What Now?

The things some people will do to get out of The Nutcracker Suite

You know, things like driving a 9' 8" bus into a parking garage with only a 6' 4" clearance. Yeah, things like that.

Which is to say that I had one hell of a Saturday night!

This was one of my "on duty" weekends; FGS teachers each have six weekends a year in which we do various and sundry activities for the boardint students -- trips to the movies, to the malls, to local hiking trails, etc. Every year, our local ballet company puts on The Nutcracker Suite, and every year there are a handful of girls who really want to go. I did this trip a few years ago and actually fell asleep in my seat; I'm not a fan of ballet in general or The Nutcracker Suite in particular. So I offered to swap duties with colleagues, but no one took me up on it, which is how I found myself driving into downtown Adventure City in a bus with nine girls ready for a ballet adventure.

Here's the thing that went very well in all of this: I dropped off the girls in front of the theatre first; they had an hour and a half to have dinner (staying in small groups for safety) and were going to meet me back in the theatre lobby at 7:15 to get their tickets for the show.

Here's the thing that really didn't go well at all: When I drive the bus, which I do no more than a few times each year, I think a lot about how long and wide I am ... but apparently I don't think nearly enough about how tall I am. And when I saw the parking garage close to the theatre, I was focused on the sign that said "theatre parking"; the sign that said "low clearance" was actually inside the garage, which seems unhelpful, so I was already in the garage entrance when I saw it and ... and, honestly, I don't know what happened in my brain at that point, but the fact of the matter is that I hit the gas and went forward anyway.

And oh, the horrific noise next! Turned out that was the roof of the bus scraping against the cement underhang and breaking off whatever plastic thing is on top of the bus. And then there was the traffic light that I hit and bent a bit sideways.

So that was a pretty pickle I'd landed myself into. I spent the next hour and a half with various parking attendants and managers and the like standing around, staring at the bus and the ceiling and muttering, occasionally turning to me to explain, "You know, the bus was too tall for this garage." Um, yeah, I've got that now. They were clearly thinking, "how the hell does someone get into this situation?" And really, the answer is "I don't actually know. I'm not sure what happened to my brain in that moment."

Fortunately, the administrator on duty at school was the calmest, most competent man every. (There are some administrators I can think of who would probably have collapsed into hysterics at my phone call, which leads one to wonder why on earth they are administrators on duty.) The first thing he asked was, "Are the girls okay? Are you okay?" And when the answer was "yes," he said, "Okay, then, no worries, this is why we have insurance." And he maintained that same calm demeanor throughout.

In the end, he called a tow company that we've used before; they lowered the bus's suspension, pulled the bus out, and then raised the suspension again. Twenty minutes, total. But, thanks to the incompetent assistant manager of the garage, who insisted on things like calling the police, it took a couple of hours before we got to that point. (The police officer was so annoyed by the stupid phone call that he was quite rude to the assistant manager.)

Fortunately, the girls were in no way affected by this. I left the bus in all of its stuck glory to meet them at the theatre at 7:15, got them settled in their seats, and then headed back to the bus in time to meet the police officer there. And then the bus was rescued and ready to drive again in time for me to park illegally across the street from the theatre (but in a line of limos, so I figured correctly that I wouldn't get a ticket) and meet the girls in the theatre lobby. They were disappointed on my behalf that I hadn't gotten to see the show, but I just told them that I'd had a little trouble with the bus and had to get the suspension adjusted but that all was now well, an explanation that seemed perfectly satisfactory to them. There was no way that I wanted the story of my bus adventure zipping around in the student body!

Honestly, the best thing about the whole miserable experience is that I stayed super cool the whole time. I got a little insistent with the incompetent manager at one point (who then started doing the "stay calm, little lady, I can see you're nervous" thing, which annoyed me even more), but I never felt the urge to cry or anything. Yay! I had thought that maybe I'd be overcome by nerves once it was all over, but nope -- just fine.

It was only Sunday night, 24 hours after the whole experience, that I got kind of weepy, in part because I was reliving that horrible noise of the bus scraping against the ceiling, and in part because I suddenly worried about coming to school today. But the day has been just fine -- no requests to come by the head of school's office, no urgent emails or scoldings at all. I ran into the lovely administrator at lunch, and he chuckled a bit when he saw me, and I got to tell him that he was my new hero, and everything was totally fine.

So that's a far more adventurous weekend than I'd been hoping to have! Fortunately, I won't have to drive the bus again until February at the soonest.

