Monthly Archives: August 2022

Little Tortures (or: “Dabid Can’t Sleep”)

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I couldn’t sleep last night. Not because I was worried/excited about anything or because my brain couldn’t calm down. But because there were little wrinkles in the bedsheets. See, when the sheets haven’t been pulled 100% fully taut on the mattress in a while, they start to loosen ever so slightly and these tiny little fabric creases form that send my nerves into overdrive.

I’ve learned not to complain about this often openly, lest I be taunted for being “delicate” like The Princess and the Pea. I know most people haven’t experienced this level of hypersensitivity and probably can’t relate, but little bedsheet crinkles have become one of my many lifelong adversaries.

My eternal battle with sensitivities doesn’t stop with wrinkles, though. If there’s a singular grain of grit, a crumb or anything else on the bed, it’s like a tiny dagger on my skin. And I would be lying if I pretended I hadn’t told my wife on multiple occasions that she needed to stop breathing because the noise was preventing me from falling asleep.

Growing up and going to college, I spent many sleepless nights trying to contort into positions where I couldn’t feel the springs of the bed through the mattress. No matter how sweltering it may be, I always wear a shirt to bed to dampen the feel of the bed on my skin. I also need a fan running constantly at night to cover up the inconsistencies of wind or raindrops outside.

So if you happen to talk to me in the morning and discover I’m grouchy or not fully with it, it may not be that I was up super late devising Pokémon movesets or obsessively reading about some fascinating new toy line—it may just be that I couldn’t sleep because of benign-looking little spikes impaling my body and keeping me awake all night.

These sensitivities are a big hindrance in the waking hours of my everyday life, too. I used to cut the tags off all my shirts so I couldn’t feel them “scratching” my back, I generally won’t wear long pants (AKA non-shorts) because I don’t like the fabric feeling constrictive on my body, and oscillating fans that move on and off my skin intermittently every few seconds make me want to hurl the fan through a window.

Our first DVD player had a little red dot-sized light that lit up whenever it was in use. I couldn’t handle that pinprick of light, so I’d pile anything I could in front of it to block it out fully: candles, action figures, matchboxes… whatever. Losing most of my sight has helped with this sensitivity to lights a lot (the sugary silver lining to a shit sandwich), but my touch sensitivity has either gotten worse than ever or I’m just noticing it a lot more now.

Despite how much my life has suffered as a result of losing the majority of my sight, I can’t help but wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off if some of my other sense hadn’t diminished as well.

Florida II (Or: “Cows Type; Dabid Flounders”)

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During graduate school, I became aware of a 2000 children’s’ book titled “Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type”. After reading the short little picture book, I immediately fixated on it, determining that I wanted to utilize it in my classes when I would eventually land my first middle school teaching job.

“Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type” is a book in which cows learn language and writing skills and utilize them as a method of civil disobedience in order to better their own status and conditions in the world. A short and simple narrative with a plethora of meaningful content for discussion buried underneath the surface, I thought reading it with my classes would perfectly set the tone for an empowering year of coursework with adolescent students.

Shockingly, this turned out to be a mistake.

Click Clack Moo Cows That Type Book Cover Art

The 13-year-old kids in my first independently-managed 7th grade English Language Arts classes immediately disdained the kid’s book—and me. The students weren’t interested in a deeper analysis of the tale at all; they asserted that they were too old for a “dumb kiddie book” and held the attitude that anyone who enjoyed reading a book of that sort (like me) must be a stupid baby.

This was conceived as an introductory lesson that would cleanly demonstrate the power and utility of written language skills, but the students took it as being childish and beneath them. It’s taken me 15 years to come to terms with and really understand why this transpired, but I think I finally do now. I was completely mind-blind to the reality that these 7th graders might respond to my carefully considered lesson in a different way than I had envisioned, and thus was caught utterly off-guard with a disastrous start to the academic year.

This disappointment—on my first or second day as a professional teacher—was my first major inkling that I might somehow be in over my head with this position. There would be ample more evidence to come of just how unprepared I was to manage a classroom of real, breathing children who wouldn’t necessarily dance to the beats that i foresaw.