June 29, 1999
| My friend Darcie and I spent the afternoon planning lessons for next year, since we're all wacked out on
the joys of teaching. It's time to tell the world: I love Darcie's obsession with office supplies. Don't get me wrong. I feel my heart begin to palpitate upon entering the threshold of OfficeMax just as much as the next person. But Darcie is even beyond me. The girl cracks me up. First, the pen thing. Now, I've always been a pushover for a pretty When I arrived at her apartment, she had a little watermelon bag on the table filled with pens and pencils for our usage and enjoyment. Not your everyday, household writing implements...each of these fine utensils has been carefully selected and test-driven by none other than Miss Darcie herself. None of the pencils had lead over .5 inches, and they were all still wearing their little protective hats, which were snapped firmly in place over their erasers. The pens came in a large variety of colors and brands, one more high-tech than the next. "Here are my pens," she said, "but I don't think I have any nice ones like you had when we worked at your house." "I brought those with me," I said, gesturing to my schoolbag. "Oh!" she breathed, sparkles in her eyes, lips pursed; expectant. I produced the pens, and the next few minutes were spent on color selection and test runs on her notepad. "Hello." "Hello." "Hello." Next, I must take on her love for paper clips. Never will a plain silver paper clip emerge from her drawer or touch her tender papers. Paper clips must be a bright, solid color (if large) or festively striped in contrasting colors (if small). One of my most favorite Darcie moments came when we were setting up grade books for second semester last year. We sat at her table, grade books open, the most high-quality pens we possessed at our disposal, and we started to count out pages for different classes and different quarters. Because we prefer to keep attendance records separate from grades, we had to use two pages per class, which necessitated the use of paper clips to flip back and forth. I began extracting paper clips from my bag and placing them into my grade book. "Oh no!!! No!" Darcie squealed, pointing a finger at my work. "You have to use the big ones to separate classes, and the baby ones to separate attendance and grades!" Oh boy. I had just spent close to an hour counting out pages of the grade book so that each class had an absolute even amount of representation, selecting pen colors to match the seasons for recording the months of the school year, and now there were paper clip size rules to worry about. It got worse. It was discovered that Darcie had left her mother lode of paper clips in her desk at school, and we had to dig in our schoolbags to produce enough to get us through the grade book setup. We pooled our results on her table. Darcie carefully matched pairs of paper clips and shoved them over to me--a large blue with a small blue-and-white striped. A large red with a small red-and-yellow striped. A large yellow with a small yellow-and-white striped. By the time she got to her grade book, some of the paper clips didn't fit into neat pairs. "Look," I told her. "I'll take the mismatched paper clips." "No..." she told me, frowning at them. "I'll just exchange them when I get to school." It may appear as if I am making fun of my beloved Darcie, but I'm not, I'm really not. Once we get down to business, we do kick-butt planning together, mainly because she is such a smart and knowledgeable teacher. Her classroom is always meticulously organized, and she is one of those people who does schoolwork every night no matter what. If she says she'll make a handout for you or come up with a lesson for you, she will--without complaint. But damn! Her grade book is beautiful. |
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