Christmas in July

I'm bracing for tomorrow's onslaught. I passed back the midterms on Friday, but told them no grade grubbing until Monday, tomorrow. The students at AUA have taken the art of cajoling the extra point to an extreme that I have never before witnessed. They managed to reduce my TA to tears the night she handed back their homework assignments.

I had been warned to take extra precautions against cheating, so I gave the midterm in the Great Auditorium.

AUA used to be the commie equivalent of a corporate retreat. Every year faithful party members would pack themselves into the lecture rooms to hear motivational speakers ranting about the party line. The culminating event might have been Khrushchev delivering a rousing closing address in the Great Auditorium: thirty rows of thirty seats on the main floor steeply sloping upward from the podium, probably another 500 seats in the first balcony, maybe another 200 in the second. A colossal chandelier hangs from the sixty-foot high vaulted ceiling.

I told my students to spread out in the cavernous expanse. Big mistake. Row 25, seat 3 has a question. Now row 5, seat 23 has a question. Now row 19, seat 6 has a question. Sweat was pouring off my body as I huffed and puffed up and down the aisles.

After the exam ended and the students left, I got curious and started nosing around back stage. I'm not sure what I was looking for, maybe one of Khrushchev's shoes. How thoroughly did the Armenians erase their communist past? And then I found it. Behind the last curtain, hanging on the wall, a twenty-foot tall map of Armenia painted bright red with an enormous yellow hammer and cycle in the corner. I told my friend Jason. Next week we plan to ask them to open the back curtain so we can get pictures of us banging our shoes on the podium in front of the map.

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Part of AUA's pretense of being an American university is their Fourth of July picnic. It rained hard the night before, so I wondered if the picnic would be cancelled, but the next day there were five buses in front of AUA waiting to take students and staff to Lake Sevan.

If Yerevan is 3600 feet above sea level, then Sevan is at 6000 feet. Shortly after we arrived the weather turned bitter cold and a deluge began. Two hundred of us crowded into a little lake-side restaurant and shivered. No one would have been surprised to see snow.

At this point things got a little hazy. The next morning I woke up in my bed with a headache and a dim recollection of splitting a bottle of vodka with Santa Claus. I remember that the two of us treated our trapped audience to a medley of songs. Maybe I sang Back in the USSR. The rest of the songs were in a foreign language, but the words flowed out of my mouth with astonishing fluency.

By the time I arrived at work, the details were all over the university, including color photos posted on the intranet. It turns out Santa was Professor Caro Lucas, a distinguished professor of Control Systems Engineering from Tehran University and a seminal figure in Persian Cybernetics. Apparently we overlapped at Berkeley and decided this was cause for a drink or two. Maybe the foreign language was Farsi. Maybe I was singing "Death to the Great American Satan." Who knows.

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Later in the day I got a call from AUA's Director, Anahit Ordyan. Apparently I accosted her on the bus ride home spewing some gibberish about how I hadn't had a decent salad since I arrived. She told me that AUA felt like it was their duty to help professors with their domestic problems and toward that end she had assigned her assistant to help me with my weekly shopping.

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The following Saturday, as I was walking to the museum steps, where I was to meet my helper, I had an acute attack of self-consciousness about my outfit. I remembered the advice repeated in the Embassy's "Before you go" pamphlet as well as the Lonely Planet guide: If you want to blend, wear dark clothes. I was wearing seersucker pants and a purple T-shirt under an unbuttoned shirt with pink pin stripes. I was the Armenian equivalent of the tourists in Fisherman's Wharf who wear red Bermuda shorts, sandals with dark socks, and "I Heart SF" sun visors. I might as well have been wearing a clown suit.

Walking down the street with me must have been like escorting a giant balloon that somehow drifted away from the Macys' Thanksgiving Parade. "Look Mommy, it's Screech from Saved by the Bell!"

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Hump Day. July is in double digits and I'm starting to feel the inevitability of my departure. This always gives me terrible anxiety. I have done all of the tough work of getting adjusted, now I have a nice routine: friends, dinners, excursions, cultural events. Plus I'm working well for the first time in 18 months. Some nights I look up from my computer and I'm surprised to see that it's 2:30 AM. I realize I forgot to go to bed. Then I realize I also forgot to eat dinner.

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