching it like a blissful hound having his belly scratched. It was great while it lasted. Then I heard footsteps in the hall. I did not want to be caught in flagrante delicto with my vibrator. So I turned it off and set it beside my desktop laptop. As soon as that student went walking by, I picked it up again. I almost gave myself vibrator elbow in the span of fifty minutes.

Never had there been as much hall traffic as there was today. It was like a million-youth-march. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade exhibits less foot traffic than passed by my classroom. Kids flitting and giggling. Adults clomping like Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales down cobblestone streets. Adults and students raiding the storage closet right next door. Uninvited visitors. I would not have been surprised if contestants from the Amazing Race had popped in to ask directions. I blame Valentine's Day. Our halls are normally bereft of students during the golden fifty minutes.

"But Val," you ask, "why didn't you simply close your door?" Because there is no such thing anymore as simply closing one's door. All doors must be locked. They can be propped open, mind you, but the lock must be engaged so that a simple slam renders the room impenetrable. That means the 147 times somebody comes a-knockin', the student closest to the door gets to walkin' and lets them in. On my plan time, I am not jumping up and dashing diagonally across the far reaches of my room to let in somebody tap tap tapping at my chamber door. Today, for instance, I had a phone call, followed by a student seeking missing work, an office worker with a request for absentee homework, a textbook returned by another office worker that was not even in my number segment, and a drop-in paraprofessional asking to see my driver's license photo.

No wonder my head hurt.