Daria Doering

The next day I subbed at a high school in North County, which is a very cushy district in the world of sub-land: beautiful schools, huge solar panels cover all the student cars in the parking lots, nice kids.  However the only thing that is weird about this district is they really emphasize that subs will not be given codes to log into computers.  And that if you are being paid for a full day, you must make yourself available for any work that is needed during a full day (i.e. during the regular teacher’s planning period), or face termination.

Well, once I realized the school was on block scheduling and I had a two hour break, I immediately tried to circumvent the first rule by going to the Media Center, hoping I could somehow log onto the internet, go to my teaching wiki, and get some work done.  I innocently asked for a guest logon, but they didn’t have any, so my plan didn’t work.  I hadn’t brought any reading, so I inwardly sighed and decided to check in at the school office for additional work after all, not wanting to lose this cushy job.  I figured maybe this whole thing was semi-voluntary: you were supposed to check in, but they weren’t going to hunt you down if you didn’t.  The office lady sent me to the nurse, who had a stack of filing for me to do.

That got me going.  Me doing freaking filing.  How ridiculous.  I get paid so little that I deserve a long break.  But I started my task , and decided to do the right thing by being as pleasant as possible to the nurse.  So we started chatting.  She said, “I have two volunteers … one’s been with me for five years … they do most of the filing, but only a teacher can do these forms”(which contained confidential health information).

Suddenly all those stacks of annoying forms that you have to fill out and turn in at your kid’s school every year had a human face behind them.  Yes, some poor soul had to file all that stuff.  And suddenly I felt good.  I was helping out this poor nurse in her 60’s who had undoubtedly done more than her share of filing through the years.  We talked pleasantly and she told me about how she was attending her 45^th high school reunion that night, and damn that her just manicured nail had just broken, and her hopes to get lucky that night and meet Mr. Right.  She also told me her daughter was an art teacher, and she’d had some tough assignments.  “Yeah, at this one place, they drew penises in all her books,” she drawled.  “She had a really nice collection of art books, and had spent a lot of her own money on them.  After that, she couldn’t use ‘em anymore.”  I commiserated … what was wrong with some of these kids?!  And thought: Hey, there was something that had never happened to me!

So I filed the stack, and afterward my eye fell on some magazines on the coffee table.  I leafed through one and came upon a profound article.  The subject was stress reduction, and the article cited research that stated that eating chocolates or sugary snacks does NOT reduce stress.  But looking at certain photos DOES.  The most stress-busting photos are of nature, water, family, vacations, pets, or attractive people of the opposite sex (such as movie stars) looking at you.  The article correlated with some thoughts I’d been having, and felt like key information that might help me in my search for alternatives to emotional eating.  I reflected on how I would never have seen this old magazine had I not been in this nurse’s office.  Among other good outcomes from doing this lowly filing job.