And the good news is that I didn't have to sit through another round of The Nutcracker Suite.

Caught between cultural contexts

South Africa's landscape is much like that of southern California, where I lived for many years, so I had an odd sense of familiarity as we journeyed around this country that I'd never been to.

And maybe that false familiarity with the landscape is what kept throwing me off as I tried to think about the metaphorical South African "landscape" -- language, politics, culture. I kept realizing with chagrin that I really didn't understand all that I thought I did and that all of my reading and studying ahead of time didn't mean that I actually necessarily knew what was going on.

For example, we had a lot of trouble in figuring out our tour guides. The first guide we had proudly told us in his introduction that he was an 11th-generation Afrikaner and had grown up on a farm -- a true Boer, as it were, although he didn't use that term and I think it may now be a politically loaded word. But, see, I don't actually quite know that; I feel like the phrase "11th-generation Afrikaner" probably signals all sorts of things that I didn't fully grasp (the Wikipedia "Boer" article I linked to says a little about this). And, as someone who cares a lot of language and how people use it to say all sorts of things below as well as on the surface, the sense of disorientation I felt at having only a surface understanding of language was both incredibly interesting and incredibly, well, disorienting!

We came to have affection for this tour guide, Tiaan, but he pissed us off mightily more than once. (And when I say "we" and "us" here, I mean the chaperones ... or, as we took to calling ourselves, "the Fac Pack"; I have heard opinions from a few of the students about Tiaan, but not enough so that I could generalize about their attitudes.) He was annoyed that we wanted to shift our plans slightly to include the Apartheid Museum -- I think he thought it was redundant, given our earlier visit to the Hector Pieterson Museum -- and so on our bus trip to the museum he kept talking about the importance of not dwelling on the past but rather looking to the future instead. (Believe me, I've now thought A LOT about the power dynamic of who has hold of the microphone on a tour bus -- not a bad thing to have been frustrated by for a teacher, actually, since of course that's essentially the position I hold in my classroom). In conjunction with the many disparaging comments he made over the week about taxes and government waste and corruption, we developed a certain picture of his politics, and one of the Fac Pack started referring to him as "our Tea Party guide," and certainly if we'd been back in the States, I think that might have been an accurate appelation. But I can't really say, in a South African context, that his opinions make him a "conservative," because I'm not sure what the conservative-liberal spectrum looks like there. Plus, the current ANC government does in fact seem to be plagued with corruption and government waste. Maybe it's incredibly frustrating for a South African tour guide to be talking with one American group after another that wants to focus on apartheid and thinks of the ANC mostly in terms of Nelson Mandela and doesn't really know much about the current government.

We also wondered how much "white guilt" (American term, of course) Afrikaners felt over apartheid and to what extent this might be affecting Tiaan's statements about the past and future. He is probably around 40, so he was just finishing high school when Mandela was released from prison; he actually didn't go through the Apartheid Museum with us, and when one of the Fac Pack asked him about it, he said that going through the exhibits made him so sick that he just couldn't do it anymore. He also spoke respectfully about various African tribes and speaks Zulu and Xhosa (as well as Afrikaans and English and some European languages as well -- quite the linguist). At the same time, he could be very abrupt with clerks and salespeople, to the extent that at least a few of the students thought he was racist, but then again he seemed very respectful of our black driver, and the two of them seemed to speak Zulu quite amicably. (They both spoke English well, so I think they spoke Zulu when they didn't want us to understand them! I noticed the same phenomenon among the safari guides at Kruger National Park; I think they wanted to be able to talk about what animals they'd seen where without raising the expectations of the visitors, and I'm sure they sometimes wanted to bitch about us as well.) And, based on other interactions we had with other folks, some of us wondered if perhaps white South African culture is just more abrupt than we're used to in America. The point is that we couldn't reliably read social interactions in the way that we're used to, and we kept scrambling to understand what was going on underneath the surface and being stymied by our inability to do so.

Another incident from our second tour guide, Clare, whom we had in Cape Town in the last leg of our journey. We quickly came to thoroughly dislike her (as opposed to Tiaan, for whom we came to have real affection despite our frustrations with him), but this incident happened in our first hour of knowing her. She had collected us at the airport after our flight from Johannesburg and was taking us to the V&A Waterfront to wander around a bit, have our first glimpse of Cape Town, and eat lunch. She was describing the various lunch possibilities at the Waterfront and told us that, for better or worse, a McDonald's had just opened up there (much groaning at this). There was also, she said, a Kentucky Fried Chicken there, and then she added, "The Africans just LOVE Kentucky Fried Chicken; they're there all the time."

