Chapter 3 - Further Changes

It occurred to me that with the right presentation and venue, images of me could be worth something, even if I was just counting pointless Internet prestige. Nothing too flashy or salacious, because I had dipped into the wrong end of that with confessions during substituting and heard no end of comments. Something fun but still professional.

Setting up my phone as well as the angle and the table would allow, I adjusted my top and considered lightly stuffing it to give slightly more of an expression. The first few shots suffered because, even though my parents had opened some of the drapes and cast pools of noon day light around, we had eventually drawn them to try to control the summer heat. Eventually, I just got lucky with a good angle on the couch and enough spill light from the kitchen. I undid the ponytail and posed my hair for different moods.

I tried a flaming waterfall of hair, then a wannabe seductive glance with my locks carelessly askew, as though I’d just woken up. Making fancy hair compositions was beyond me but a variety of ponytails were kind of fun. I still had that X-Files season one Gillian Anderson look, a style that very much felt like a work in progress. I crossed my legs as tightly as I could bear.

After about a dozen worthwhile shots, I linked up my laptop with my photos account and checked how they looked on the larger screen. I saw my face in the webcam preview for instruction but it was a pitiful resolution compared to what my phone could create.

In some of them, my eyeline had issues. But I picked out a couple that I thought weren’t too bad. This was stupid though. Where was I going to post them and why? It would have to be somewhere that focused more on faces, maybe?

I knew some of those. Pretty fast, I realized it was like taking a few swings at a batting cage in an arcade fun land with a putt putt golf course and then making the next step signing up for minor-league baseball. Every post was basically a perfect celebrity. Or it was someone with maximum cleavage and a top that showcased it. Even posting areas that supposedly focused on faces had their images cropped to the contours of the neckline.

Instantly, I just wanted to back out and not even bother trying to find somewhere to post. That said, I considered maybe a theme. Playing up a teacherly look was the opposite of what I wanted to do though. And everywhere I went was just boobs.

My stomach issued the most vocal complaints as I did my best to breathe and figure it out. Ultimately, I started sifting through a girl next door kind of page. It wasn’t ideal, but it at least seemed to be the closest thing to the next step in showing myself off.

Initially, I considered telling a version of my story which was like “working from home and feeling bored” but that sounded way too much like a blanket invitation to be flooded with messages and horny comments. Although, wasn’t I fishing for the interest of users?

After a long time browsing around for the kind of image I had and the sort of impression I wanted to give, I finally landed on a “cuteness” focused page which wasn’t as active as some, but still looked like it could work.

Creating a new account, I soon smirked and snickered that it had taken me this long to realize that my recast initials were MJ.

Unfortunately, every possible username that popped into my head sounded like a vague allusion to something else. Which made me nervous if anyone ever connected it to my regular accounts. So far as my regular accounts, a few of my alts were unchanged but my primary email had Margaret as my first name now. If it had changed earlier in the day, then I just didn’t notice it.

After way too many minutes trying to come up with something that felt eloquent and yet evocative of my new identity while not giving the game away, I eventually went with a random name generator and christened myself….“strutting_iguana” without any real rationale behind it.

From there, I did my best with free photo editing options to make my pictures look as good as possible. Tapping the sides of the keyboard with my nails, I was immediately at a loss for what to title it.

“Hey there, boys”, was the first thing to pop into my head and the subject of immediate, mortified cringe. First of all, that was way too provocative and would give a mixed message with my strait-laced image and intentions. Whatever my intentions were at this point. Mostly, I  just wanted to have a little fun. In the back of my head, I knew that showing myself off was either going to be met with absolute silence as my postings dropped into the purge pits of the Internet or I was going to be overwhelmed with attention I had no idea what to do with.

