Women I Love: 17/365, Carol

Teachers teach many things. Things like multiplication tables, which I never learned; Shakespearean sonnets which I was never good at memorizing; computer skills, the smooth movement of a jigsaw, the recipe for a bunt cake, sprechen sie Deutsch, parle vous francais, that atom and that one over there and the most delicate way to cut the flesh of a piglet without having the guts and bits pour out into the dissection tray. But what they can't often teach are the minute details of personality. They can lecture on the id and the ego and hold their heads up, showing off their own super-egos but things like sarcasm, who can teach that? By living it. Mrs. Quigley was ripe with sarcasm, sat on the edge of a student's desk at the front of the room in her black pant suits like a wounded warrior of Bohemianism, forcing words to fornicate like a contemporary Jack the Ripper of literature. Hold your head up when you read, speak from your diaphragm, don't fold your hands - use them, enunciate, fuck math and science because when you go out into the world you're going to have a calculator on your cubicle desk to do all that work for you but sloppy speaking - we don't want a bunch of Ozzy Osbournes forming like herds of sheep at cross walks. Perform. Force yourself. Learn: not about Whitman or the iambic pentameter or the key hole structure, shit, don't even bother learning how to write a complete sentence because you can fake that stuff. You can't fake how you speak. Do it slowly, do it like you're fucking the captain of the cheerleading sqaud and you want it to last; if you go too quickly, you're likely to blow it - along with your reputation. The way you speak is the way people will remember you and no one wants to die and have friends and family not be able to remember your last words because they couldn't understand it. When you're on your death bed, open your mouth, let your tongue curl around the syllables, peal them off the roof of your mouth and through your teeth, pick them out like an annoying piece of popcorn kernel and if you're not able to do that, if you can't bring yourself to make yourself at least sound smart, if you weren't able to watch George W. Bush and recognize that he didn't make any more sense than a bipolar schizo then she didn't want any of the credit. At some point, she decided to become a guidance counselor and gave up teaching English. She guided the way she spoke. She gave counsel the way she taught. But she'd turned on herself. People who know too much usually do before they become silenced. Come to think of it, she never covered the chapter on irony.