Treading water (poorly)

Once when I was about 8 years old I got swept down a waterfall. This was in San Marcos, Texas so we're not talking about a thundering, vertiginous, mist-producing waterfall like the kind you see on screen savers. As waterfalls go, it was more of a water-stumble, but it had enough height, volume, and velocity to give an 8-year-old a rather sudden and unpleasant yank beneath the surface and a few accompanying bruises and scrapes from rocks and glass on the way down, and enough of a current to not let go of a passenger right away.

The experience has since crystallized into one of those Metaphorical Moments, handily foreshadowing things to come-- the fall itself was my fault for bumbling around too close to a water-stumble and losing my balance, but at the time I blamed my dad, who was on the bank nearby exhaling his way into unconsciousness in order to inflate my plastic raft (which would only have carried me over the edge even quicker than my own two legs, come to think of it). I ended up being pulled a ways (a mile! to an 8-year-old, more like 100 yards to an adult) down the river and expending nearly all of my energy frantically fighting the current, and finally catching up, completely exhausted, against a sand bank.

How I felt then, sitting on the sand bank is close to how I feel today, but maybe with less shock. The past two weeks have moved with the speed and treachery of a San Marcos water-stumble, and even though I'm now a much larger and slightly less clumsy adult, I still had my feet knocked out from under me, and treading water has proved only slightly more successful.

I got a look from a student today that pretty much summed it up: it was the kind of bored, slightly patronizing curiosity with which you might look at a dog as it tugged and tugged on something way too large to be moved. This particular student defiantly maintained a pristinely white sheet of paper after I'd been spewing an hour's worth of Things You Need to Know in Order to Pass My Class. Fine, I thought, on your head be it. But it still wears me out and wears me down just that little bit. There are hundreds of her, hundreds for which I am responsible, and every day they wash over me like water and I wonder how much I'm helping and how much I'm just using up more than my fair share of oxygen.