From Blackmun to Black Birds and Blackboards

I’ve come to appreciate that in the suburbs, waking up to the gentle twitter of birds really should be translated as waking up to the screaming noise of black birds (not of the Agelaius phoeniceus sort, but CROWS).

Crows can make life on our block an offensively dirty and miserably loud experience. The birds build their nests in the tall trees that line the street (minus one tree – chopped down, my fault, see post below) and leave their droppings on chosen driveways. They love ours. No good reason, they just do.

They ravage the garbage pails each week. Thanks to them, I know that our left-side neighbors always order meat toppings on their pizza, and everyone up and down the block knows that we went through a summer fad of eating fruit juice pops. There’s actually more that they know, but what the block knows, the blog need not reveal.

This morning, the birds were at it from dawn and it isn’t even garbage day. I heard that one environmentally correct way of dealing with them (apart from brutal murder and I am not there yet) is to fly a plane overhead and make exploding noises. These days that’s just about the worst idea that you could have. So, I am working on developing coping strategies instead.

But mainly I am hurrying to review my lecture for this morning. It is an introduction to the issues surrounding child support. This is the one topic that I cannot do without using numbers and a calculator (an anathema to law students), because you cannot demonstrate the legal fictions and absurdities created by otherwise rational (one supposes) legislators without entering into the math of it. This in turn means that since I am technologically of the “behind” sort, I have to expose my other behindedness – meaning I have to turn my “back” to the class and write things on the blackboard.

I hate doing that—perhaps my loathing of it signifies my not wanting to lose control of the classroom. And in addition, when I turn my back to students, I am imagining that I have gotten myself into some absurdly compromising state, much to everyone’s amusement. This isn’t sheer paranoia. Four years ago, I was walking to my office in the morning and a random student on the sidewalk came up to me and said: “uh, I think you’d want to know, your skirt zipper is undone.” I was so GRATEFUL to her, but ever since then, I feel compelled to check every time I am turning my back to the class. The act of checking itself is probably completely indiscreet and produces gales of guffaws. What can you do.