God, keep it simple. “First post, hi there everyone. Hope you’re having a nice afternoon.” I filled everything out and made sure the image was hosted at a decent quality and then I went through practically every pixel of it to make sure it presented me in the light I was hoping for. I also double checked the rules. It was specifically a safe for work slice of the site which encouraged being safe. Not that I felt I needed to be protected, but I also didn’t want a free-for-all.

Would’ve been nice to be able to show off a little bit more, but I already had so much. Taking the plunge, I clicked to release the post. Naturally, nothing happened in the moments right after. I did receive a message from the auto-mod welcoming me to the channel and saying that my post was provisionally approved and would be public as soon as it was checked by a person. I leaned back and sighed.

Soon after that, I found a similar place to post focused on faces. Using one of my other shots that didn’t skew too provocative, I thought about making some sort of meme joke before just iterating on the first one. Following that, I still had a few that looked like I recently came out of the shower. I had some general options but nothing I felt comfortable with which wasn’t completely bereft of activity.

While I did all this, I had a phantom smell infesting the inside of my nose. Automatically, I figured it was just mom‘s perfume lingering in the house. But that had a sharper aroma. This seemed like fresh linen with a floral edge. I hadn’t left a bar of deodorant nearby, I checked. Blowing my nose didn’t change it and, when I moved around, it seem to follow me. I just hoped it wasn’t something bad.

Once I pushed through a layer of stories about bad celebrity encounters, I eventually paired my tussled hair photo with a meme about Mondays. Low hanging fruit, but it was my best effort. The remaining shots didn’t seem like enough to bother with finding a home for.

I had three posts though, all showcasing photographs of myself that I just took without any special work done to them, makeup, lighting, or anything. My heart raced and my legs felt tingly and cold despite the sweaty presence of the room.

I had plenty to do so far as prep for the afternoon session, so I tried to put things out of mind and just let myself be pleasantly surprised when people responded. Once again, I questioned myself about why on earth I was bothering with putting so much emotion and effort into something that felt like tossing a piece of paper into the wind. The old version of my parents would absolutely have something to say about this and I fully expected the same would be case now.

It didn’t take long before I was crying again and didn’t understand why. No matter what happened with the three images I sent out, like bottled letters to the turbulent tides of the Internet, I could tell I would both overthink it and feel a waterfall of fear with every random comment that judged me physically. Literally, I was inviting scrutiny from a bunch of random strangers. Maybe that was the point.

My tutoring students were nice to me, but I controlled the fate of their summers and whether they got credit. My parents were my parents, no matter how changed. And I could hardly be considered an objective party to myself. The opinions of Internet strangers were meaningless. And yet it felt like it could be a blast of cold water to be told that I either looked better or worse than the immediate sphere of opinions around myself.

It meant absolutely nothing and yet I wanted to hear what they had to say, for another sample of this reality. If nothing else, maybe those who looked at it might be turned into a redhead like me. Funny notion.

I peaked at the stew leftovers a bit as they started to collect some condensation. I wished that I had more soda to drink, even though there was a time when I drank far too much and I did a number on my stomach, just like a hard laxative.

Some crackers that weren’t expired made for a nice little snack with my usual water bottle. It would’ve been nice to put my bottle in the fridge top or the freezer below but, despite how much I craved icy water, it didn’t seem worth the effort compared to one of the liter bottles I barely managed to fit along the top row of the fridge door.

As I enjoyed the clear, freshened air around the computer, I tabbed over to the assignment queue. Of the afternoon students, a good three-fourths already had their assignments turned in, although a couple of them were double posted with accidental zero-byte files. I wasn’t a stickler about this sort of stuff. As long as it seemed like they were working on the assignments, I could still mark them for participation.

The agency officially said that all assignments needed to be in at the exact time marked by the instructor. Fortunately, that was just a box to tick. At the same time, I made it clear to everyone, morning or afternoon, that if they tested my good graces then they couldn’t be assured I would help them out.

