Fresh Garbage
When I was in high school, my sister Barb was a groupie of a European band called The Free Love. Their hit song was called Fresh Garbage and it’s tagline was “Look beneath your little morning, see the things you didn’t quite consume, the world’s a can for your fresh garbage….nah, nah,nah,nah,nah,nah, Na-nah, nah…” It was quite a hit.
My pal Mike gets a regular 8+ hours of sleep each night. He goes to bed by 9:30pm and wakes up before 6am to exercise. Innocence has its rewards. I am lucky if I get 6 hours of sleep. Conclude what you will.
Kim and I were tired last night and went to bed here in NYC by about 10pm. It’s still dark here, but I’ve had my 6 hours and now the City Sanitation trucks are doing their 44th Street thing and I’m up and at ‘em in a compact King room at the Cornell Club with little Miss Innocent snoozing off her extra two hours+ of innocence sleep while I am hunched over the bedside in the dark (I may not be innocent, but I’m not inconsiderate either) with my iPhone and typing finger hard at work.
Since my expert witness appointment got postponed at the last minute until Monday, I have no agenda this morning and my mind is racing to fill in the gaps. First on the list is my USD course evaluations. Us alpha dogs need constant validation and while my ethics course returns are up to 94% (why is there always one holdout?), my finance course stands at 68% after 2 cajoling emails from me. So, in the wee dark hours in NYC I have come up with a brilliant solution. I will use humor to pry free the remaining 8 evaluations.
When I was in college (yes, at Cornell, hence the Club), our favorite rag was the National Lampoon magazine. It was the post-adolescent version of Mad Magazine of our youth. It was hilarious. One famous issue they put a mangy dog on the cover and said they would shoot the dog if not enough people bought the issue. Hilarious. In the readers notes of the next issue, they faithfully reported that they had sold more issues, but not enough more, so they had to shoot the dog anyway. More hilarious.
I have two days until the evaluations window closes, so I sent another cajoling email to the finance class this morning. I told them about the National Lampoon tactic and said that they had forced me into a similar situation. If the 8 wayward students did not send in their evaluations, I would be forced to give Frank , the A/V student who is brilliantly average, an A+ in the course and thereby throw off the curve for everyone else. I told them that they had left me no choice but to threaten them in this way. I have one more day to see evaluation returns and then one last email to send them tomorrow with some sort of post-mortem on the situation.
I am already turning over ideas on how to address the outcome of all of this. On the one hand I can use the National Lampoon approach and tell them that they either came through with enough evaluations to save western democracy from collapse and Frank’s grade has reverted to mean or that I just succumbed to normal grade inflation. That has all sorts of academic statistical, economic and political significance which may be lost on them, so I’m not sure that’s the best way to go. I can just say that they were as good a class as they could be and pull the old “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed in you” parental admonition and try to get a few final laughs at Frank’s expense (I know Frank will just love the added attention and I know I will be doing him a favor with the ladies in the class). What to do, what to do?
Early morning Manhattan is doing for me what it always has. As you know, this City never sleeps, just like I never sleep enough while Mike contentedly snoozes away. The other night Kim and I noticed Betty talking in her sleep. Her usual position is to have her little tongue stuck out of the gap in her teeth while she sleeps. It makes her look very content, but a bit vacant-minded. That night we heard her snuffling like a big dog off the porch and wagging her tail in a doggy version of what we presumed was a very pleasant dream. I guess all dogs have dreams. Mike probably has a similar look about him in the early morning as he wraps up his REM sleep and contemplates his morning walk and line drives he will snag at short stop that day. Me, I’m listening to City Sanitation workers toss garbage around the street and thinking about how to poke fun at Frank so that I can feel better about myself in my pseudo-teaching career. Go figure.
Yesterday on the way in from the airport I was contemplating the gap in my morning dance card brought on by my expert witness cancellation. As I write that sentence, I am struck by the symbolism of my expertise being put on hold as I return to the scene of my professional crime here in the City…at the Cornell Club. Whoa! I really do have to go in and take a cold shower soon. But first, while in the cab, sitting on the Van Wyck (who of us haven’t been there way too many times) I called an old fraternity pal who used to borrow my house in Ithaca all the time. He answered, but was clearly otherwise engaged, so he told me he would call me right back. Guess what? As I may have mentioned, I have no more house in Ithaca. Cornell has liberated it from me. I have no return call messages from that friend either. I have insufficient evaluation coverage in Advanced Corporate Finance. I crossed the bar in Ethics, but not so much in Finance yet. Meanwhile, my lawyer friends here in midtown don’t need my expertise until Monday and the morning light isn’t up just yet in this darkened room in which I am twitching at this very moment.
Did I mention how much I enjoy being back in New York? As we got through the Midtown Tunnel at 5pm on a December Thursday, the traffic just smoothly breezed through Third Avenue…. Wait, no it didn’t. Why would it. The cockamamy exit to the tunnel still zigs and zags around old buildings like it has for the fifty years I’ve been waiting for the gridlock on Third Avenue to let up enough so we can sit on 37th Street wondering how great it must be to live on this street in Murray Hill that NEVER has no traffic on it. And so, we treat ourselves to dinner at Morton’s on 45th Street. The Gruyère on the onion soup is kinda strong. The $72 Wagyu filet is stringy (we should have gone to the Korean BBQ place) and Kim even says the salmon has a strange sauce on it. Ah…The Big Apple.
As The Free Love use to say, the world’s just a can for your fresh garbage….nah, nah,nah,nah,nah,nah, Na-nah, nah…” It was quite a hit and the hits just keep on coming. Time for that cold shower.