So, first of all, when she said "Africans," she meant blacks. We never heard anyone else on the trip use "blacks" and "Africans" as equivalent terms, and I found it extremely strange and troubling. It sounded racist to me, although when I got home and was telling D. about it, she wondered if it was the South African version of saying "Native Americans" instead of "Indians." Hmm, I just don't know. (As you've seen, "I just don't know" is what I keep coming back to!) And maybe it just seemed racist to me because the first time I heard her say it was in a remark about black people loving fried chicken. One of my fellow Fac Pack was ready to deck the woman, and again, in an American context, I would have half-expected Clare to follow up the fried chicken comment with one about watermelon, at which point we could have easily labeled her as a racist ... unless she was talking about it in a soul food context, at which point maybe everything changes -- all so complicated! And if it's complicated for us in an American context, how much more so in a South African context where we don't understand subtext? As I said to my colleague over lunch (at neither McDonald's nor KFC, thank you; we took advantage of being on the Cape to have seafood whenever possible), we don't know whether South Africa has a cultural stereotype about blacks and fried chicken; if that stereotype doesn't exist there, is her comment racist? Now, since we eventually learned beyond reasonable doubt that Clare is really anti-gay, and since we came to loathe her, I'm just as happy to think that she's a racist as well, but the point is that we actually couldn't tell that one way or the other from her comment.

What I really, really wish is that we'd had someone in South Africa with whom we could have thrashed some of this out, but neither of our tour guides was up for such analysis -- and particularly not for such self-analysis, which is fair enough -- and we were all stepping gingerly enough in our other social interactions that we avoided such interrogation. But I do know a really smart South African who is very thoughtful about race and about her own and other national contexts; she's finishing up her M.Div. this term, so she's got a lot on her plate, but I may ask her to have coffee with me, perhaps after she graduates, so that I can pick her brain.

Anyway, all of this cultural disorientation was both fascinating and utterly exhausting; D. keeps telling me that one reason I'm so tired is that I'm going through culture shock, which at first I dismissed because, for heaven's sake, I was only there for just over a week, but now I'm realizing that she might be right, that the constant thinking I was doing, always trying to read everything around me and being stymied in that attempt, probably wore me right out. (Not that I don't think on a regular basis here, of course, but you see what I mean.) It does give me some additional understanding of what my AP Comp class probably feels like for my students, though -- I'm always asking them to figure out the subtext of language, and while the U.S. is their own culture, they don't know nearly as much about it or its history as I sometimes assume they do, and so they are often scrambling a bit.

And now I'm going to hit "Publish" and am going to go out and plant forsythia in my back yard. I've basically given up on getting schoolwork done before spring break ends tonight -- which means it's going to be one hell of a week as I play catch-up, but at least the faculty go back one day before the students do -- and instead am trying to do self-nourishing things. And since I went to bed at 8:30 last night and have already been up for a couple of hours this morning (hmm, what did I say the other day about not having any jet lag?), I should be able to get the three plants in the ground before I head off to church this morning. And then there may well be a nap in my future.

The weary traveler returns

Actually, the weary traveler returned on Tuesday morning, but I've been too dang weary to do much of anything since then! No real problems with jet lag, I'm surprised and glad to say, even considering that I came home from the airport and crawled into bed at 11:00 a.m. and slept for four solid hours, which is the exact wrong thing to do for forestalling jet lag. But we were going at a terrific pace for the full ten days of the trip, with a godawfully long day of flying on either side, and I think my body basically just collapsed these last few days.