Probably the most fascinating thing I had gleaned through teaching was the way that students responded to questions and ideas. Even freshmen have a hardcore bullshit detector. None of them were interested in the current president, even though he made speeches that pumped up his sympathetic tones towards them. As an afterthought, I checked Google to make sure that the current president was still the current president. Yup.

They didn’t have evidence, nuance, or reasoning to their statements, but they had enthusiasm and a blanket sense of determination. They were intimately aware of the kind of discourse shared on the Internet and between their friends, however, none of that touched upon their domes of thought. All that was reserved for influencers, musicians, and “gotcha” moments, at least as far as I could piece together with my adult brain. And they always managed to surprise me. Except when it came to passages in their essays precisely matching a search for Wikipedia.

Because of that, and especially with this group, I did my best to pass along the idea of re-contextualizing or rephrasing material so that it didn’t sound like you just changed a few words in a quote, but that you’re taking that information and trying to do something more with it. God, I was so used to lecturing that lectures played out in practice in my head.

Afternoon session would be about the same as the morning one except for some included notes that we’d gotten further into a review. A few of the early students popped in with messages and asking about grading. As I sifted through, my eyes rested on a name that stuck out as oddly unfamiliar.

Susanna Coronil. Now, I had a Felipe Coronil who had been with this tutoring/class session for most of the summer. But I had no idea which last names were basically like my own for commonness. Could also be his sister or some other relative. The odd thing was that several assignments were marked for this class as done. Of course, the powers that be so far as regulating class load and kids in the tutoring system moved people in and out a lot. I made a little note on my lecture page to let Susanna introduce herself if she wanted and get her familiar with how I did things as an opening.

Things started to move fast once students showed up and I had to organize their questions and concerns according to who I wanted to provide answers for privately and who should be on the public video stream. I learned pretty fast with the system that there was basically no privacy and if you wanted to cut loose and drop a quiet or frustrated word then it was best to just cover up your camera before you did so. I got a note about a screamed obscenity pretty early on even though all the students had signed off and weren’t there to hear it. The problem was the system kept recording if there was something in the feed to listen to, so someone saw the microphone peaking at the very end and I got written up about it.

I liked the afternoon group a little bit better than the morning one but there was no way I would tell one or the other that they were my favorite, even though there was a bit of a competitive game between the two of them for a while. Some of them just rolled out of bed after a noonday nap and others had been psychologically beaten by their other classes so far. What it amounted to was a group that slumped down in front of their cameras and accepted what was coming. Most of the time.

Today was already pretty active with wholly inappropriate questions about defining a “skank”. My response was to wring all the coolness out of the word through my adult analysis of alternative definitions and pulling up the Oxford English Dictionary. I expected that I had metaphorically dropped the terminology to the level of any person my age doing a dab pose. It wasn’t quite as methodical as my word-by-word etymological assassination of every phrase in their lexicon.

However, I did manage to segue it into the opening practice of grammar and rephrasing. As I pivoted from that initial note to making sure everyone was present and logged in, except for Felipe, I glanced towards Susanna‘s webcam.

She had on a bulky black shirt as she hunched over a spiral ring notebook with a pink pen in her left hand. Her perfect circle glasses with a fringe of light silver not only completely enveloped her eyes but stretched down to her rounded cheeks and her full eyebrows. A sweep of sharply crinkly hair flowed over her shoulders with a fair golden reddish tone that didn’t feel too different than my newly bequeathed locks. Felipe also had naturally curly, dark hair.

They both had a certain awkwardness. Felipe had stark lines to his face like someone had shaped him with a chisel but didn’t have the time to finish the edges. Susanna looked kinda like a balloon, both in the soft swoop of her face and as though she was holding onto a nervous breath and trembling to not let it go.

As things settled, I sent a quiet private message welcoming Susanna to my class and asking her if she wanted to introduce herself. She sent me back question marks and fervent bewilderment that immediately surmised that she’d done something wrong. Hastily, I reassured her that everything was fine and I appropriated the blame myself. Without prompting, she said that this was week five and wanted to make sure I had her assignments. Not even hearing that she had a 93.8% grade assuaged her nerves.

