2 - What Is Love?

or a tale about procrastination.

by Anton Licht

12:21 PM - The door opens and Anne is entering the teacher’s room. She is holding her air pistol formed out of fingers to her temple and shoots the imaginary bullet directly through her brain while dropping the tongue out of her mouth. I give her the I-know-how-you-feel smile and continue chewing my sandwich. While my teeth stomp thirty-two times for every bite, the thoughts continue revolving around the question of whether there is a second-hand market for one-way gloves. I really don’t know where this came from.

“You look like you are ready for your retirement, Anne.”, I hear Tom, the music teacher from a table close to the wall.

“Don’t even ask.”, Anne says, while my chewing astral body is trying on imaginative rubber gloves which have some scratches but no rips.

“Tell us”, Tom insists and I kinda know already where Anne is going with this.

“8b again.”, she says without losing a second. “Everything is a negotiation with them. I wonder which poor manager is going to hire them one day. Or maybe they will even refuse to take any jobs. It’s really not possible to just ask them for simple homework. Have we been like this?”

She crumples on a chair at my table. My outer body takes the imaginary gloves aside for her not to sit on them.

“You can be happy to teach such a confident class, don’t you?”, Tom tries to cheer her up. I slightly smile at her and shrug my shoulders to gloss over the fact that right now I only register every third word they say and have a very long delay.

“What a week, huh?”, she sighs.

“Anne, it’s Wednesday.”, Tom laughs and his laughter is shattering my mental second-hand shopping experience. My brain is reuniting with my body.

Wednesday, huh? For some reason, I thought it was Monday. But that means tomorrow is Thursday already? Something is itching me.

“So, how are you doing?”, Anne now turns to me. “Did you finish the schmalz essays?” I cough parts of my sandwich.

3:12 PM - The reveal of the current weekday changed my after-school plans from an easy-going evening crash on the couch to a guilt-driven semi-intense work unit. The “schmalz essays”, how we call them among us German teachers, is a graded exercise we let the 10th grade do every year to teach them the formal aspects of writing convincing essays.

The topic is “What is love?”. It is especially suitable for us since we can avoid political discussions with furious parents - at least most of the time - plus, I also think the topic is too sensitive for pubescent teenagers to even show their parents what they are writing. The more surprising it is how personal they get in their manuscripts, which is where the term “schmalz” comes into play: most often, they are dripping with cheesiness.

In my theory, there is, similar to the attorney-client privilege, tacit teacher-student secrecy for that kind of topic. And I demonstrated my trustworthiness by announcing a deadline for feedback and grades.

Looking back now, probably not the smartest move I made, because the deadline is tomorrow morning’s first class and I didn’t even get started.

As I’m making my way from the school building to the car I’m trying to not catch the eye of any student who is leaving the school as well. Yet, from the other door, I see Anika-Luisa, our uber-student, heading in my direction. I decide spontaneously to change my path.

“Hey Miss M”, I hear somebody directly behind me. I roll my eyes like Gandalf when he heard that Frodo wants to take the Ring to Mordor, and slowly turn around.

“Dillan, it’s ‘Hello, Miss Müller-Vordorf.’ if you want to tell me anything.”

“Ehm, hello Miss …” I’m not taking it personally that he struggles with the adventurous surname combination I got from my parents.

“What is it, Dillan?”

He is not holding eye contact and his look is wandering from his toes to my toes.

“Could I please still hand in my paper?” He is handing me a crinkled sheet of graphing paper with ink stains all over the place. I look at it.

Instead of the minimum two pages, I requested, he barely filled half of the page.

“Is that your essay?”, I ask.

“Essay, yes.”

In my head, I’m comparing the workload of teaching him a lesson and letting him do some proper work to just grade what he holds in his hand. Seeing Anika-Luisa approaching behind him speeds up my decision process.

“Fine. But next time, hit the deadline.”, I say harsher than intended, take the sheet, and head without looking back to the safety of my car.

4:03 PM - I crash on my couch. Damn you, who made me think being a teacher would be easy.

My next priorities: changing the clothes, food, and regaining the energy for my main challenge tonight. I’m checking my phone.

4:59 PM - Shocked, I’m staring at the time on the screen. How did I end up solving so many worldes? And how could I even ignore that drilling feeling of hunger in my stomach? At least I would regain some time by merging my lunch with my dinner.

I look into an empty fridge. “Well played past-me”, I think, and close the fridge again. Ordering food it is.

5:17 PM - I take the essays out of my bag and put them on my stuffed desk. As I’m still waiting for the food, I decide it’s too early to jump into action. To appease my guilty conscience though, I start forming a plan in my head. Grading itself won’t be too hard, I have a checklist already from the past years and all I need to do is to see how many points on the list each student fulfills. Writing an essay should be like a creative walk through the author’s brain discussing the main hypothesis around a topic. Like every other persuasive writing, it should be well structured into a beginning, a middle, and an end. Simple enough, yet many of my students struggle with this structure.

In the introduction, they should present a thesis ranging from “love is about intimate connection” to something like “love is an over-romanticized dead end.” However often you have no clue till the end where the student is going with their thoughts.

An important part of the introduction is of course the hook in the first sentence. We teachers in the German department take every year bets on how many students start with “What is love? Baby, don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. No more.” thinking that is creative. The answer is usually around 3-5 students per class, although we observed a decrease in the past 2 years.

