From now on, please call me Reticence

While I was waiting for George, my landshark, to fetch plumbing parts to fix my bathroom sink, I felt the urge to blog. Dear old Doctor Blog, always ready to listen, nod sagely, and let me find my own solutions. For free. The perfect therapist. I complained about the plumbing problem in my last session, Doc, remember? My bathroom sink is connected to the neighboring unit's bathroom sink. Earlier today, as I was leaving for work, I saw George pull up in his manly white pickup truck. I blocked traffic to ask him when he planned to come and fix my sink.

“It's still not draining?” he said in surprise. “The other sink drains fine.”

“Yeah, it's draining into my sink.” I said.

“It drains eventually, though, right?”

“Yeah, after about 72 hours. But as soon as you run water next door, it fills back up again.”

“Okay, I'll take a look,” he promised. The tone of his voice said he didn't believe me.

In case you are interested, which I'm sure you are not, but I'm going to tell you about it anyway: I made it through another week at the career college, driving back and forth to the far campus like the proverbial freeway flier adjunct I used to be (and could be again in another eight weeks). Progress has been made. After two weeks, the students are no longer nameless perplexed faces. Now those perplexed faces have names. Luckily for my tired brain, it seems like most of them are named Amanda or Mindy. There's a sprinkling of other banal American names: Tabitha, Nicole, Michelle, Amy. So predictable and hard to tell apart. Especially when they are all obese white females. When it's time to remember names, give me the Ysenias, Astellas, Germans, and Laureens.

Hold that thought. Now George has returned. After some pounding, groaning, sawing, and rattling, with a minimum of spills, the pipes under the sink have been successfully replaced. Luckily he remembered that the sink isn't draining, after he spent some energetic minutes running water to test for leaks. (I wasn't paying attention because I was freaked out by having a man in my bathroom. Aaaah!) The water rose to within an inch of the top edge of my cracked and dirty little sink, a preview of things to come for a lot of rivers and streams if the human race doesn't do something about global warming. Hey, speaking of global warming, you want to see something really thought provoking? Check out this dynamic map of the consequences of rising sea levels. Zoom in on your area, and set the sea level rise to 60 meters. So long, Willamette Valley, hello Lake Willamette!

Now George is in the basement, cutting up pipes, like the Ponce de Leon of plumbers, searching for the mythical clog. It's a never ending quest in a building this old. The Love Shack was built in the late 1930s, I believe. It has a few flaws, which George is gradually remedying: New doors, new windows, and new paint go a long way toward making this place respectable (especially since the cafe opened across the street and raised the bar for the neighborhood). Indoors, my kitchen and bathroom floors are covered in cheesy black and white lino tiles laid by a decorator wanna-be sometime toward the end of the last millennium, but I've still got the original porcelain sinks, tub, and cupboards, in all their etched, grooved, and stained glory. And now he's gradually replacing the plumbing. You go, George, hero of slumlords.

Back to the bland name thing. I'm sure they all think, oh boy, another tired old teacher who can't be bothered to learn our names. The truth is, I try, and for ten weeks, I think I do a pretty good job. After the term is over, their names float out of my head like cottonwood fluff. Bland names are hard to remember. I'm sure all those Amandas don't feel particularly bland. And in their defense, they probably didn't choose to be named Amanda. Or Tiffany. Or Michelle. Really, what's in a name, anyway? My colleague Sheryl and I are interchangeable, and I'm quite happy to answer to hey, you.

In the fifth grade, I would have sold my soul to be an Amanda (ditto re: curly hair). Just like all these 1990s Amandas, I was saddled with one of the blandly popular names of the day: Carol. I have never felt like a Carol. In the 1930s there was Carole Lombard, the blonde beauty, but that was before my time. In the 1950s, my namesakes were Carol Burnett and Carol Channing, two larger-than-life personalities impossible for me to live up to. I should have been named Violet (as in shrinking), or perhaps... I don't know, Shyla. Timidity. Reticence. Yeah, that would be a good name for me: Reticence. Hey, I like it. Maybe I'll change my name. From now on, you can call me... Reticence.