back at school

I'm back at school today, attending my training sessions as part of that on-line teaching grant I received this semester. I love coming to these, but I have to admit that coming back on campus is always highly disorienting for me, even still. I have to do a lot of faking. I've come to look at the overall experience kind of as if I'm going on a fast ride at Disneyland--the kind with the claws that pick you up and shake you around until your brain plasters itself around the perimeter of your skull and you feel slightly like throwing up, preferably all over that loud-talker walking next to you who seems to have trouble moving in a straight line. I try to look like I know what I'm doing, where I'm going, and who this person is who just said hello to me, and as such the experience provides endless fuel for my ongoing bafflement about what it is that makes the brain able to work just fine in one context and not at all in another.


I'm also wondering why we'll pay $8 a pop for the one kind of experience when the other seems so totally unpleasant. Context again, I suppose--or perhaps it's the potential embarrassment factor. At Disneyland, it doesn't matter if you stumble around like a drunken sailor, tripping over your own feet and generally looking like an imbecile. It doesn't matter if you ARE a drunken sailor. On a college campus, it matters rather a lot. And of course there's the issue of the lack of control. People are constantly in motion on a college campus. We may be used to dodging out of the way in situations that are familiar enough to us that we know the drill, but that sense of accustomedness, I am finding, is very fragile. It takes very little to make you a stranger to your own familiar world.

But it's more than that. The disorientation is accompanied almost by a sense of nausea. I can't take very much of it before I have to find a place to sit down and be quiet for a while. The phenomenon doesn't occur in any public places I'm used to: the local grocery store is fine; walks out in the hills are fine; restaurants are fine, including, surprisingly, new ones that I might not have been to before. It's just certain kinds of experiences that I find are problems.

Of course, it could just be universities.