I'll start by saying that it was an amazing, fabulous trip. Unfortunately, one effect of my exhaustion and of returning home in general has been a wicked case of post-trip blues. I assume that this is a normal thing, right? At one point on Wednesday I suddenly "knew" with urgent conviction that none of the other faculty chaperones really liked me at all, and then yesterday I "knew" with equal conviction that I would never have an adventure ever, ever again in life and that all exciting fun was over for me forever. Fortunately, one advantage I've found in middle age is that I finally know myself well enough to recognize and take care of my inner toddler, who gets terribly fractious and unhappy when she is over-tired, so even as I was floundering around in despair, another part of me was patting myself gently on the back and saying, "There, there, honey, why don't we get you a snack, and then you can take a nap?" I'm glad to say that this morning I am feeling much more like myself, and I have hope that I will have regained emotional as well as physical equanimity by the time I go back to school on Monday. But thank goodness that we have these days at the end of spring break to recover! At St. Martyr's, they used to run international trips over spring break, but that break was only one week long, so folks pretty much came home from the airport and went back to school right away; I'm so grateful for our two-week spring break that allows for not only a longer trip but also some recovery time. One reason we have this extra long spring break is that we have so many international students, most of whom go home over break, and I have extra compassion for them now, since they get back to the States and to their dorms the day before classes begin; the faculty always get an email reminding us that they're both physically and emotionally fragile the first couple of days back, and that reminder will have extra resonance for me now.

The only real thing I've managed to accomplish since getting home is uploading photos to Facebook, so if you're friends with me there, you can see the photo album I've put together as well as some other photos that my fellow chaperones have posted. (And if we're not friends on FB, we can always make that happen.) I'll post some photos here as well, but I want to use this space to do some thinking about the trip. I kept a journal during the trip and have written a little more in it since I got back, and I know that I'll continue to think about the experience for days to come ... and, in other ways, for years to come. I think I finally understand why, for so many people, particular trips they've taken clearly become touchstones for the rest of their lives. A trip that my mom and I took to the U.K. back when I was 27 has functioned that way for me, certainly, and I think that this trip will be even more that way.

Let me start today with observations not about South Africa itself but about my experience of being me on this trip. As you know, I was super excited about the trip ... but I was also really scared. Because, that trip to the U.K. back when I was 27? Yeah, that was the last international travel I had done (other than trips to Canada, which I don't count in quite the same way, not in an American, colonialist, "Canada doesn't count" way but just because it doesn't require trans-ocean travel). My lack of travel experience has for years made me feel less cultured than other folks, particularly running around in academic circles where many people do a lot of traveling, and so I was looking forward to gaining a bit more "cultcha" but also afraid that my lack of travel experience was really going to show somehow. And maybe it did, but if so it didn't seem to matter so much. Three of the six chaperones had been on the last South Africa trip that FGS ran, another one had been to Africa before but not South Africa, and the other two of us hadn't been on the continent at all, but we were all having some new experiences and were learning together, and those particular worries that I'd had faded away pretty much immediately on the trip.

My bigger fear going in was that I simply wasn't going to be up to the trip. In my family, I'm the "delicate flower," the one who fades if the weather is too hot or the sun too bright, the one who gets overly tired, the one who feels faint, the one who gets weepy when tired and over-stimulated. Not that any of us is so very strong and gung-ho, actually, but the others seem more stoic in the face of physical discomfort than I am. And my fainting episode this month no doubt contributed to my sense of myself as somehow fragile, perhaps not up to the rough and tumble that other folks can handle. So I was seriously worried that I wasn't going to be able to keep up on the trip, that the sun and different food and bus rides and people around all the time were going to get to me and that there would be no holing up by myself for a few hours to bring relief. The day and a half of safari was my biggest source of anxiety, and I did get a little tremulous the night before in anticipation. And if it had been hotter, as it was when the last FGS group did it three years ago, or if I had forgotten to bring my own snacks, my fears might well have been realized; fortunately, we were blessed with good weather throughout the trip, and I was blessed with good health, and I made it through the experience -- and, indeed, all of the experiences on the trip -- with no problems. But there were a couple of kids who weren't feeling well on the day of the safari, and I felt so bad for them. (I'm really glad that I opted against taking malaria pills; I did so on the grounds that our time in Kruger National Park was the only period in which there was any exposure risk and that I'd rather soak myself in DEET for a day and a half than have an upset stomach from malarial pills [and those pills were in every case what caused the students to feel under the weather] ... and then, as it turned out, we never saw a mosquito in the park at all, and I didn't even bother wearing bug spray on the second day.) Anyway, my South African adventure has actually not changed this sense of myself as someone who easily gets faint and flustered; I think that's still true, and I was just lucky on this trip. And it's something that I will take into account and plan around for future trips; the stories that D tells about the conditions (heat, food, transportation, living quarters) of her trip to Liberia last year, and the stories that one of my fellow chaperones tells about her trip to Ghana a couple of years ago, make me feel faint and weepy just listening to them, and I am pretty sure that I wouldn't even attempt such trips (and in fact my friend wound up in a hospital in Ghana). I recognize that this inability to rough it will leave me out of some adventures, but there are still plenty of adventures left for me in which I take some risks with full knowledge of my own limitations, which is pretty much what I did in signing on for this South Africa trip.

