The Business of Teaching
I just finished teaching my Law, Policy & Ethics course for two hours tonight in what felt like a 90 degree classroom (we are all asked to conserve energy during this heat wave). It wrung me out and felt like a hard day in the salt mine by the time I was done. There is nothing inherently hard about the course material or this particular class, since it was the introductory session. But two hours of heat made everything feel much harder and since enthusiasm is my stock and trade, I didn’t want to be any less animated than normal for this first class. So, I just jumped through all the normal hoops in a room full of relatively interested students who have not yet been worn down by the long semester. It was simply hard work and I felt it as I drove home. The good news is that I slept well and woke up refreshed.
One of my students who is also in my Advanced Corporate Finance course had heard me say that I was having shoulder pain at night and that it was keeping me up. It seems he is starting a legal cannabis business and when I said I had never smoked a joint the class thought that was the funniest thing they had ever heard. They admonished me to get with it and understanding that most people do not take their cannabis via smoke these days since that is clearly bad for you. Instead, they implied that there were lots of better, more effective ways to ingest cannabis, CBD (cannabidiol) and or THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol). This student said his new company was testing some CBD patches for people with joint pain like my shoulder and that he would be happy to add me to the list of beta-testers for his new product. I agreed even though I literally know nothing about cannabis, CBD or THC. I am an anomaly for a youth of the late 60s and early 70s. Literally almost EVERYONE I knew in college had or did smoke pot and got high quite regularly. I ignored the issue during business school, but when I started working I could smell dope everywhere I went in the City, even in the men’s room at work once in a while. The 80s were more about cocaine and PCP, crack and other drugs, but cannabis never left the scene. I seemed to have an ability to choose apartments in NYC where the next door neighbors were heavy pot smokers and the sweet smell of Marijuana was never very far from my nose. I have often said that in the same where secondary smoke is supposed to be the most harmful to you, I was getting more of a secondary high from living near dope-smokers than I ever would get as a normal recreational user of the stuff.
Somewhere along the way, marijuana became both recreational (which sounds much more benign than other labels like “gateway drug”, “weed” or other names) and it became medicinal. I have read up a bit on the medicinal qualities given the free offer of CBD patches from my student. I think its pretty damn funny that it has taken me until age 68 to decided to try out the one substance that probably best defined my generation. While watching The Kominsky Method, a great show on Netflix starring Michael Douglas and featuring Paul Reiser as Douglas’ daughter’s boyfriend. Douglas is 78 and Reiser is only 66, but Reiser looks as old or older in the show and the schtick is that Douglas has to put up with his daughter dating a man Douglas’ age. In that show, Reiser’s girlfriend finds his habit of smoking dope to be juvenile and this prototypical Baby Boomer is made to be a bit of a self-indulgent, but nice putz. The dope smoking is a big part of that putzy image. So, here I am, two years older than Paul Reiser, potentially making a bit of a putz of myself by trying a CBD patch for my 68-year-old shoulder pain and convincing myself that its the THC that makes you high and not the CBD, so I’m not really doing what all my generational cohorts have done harmlessly for years.
I haven’t used the patches yet and plan to try them on the weekend for some silly reason. Actually, I’m trying to be very scientific and trying to take my beta-tester role seriously. Teaching these classes late at night and then driving home really tires me out and usually sleep pretty soundly anyway on those nights so I want to eliminate that variable from the equation. In addition to that, if I’m going to get mellowed out, I want it to be when I have no agenda to pursue. And lots of time to sleep in. We have no plans for this weekend for the first time since the summer began, so as the old joke kinda goes, tonight’s the night, tonight’s the night!
What I am most interested in figuring out about all this is what the distinction is between being mellowed out by CBD versus getting high with THC. I see that the molecular compounds of the two are almost identical, but supposedly there is something about the way the brain receptors attach to these two ingredients that makes for the difference. Since I don’t really have any interest in getting high, which is very consistent with my general view about alcohol use and my lack of interest in using it to distance myself from the reality of the moment, I may never truly appreciate the difference, but I am interested in feeling what being mellowed out is all about.
The closest to getting mellow I can imagine are the times I have had to have a medical procedure and been given something to make me not give a shit what they did to me. There is, of course, the use of the Michael Jackson drug, Propofol, which they use when you get a colonoscopy. After my last twenty-minute nap during which they defiled me in ways I choose not to imagine, I swore that I better understood why Michael took that shit like he did. Sleep is a beautiful thing when it is that sound and that devoid of memory. The other drug is Valium, which I now know I owe to the same Sackler family that brought us OxyContin. I was in for an endoscopy and after explaining my strong gag reflex upon seeing the garden hose with a Spaldeen on the end they planned to put down my throat, the doctor said not to worry that the Valium would take care of that. After ten minutes I told him he could put a Buick down my throat and I wouldn’t care.
Despite the very effective experience with chilling drugs, I have still not actively sought any use of cannabis or its related byproducts. That is about to change next weekend. If I get a lot of shoulder pain relief, I imagine the four patches I have will soon prove to need supplement and I may well find myself helping to launch my student’s business. So, you see, the business of teaching is such that it’s only somewhat about teaching business. Sometimes you need to let the business teach you.