wishful thinking

The summer, which was long and sort of endless seeming, has caught me off guard by coming to an end. Damn you, summer. And with its passing comes the return of teaching. I have been moderately excited about teaching this semester, at least, I put in a lot of work, so I guess I fully expect to get a lot out of it. First law of thermodynamics and all. I'm teaching introduction to composition, which basically involves helping freshman adjust to college-level writing and sometimes college in general. In the past, myself and other instructors have designed the course around a theme or topic. The idea being that writing is less fun when you have nothing to write about. The last class I taught was on "espionage" and besides the three or four people, humorless feminists mostly, who felt alienated and objectified by 007, it was a blast. In the effort to be a little more democratic, I decided this year that I would leave topic selection up to the students. I thought, yeah, that will be fun, I'll have students writing on such a wide variety of wonderful topics like stem cell research, tourism, election reform - and, for the less ambitious, harmless pastimes such as coffee, dogs, and fetishism. Boy was I surprised when my students' list of things that "interested them deeply" looked something like this: sports, sports, sports, white sox, sports, sports, music and sports, sports, sports, sports, sports injuries(!), music, sports, sports, travel (I love you, person!), and extreme sports. But really. What did I expect?

This morning I decided to check the status of my apple "buy a mac get an ipod free" rebate. Lo and behold, no rebate. After being misled by the obligatory, unhelpful support person, who's advice was, "just start the whole rebate process over again from the beginning." Without realizing that a. the deadline was passed and b. I didn't have the original barcodes because they had lost them. In fact, I actually began to believe the lady on the phone to be directly responsible. I imagined my barcodes, meticulously cut from the product boxes, falling between the grooves of her couch. The second, smarter lately impressed me by becoming a little peeved at first. Is there a dumb cop, smart cop routine that I don't know about? She seemed to know all of the computer's secrets that the company must only release to their most valued of employees. So now the form is due by the 14th or else the offer is expired and I can kiss my rebate goodbye. This is when it occurred to me what rebates actually were: a great hassle imposed on consumers to keep the less persistent ones from actually saving the money they were promised. And once again, all of my basic expectations turn out to be wishful thinking.

The latest joke from the "joke of the day" widget on my google homepage is called "juicy squirt" - tempting, isn't it? But with my track record for unmet expectations, I think I might just pass because I don't think I can handle another disappointment.