And the fact that I'm thinking about further adventures is one of the best things to come out of this trip. I have traditionally thought of myself as a bad traveler -- the "delicate flower" business in conjunction with anxiety in the face of the unknown and a potential lack of flexibility -- but of course I hadn't tested that particular theory about myself in years. And even a seasoned traveler might quail in the face of chaperoning thirty-six 8th- through 12th-graders (with five other adults, of course)! But I actually did fine. We worked with a tour company, so there really were limited decisions that I needed to make, and two of the chaperones were clearly our leaders, so I mostly just had to step up and do what they asked, and our girls were so responsible that they just weren't a problem. (As one of my more seasoned colleagues said to me the first day in the airport as I started getting anxious about keeping track of my particular six students: "WN, they don't actually want to get lost, which is a huge head start." A much different attitude than I remember in some of my fellow students on the few high school trips that I took.) My fortitude was tested mostly in the airports, both going and coming, when I inadvertently wound up sort of "in charge" on three different occasions, and in every case I rose to the occasion; I'm still having nightmares, literally, about getting everyone through customs in Washington, when more than one Dulles (or maybe TSA) official did his best to make life really, really hard for us (including their attempting to send 8th-graders off on their own to a different terminal and then getting nasty with the chaperones when we intervened. WTF?!) ... but the important thing is that I managed it without getting weepy and distraught until afterward. D. had reassured me several times beforehand that the presence of students would mean that I was in teacher mode -- i.e., competent adult mode -- throughout the trip, and she was absolutely right.

So here's some of what I got out of this trip: A reassurance that I am indeed a capable grown-up (question: when am I going to stop needing that kind of reassurance? Wouldn't you think that, by age 44, I would have internalized this more?), a recognition that there are all kinds of adventures that I can have even if I'm not the halest and heartiest person, and a deep desire to have more of those adventures. Yes, I've finally gotten the travel bug at this relatively late stage of my life! (Not that I'm so old, but that most people get bitten by that bug much earlier in life.) Not that I have any money to pursue further travel, and I'm afraid that will be the case for at least the next few years until D. is out of school and making a salary and we've paid off the debt we've accrued in the last couple of years, but of course I now realize that there are ways of traveling without footing the bill. I'm confident that I proved myself as a chaperone on this trip, and I'm eager to see what other school trips might arise. There will probably be another South Africa trip in 2 or 3 years, and I'd like to go again, but I also want to throw my hat in the ring for other possibilities. Unfortunately, (1) I'm not eligible for any of the foreign language trips, what with my being limited to English, and (2) there's really no "ring" exactly to throw one's hat into. Most things at FGS are very open and transparent, but the international trips are not one of them, and most of the planning for them happens behind closed doors and is then announced as a fait accompli to the faculty as a whole. I'd like to see this pattern changed, but in the meantime I think that I'm now in the secret fraternity of successful chaperones who may get invited for future trips. And once D. and I are in a better financial situation, we can start saving for a big trip every few years, something she's been talking about for years but that I kind of resisted before now.

Okay, I know that none of this was specifically about South Africa at all, and I promise to write about the country itself next time around. In the meantime, a couple of photos from our Kruger National Park safari:

Pretty dang awesome.

All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go

Yes, this is what my life has come to. I can't get this John Denver song out of my head.

So here's what's happened in the last week: My mom sent me an email on Wednesday afternoon to say that she was devastated by my email. I actually thought it was about as good a response as I could have gotten under the circumstances, because she said that she really wanted to talk on the phone before I left the country so that she could say "I love you." But D.'s reaction, not on the first read but on subesquent readings of the email, was less positive, since there was certainly some guilt-tripping going on. Ah well. We did talk last night, and it was mostly kind of inconsequential stuff, but we did talk a little about the email exchange. I pointed out more than once that I was not in any crisis, that I had sent the email because she had asked, not because I was deeply unhappy. She did a little more guilt-tripping on the phone and also clearly kind of wanted me to be taking sides in the conflict between her and my brother, but I tried to remain a voice of calm. I did say that I thought a problematic pattern in our family was that we are all very judgmental (echoing a point I'd made in the email), that we have trouble acknowledging that someone could do or think differently from us and yet not be doing anything wrong, and that I thought that one thing going on between her and my brother is that they are each simultaneously judging and feeling judged. She didn't respond to that point -- just silence on the other end of the phone. This judgmentalism is something I've worked very hard on rectifying in myself for probably the last fifteen years, and I think I've made quite a bit of progress but not eradicated the tendency; I don't actually think that either of them sees any problem with being judgmental and in fact they sort of pride themselves on it, so it's no wonder that they butt heads. Anyway, it wasn't that long a conversation, because of course I had a long list of things to do last night, but it was definitely the most stressful part of my "to do" list last night. Thank you, all of you, for your incredibly supportive comments on my last post about all of this!