Around 3 kids per year talk exclusively about their pet and a minimum of one person per class is denying the existence of love altogether. Honestly, by now, I could be one of them.

In the mid part of the essay, the author presents supporting or contradicting statements as arguments together with examples. “Love is personal. My mom loves my new dad and I don’t.” or “Love is a very chaotic reaction in the brain. When my sister falls in love she stops talking any sense.” Usually, the more personal the examples are chosen, the stronger the whole piece will be. And admittedly, the more entertaining for me to read - which makes me briefly check the white wine bottle in the fridge. I’m safe for the evening.

In the third part of the essay, the students have to converge their thoughts back to a conclusion. Here again, many of them struggle, and barely a student comes up with an entertaining closure.

For me, the tricky part isn’t judging the structure though. It’s reading bad handwriting. And if bad handwriting is combined with grammar mistakes, inconclusive argument chains, and missing examples, some of the essays turn into a dangerous dada energy drain bomb.

Glimpsing the papers, I can spot already a few candidates and I decide to have an easy start and put the work of Anika-Luisa on top. At least, I know I can expect some high-quality piece of unsurprising boredom. Solid and rigid.

The door rings, my food arrived.

5:50 PM - As I put my dirty dishes into the sink. I start thinking about what I would write in this essay. I’d be definitely dancing between denying the existence of true love and an overly romantic picture as in Downton Abby. My thoughts are going to my ex-boyfriend, Max, and how he dumped me on my birthday not even knowing it was my birthday. I tried to come up with reasonable explanations. Why it was the only logical thing for him to decide that way. Taking all the responsibility and guilt.

I emerge back from that dark pit and realize that I ended up on the couch with Instagram in my hand.

6:32 PM - Still good in time, no reason to be harsh to me. I just need to stop scrolling now. Three more images, two, one last image. This is the last one. Now. Now really. Ok, now. I’m throwing the phone away from me and it jumps off the couch and it lands hard on the floor. I need it back though, to turn the music on. I really can’t concentrate when it’s quiet. So I pick some good dubstep and get my energy flowing. This ritual helped me to finish my studies in only eight years. It will help me now too.

6:39 PM - I’m dancing with a glass and wine bottle to my desk. Time to get started with some good old Anika-Luisa stuff. I grab the paper on top of the stack and sit down.

“Who didn’t watch a romantic movie before, and was thinking why do the main characters act that way?”

“Ehm, I’m usually not overthinking what I watch, Anika-Luisa”, I say with a snappy tone.

6:42 PM - Exactly what I expected from her. An unexciting 3 minute read with no passion or flaws. Perfect structure, a mediocre hook, in the beginning, no first-hand experience of love but the conclusion that everybody deserves it. No grammar mistake and no typo. Only a missing comma which I admit I had some Schadenfreude finding it.

I give her an A. I guess for an A-plus it’s really missing tension and passion. But at the same time, I don’t dare to be the one destroying her streak of amazing grades. If somebody wants to open that box of Pandora and prepare her for real life, it’s gonna be one of my colleagues - not me.

In the next paper on the stash, I recognize the sheet that Dillan gave me on my escape home.

“Sorry, it’s going too well right now. I can’t risk it at the moment.”, I say, shaking my head with the wine glass in my hand and I slide the paper under the stack.

9:29 PM - Besides the first “Baby, don’t hurt me.” and a very intense deciphering of what I guess was an essay about love to ice cream, things have gotten interesting. Maya Lena wrote about the freedom to love whoever you want. And also pointed out that this means for people to have the freedom to not love you as well. Made me think. Probably not the kind of thoughts I want in my spare time. Rihanna Lua was talking about how the love for a partner, for family, and for friends, can be considered polygamy, and that society sets harsh borders on how many to love how intense, in order to make individuals depressed.

“Having one person to love would be a good start, though.”, I say slightly too loud and chuck the rest of my wine bottle.

Reading “Giving yourself to forced feelings is pathetic and shouldn’t be overrated.” on the next paper by Lars-Pascal instant stresses me and I decide to take a shower break.

10:22 PM - I’m sitting wrapped in a towel on my couch and continue reading. This time a red wine bottle as my companion. Deep inside I wonder why everybody in the class has an “L” in their name, and besides Dillon of course, a double name. Where are the Tims and Toms and Maxes in this generation? Ok, nobody needs Max. Besides that, may it be the wine and the melancholic music I’m currently playing, or not, but those essays seem to be tailored to attack me.

Here, “… For some people, love is a fantasy construct performed on imaginary projections of real-world encounters. Only to soothe their soul …” or “… the moment you realize you weren’t in love but just trophy hunting, should be a lesson to you …”. Who writes those mean things? Has this been the case the last few years too?

12:12 PM - I think only one more essay to go. After two breakdowns and luckily unsuccessful attempts to call Max or my mom,  I’m sitting naked with a glass of red wine on the floor, enjoying the gentle touches of the Roomba hovering robot at my thighs and ass, it trying to proceed with the spot cleaning under me. My phone is playing “What Is Love” and I wobble in the rhythm. I reach to the couch and grab the last sheet. The last one to go.

“Oh Dillan, what did you do?”