I had a hunch. It wasn’t one I wanted to immediately indulge nor was it one I wanted to toss out without consideration. So much changed with this morning that it didn’t seem like a stretch that odd ripple effects were out there. Had I done it?

That felt way too presumptuous. Granted, the notion that this girl Susanna woke up as a girl, or something like that, in the same way I did was fascinating, even though I had no confident clue how to ask her if anything was amiss in her life.

“Is there anything you’d like to tell me privately?” It was the best I could do but at the same time, I absolutely knew she would take it the wrong way and be stressed out that something she had done might’ve been conflated or misconstrued as cheating.

Ultimately, she had other stuff on her mind about grammar rules and confusing vowel sounds and was too embarrassed to say it before the group. Those were areas that I didn’t even feel that confident myself about the sounds matching up with the symbols used. I promised to give her a special PDF with as much information as I could offer.

She left me with her own question, “Is something wrong? Did I do something wrong, I didn’t do anything wrong, I hope I don’t know I I hope I didn’t…” Her words petered out with a squeaking shyness that I envied. Unless this was a large-scale prank with elements that included hacking the grading system, she was sincere about everything. He used to be Felipe but now she was Susanna. And the universe just accepted it.

Or I was going nuts, and my memory of a male student was false and this was reality, along with a whole lot of other memories. I sifted through the details that I knew about Felipe. Susanna’s skin tone was closer to a fair cocoa butter tan while Felipe’s was a dark, almost Indian almond tone. So far as size, it was hard to judge because the camera was positioned differently for her with the bulk of her computer chair back cut off. She had to be at least a foot shorter though. And her limbs were even more drastically altered than mine had been.

I had to feel a flair of envy from the absolute mountain range that distorted her black shirt, even though I didn’t want to linger there in my thoughts. Was she and her family happy though? Such a drastic change and maybe she had memories about it but perhaps she just dismissed it as a strange dream compared to the certainty of the rest of the world and everyone who knew her. Was it better to remember or forget? I swallowed hard.

She deserved an answer, so I assured her that it was nothing she had done. Rather, I explained that my morning had been full of unexpected surprises and quite expected warmth with the desire to just sleep through it. As well, my answer alluded to a visit from my parents preoccupying my thoughts. They were all deflections.

To set her questions at rest, I came up with the answer that things my mother said left me thinking about certain students and whether I was overlooking problems that they might not have the confidence to share with me. It was a response that benefited from the fact I didn’t have to find words to phrase it but rather sent it over to her in text. Despite all the practice of stating things out loud, just typing was preferable.

She thanked me for my concern, also in text, but nervously reassured me that, as far as she knew, everything was fine on her end. And this would be enough. We both had other concerns to pivot towards.

I sifted through the guided initial practice while going over essay writing and similar lessons of rhetorical style. How to make an argument, how to recognize an argument, how to respond to an argument, and once again and always, how to restate information without making token changes while still retaining the core insight. For some reason, everyone wanted to talk about alligators, so I worked off of that.

We went through examples of objective information regarding alligators and passed through the gray area where it became subjective claims. How their teeth compared to crocodiles. Then claims about disposition and assertions about being menaces.

Styles of learning, especially to me, had been disproven and also fallen out of favor with my tutoring employer. Some new buzzwords about “holistic education” filled their space. That meant making sure photographs of the subject I was talking about supplemented the discussion while everyone was listening to me and the system required a certain amount of notes to be taken. Basically, that meant I could see whether anyone was typing while I was lecturing.

If I wanted to be a hard ass, like some of the summer teachers they had, then I could ding them for not registering any activity on their keyboards. It also meant that the agency basically allowed keyloggers and other invasive software to watch exactly what they were doing. Some students removed it, because it was bullshit. I even helped them do it.

