what might kill attendance(and the shit story)

Second day of class. I'm beginning to see the future taking shape. Today, my 10:10AM CBI English class was down by one student and the following class, 11:20AM CBI, was up by one, as a new student appeared. Actually, this new student was an old student: she was the selfsame girl who had the temerity to ask if she could stand up during class. My three-hour Intensive English class held steady today; we had five again (one girl defected yesterday in the middle of class after concluding she was in the wrong level; I'm not counting her).

So the numbers aren't unstable quite yet, though I expect the class composition to be in flux for the first two weeks of term. Thereafter, we'll see the usual steady decline.

I am, however, worried that my biggest class, the 11:20AM one, might see a rapid dropoff because of one lady, a 49-year-old, who has some amazingly nasty body odor. For my readers who aren't in Korea, let me note: in general Koreans are far less smelly than us Westerners (I'm half-Korean, but I have no choice but to lump myself in with my Western comrades on this: I produce an impressive Western funk). Sorry, but that's just a fact. A truly smelly Korean is unusual; a truly smelly Korean woman is, as the French say, inouï: unheard-of.

The odor in question is a vile combination of body musk and unwashed clothing. However much it's disturbing me, I can only imagine the havoc it's wreaking on the sensitive olfactory nerves of the younger, primmer ladies in my class, and I'm sincerely worried that I might lose students based solely on this lady's presence.

What kills me is that my noisome putrefactrix is a friendly enough soul. She's single and wears her hair in a rather manly fashion (I really need to provide you all with a picture). I think she means well. But with her blunt features, she's no beauty queen, and when you combine her dowdy looks with her offensive scent, you can see why she remains single. I, at least, shower daily-- often twice daily in the summertime, because I know how nasty I can smell.

Fuck. What to do?

I predict I'll be taking significant losses by the third week. My nightmare is that the class will dwindle until it's just me and her and her stink, and she'll be looking around, wondering where everyone else went. At that point, I'll explode and tell her what I think the reason for everyone's disappearance is... and she'll depart in a huff, leaving me with zero students.

Maybe not a bad thing, that.

In other news, I had an interesting shit earlier today. It was one of those super-solid chunks that you have to push and push in order to get out of your system. A full minute of pushing only budges such a log by a few millimeters, so you're forced to rest a bit, then try again. This is something I've done at home, with generally positive results. I push, I heave, I rest, I start over... after ten or fifteen minutes, the entire payload clears the bomb bay and I leave the bathroom with a properly empty colon.

But today, with the log sticking an estimated 1.5 centimeters out of my ass, I looked at my watch and realized I had only 90 seconds before break would be over. My three-hour class includes a ten-minute break in the middle, you see, and I had wasted the first five minutes on some errand, then hit the restroom during the final five minutes. The situation was approaching crisis levels.

So there I was, recalcitrant log peeping timidly out of my ass, and the awful choice was upon me: behead the log now and try again later, or risk being late for my class by engaging in one last, desperate, hemorrhoid-bursting push.

I chose beheading. The blade of my anus scythed through the turtle's neck; the head dropped into the bowl with a cadaverous poip.

Then it was time to wipe.

If you're like me, you dread this moment, because the log you're dealing with is obviously composed of something abnormal. Normal logs slide out like miniature sandworms from Frank Herbert's Dune, and the amount of wiping needed is minimal. But when you behead a log of the type I was trying to shit out-- that is, the type that doesn't want to come out-- what generally happens is that you wipe... and you wipe... and you wipe some more... and the amount of shit befouling your portal never seems to change. In a bizarre way, it's sort of magical, really, like when you find one of those fantastic, self-refilling chalices of legend. The ass becomes, for all intents and purposes, unwipeable, as if the material you're voiding is a close cousin of Nutella. Ever tried to wipe Nutella off a piece of bread?

I ended up being a minute late to class, but the students didn't seem to mind. The important thing was that I managed to rid myself of the foulness and tracked none of it back with me to class. The Intensive English students don't deserve to be exposed to stinkiness any more than do my poor 11:20s.


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