Should COMP Be In Air Quotes?

I teach COMP. Or do I?

I'm pasting fun images on slides, creating QR codes, and interactive polls about levels of intimacy with five-paragraph essays.

I'm drawing rudimentary trees and clustering word leaves about intimate topics like middle-aging, empty-nesting, and mother-dying. I'm displaying them on a white expanse that descends from a cavity in the ceiling. I stand in front of it like an ostrich in a photo booth.

I'm lecturing about word patterns and word choices and wordy words until all anyone hears is the 'o' and the 'r' being pulled and retracted like a toolbelt tape measure during an open-concept renovation...until I feel like a cow with engorged udders who roamed indoors just as the modern farmhouse sink is installed.

I pass out blank sheets of paper on blank tables flanked by blank stares and make tabula rasa accusations. "Your ticket is punched. Your bags won't close. Your bins are overflowing," I say, "rip open your seed packets, warm your soil, amp up the damn autumn sun." I add, "Remember the Dixie Cup?"

I'm glad when the clock hands start flicking me in the eye because I'm ready to fill a Dixie Cup with tears. Tears appropriate to the rhetorical context. Tears in every color of the rainbow. Kool-aid tears, essentially. As the classroom empties, I remember I am the Dixie Cup. Fortunately, there is a dispenser stored in the podium.

What a transition! Just this morning I flushed a black baby fish floating like a cartoon comma along the surface of my son's orphaned tank. I hadn't noticed the flecks of orange on his hybrid underbelly until I flicked him into the commode.

After that, I pulled out my eyelashes...which I don't have to tell you, look just like quotation marks...especially when caked with mascara. It's more satisfying to tug them out when they're made-up. And then I twisted small strands of hair around my finger as though it would cure virus variations. As though it saved lives. As though it revealed the purpose and audience no one could identify.

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