In my first year tutoring and instructing from afar, I didn’t have the confidence to supersede the program like this but by the end of it, I got in contact with another instructor with a bit more experience and learned I could just say that the key stuff was corrupted and they wouldn’t bother to check it.

That didn’t mean that the students who obviously weren’t bothering would get a free pass, it just meant I would have to pay more attention to them in my closing write-ups about why they got certain grades. Just normal teaching attentiveness. As a closing section and a middle finger to one of my teachers in my post-grad program, I worked in the rhetoric of poetry as a method of applying the lessons of regular writing to flashier varieties.

I argued in one of the books that I created for a class that breaking apart complicated writing was important for students because poetics are often used to strengthen an argument. Maybe it was a bit petty, based on the fact I got marked off for having chapters dealing with poetry in a rhetoric book proposal, but I often found that the students really enjoyed those 'digressions', especially when I broadened poetry to include musical stylings.

We got through the vast majority of the material and then some as I started to sweat in the main room from the advancing afternoon. Re-positioning as many fans as possible helped a little bit but far less than I would’ve preferred. As well, I felt a vague sense of humidity which did little to muffle the heat. It wasn’t till we were almost at the end of class that a distant rumble of thunder rippled against the windows and started rattling the air around me. None of it was in sync with the students as they all experienced a sense of thunder several minutes later or not at all. The problem was the next couple of rounds led to a faint brownout that dimmed the lights and rattled many fans around me. Fortunately, the Wi-Fi stuck around.

Of course, the last few minutes of the session devolved into excitement about the noises nature was making. I did my honest best to hold things together with a last thought connecting the power and influence of nature in a poetic rhetorical sense but my energy for the day was fading. Only a few students lingered after time to privately pose me a few questions on some points where they were unclear. This included Susanna, who thanked me for my time but didn’t allude to any differences in her life or perceptions.

Soon after this, I shut my laptop down out of caution and returned to my phone and the cool darkness of my bedroom with the dense, palpable clouds rolling over the afternoon. I had zero messages with strutting_iguana. None of my posts and images had been deleted or blocked. In fact, one of them had 10 points while another had 27 and then the last one had 12. Those were fair numbers for first postings, but no one had chimed in with words one way or the other. God, it hurt.

The soul-crushing horror of presenting something creative online, just to receive a void of silence from everyone or some token statement, had long-ago been etched into me like a hardening of my skin, soul, and heart. It still hurt, but I’d come to expect it.

To put forth a face that still barely felt like mine but which I had some hope to share with others, was a fresh, raw space like something painful wrapped around delicate skin. It didn’t matter to me, it shouldn’t have mattered to me. That’s what I told myself, yet I still felt like crying over the implication of apathy.

If I had an even prettier face. If I had nicer nails. Absolutely, if I had a full, noticeable chest to express some cleavage. If I took the photo a little bit better with a nicer setting, better lighting, or a superior locale. It was the same trap I sprung every time I put myself out there, one way or another.

It didn’t matter. Yet, I was still hoping I might get something. The dense, nearly-dripping air around me provided a nice distraction. It wasn’t like an old family trip to Missouri where the air just about smothered me when I was outside. Nowhere out here could get anywhere close to that level of humidity. It was refreshing though. A storm to wash the worst of the summer away and make sure that dad‘s cleaning job outside had a proper rinse to go with the scrub.

Finding a spot on the small porch, I could feel the closeness of the clouds. The heat still smoldered despite the change in the weather. Sizzling droplets flicked over the pavement and danced through the leaves above. Not enough to even dampen the ground. Eventually, the wetness remained even though it didn’t seem long for this world.

As the storm settled into a menace that blasted the grounds with inconsistent waves of droplets while flashing lightning in the distance, I decided to get ready to head out. It was an utterly terrifying prospect. How would the average person see me? Again, it didn’t matter in the least and, at the same time, it preoccupied the nervous twisting and turning of my excited nerves.