On to brighter topics, we leave for the airport in15 minutes! I'd gotten my bags packed Wednesday night, knowing that in doing so I'd realize all sorts of last-minute tasks I needed to do, and that indeed proved to be the case. I was crazy-organized (for me), and actually slept quite well last night because I was so on top of everything. ... And then this morning, 10 minutes after D. dropped me off at school, I realized I'd forgotten to pack the cord to charge my Kindle. Aargh! I called D., who generously said that she'd get it at home and bring it back to me at school. While she was home, she decided to take just one more gander around the place ... and found that I'd also forgotten to pack the camera charger. Yikes! (Although at least in the latter case I had packed the extra camera battery and battery charger, so that wouldn't have been a disaster.) She came back to school, and when I ran out to the car to get them from her, I burst into tears, because I was feeling guilty about her double roundtrip to school and because I was having to say goodbye again and because the fact that I'd forgotten both of these things had shaken my confidence that I'm actually prepared for this trip. But I pulled myself together after a couple of minutes, and now I'm just that combination of excitement and keyed-up nervousness that marks all of my travel efforts.

I decided not to bring a laptop on this trip -- radical choice! -- so no updates from the road, but there will undoubtedly be pictures and stories galore once I return. See you all in a couple of weeks!

Guess what, guess what?!

Guess who's going to the South Africa?

Ooh, good guess -- yes, it's me!

FGS runs student trips to various countries each spring break -- mostly in conjunction with the languages and social studies courses we offer. This coming spring, we're running our second trip to South Africa, and more kids than expected have signed up (probably because the first trip two or three years ago was apparently just amazing), so suddenly they needed an extra chaperone.

And guess whom they invited? Yes, that's right, it's me!

I have said "yes." Yay!

I haven't been overseas in 16 years -- a figure I hadn't quite realized until this afternoon. I have this sense of myself as not a great traveler, but I don't actually have any real evidence to back that up. And maybe I have just based that sense of myself on the fact that the last time I traveled, back in my late 20s, I got grumpy a couple of times with my mother, who was my traveling companion, although for the most part we did quite well together. So that's not really evidence of my being a bad traveler, right? And I am not always the most flexible person in the world, and my anxiety sometimes gets high when I'm in unfamiliar situations. But that's true of a lot of people, right?

Anyway, I didn't share any of those concerns about myself as a traveler with the chaperone who talked with me today about the trip. First of all, I'm not in charge on this trip -- I'll be an adult presence with responsibilities, but I won't be the one running the show. And three of the (now) five chaperones went on the trip last time and thus understand the ropes. And, finally, maybe I really am sometimes more adventurous than I think of myself as being.

Additional cool things about this trip:

I've been feeling sort of intellectually restless lately, wanting a research project but kind of spinning my wheels on finding one. But now -- South Africa! I certainly know as much about South Africa as the average person on the street, but that's hardly enough to take full advantage of this trip. So looks like I better hit the books! I have 4 1/2 months to learn all I canabout South Africa -- history, culture, politics, literature, etc. -- so that I feel thoughtfully prepared and knowledgeably excited about the adventure ahead. Yay! (And title suggestions most welcome if you all have them.)

In addition, one of the ugly things that happened in my last year at St. Martyr's was that the university president actually canceled an overseas student trip rather than let me chaperone it. (Apparently my deviancy was so unbridled that there was no telling what I'd do once I got the vulnerable undergrads overseas. Or at least that's what the president was afraid others would think, and he didn't want to appear to be condoning my lesbionic ways.) So, especially in light of my low-level anxiety this year about being in my fifth year at FGS, the same year everything went to hell at St. Martyr's, there's something wonderfully right about being sought out and invited as a chaperone on an overseas student trip.

Plus, ... South Africa! Yay! So I'm a very happy camper and excited about the adventure to come.