Oh, Mist.

This entry is dedicated to the teacher with the yellow bow tie, who was a picture of responsible adulthood, and Sven, who got mugged in Mexico.

I spent yesterday evening at the Cair Paravel Latin School Junior Varsity Scholars' Bowl Invitational Tournament with a group of brilliant and excitable teenagers who mostly were there for the free cookies. We careened around the tiny building from room to room, each classroom slightly more absurd and endearing than the last. From the medieval theme wall paper borders in the classrooms, to the plastic candelabras in the hallway, it was either everything that a Narnia-themed school should be... or everything that a Narnia-themed school should not be.

We ended up tying for 3rd place, but since we had beat the other team 110 to 20 in a breathtaking 6th round, I drove home with a van full of happy kids and a shiny red plastic trophy. On my way to gas up the van before returning the keys, I noticed a Dillons grocery store Grand Opening (where I didn't recall there having even been a building the night before!), and decided to join the throng of people experiencing the blessed event. How exciting, all the same products, made anew by the clever rearrangement on new shelves and the strategic placement of signs and lighting!

I made a beeline for the merchandise I had come for--a pack of Orbit Mist gum. Today I taught my students a list of culturally appropriate responses to anecdotes. This included the phrase "So ein Mist!" This is German for "That sucks!" but literally means "That is crap." Hence why I needed a pack of Mist gum as a prize for our "So Ein Mist Award." The students voted for who could tell the most embarrassing or most painful anecdote about something that happened to him or her. The student who won had been mugged while on a youth group service trip in Mexico. A close runner up was the story from the kid who broke his foot skateboarding, then broke his other foot soon after, while trying to skateboard home on crutches. So ein Mist.

I reached the gum aisle in record time. My self congratulations ended quickly as I scanned at least 50 different varieties of gum sporting all varieties of cool names and fruitamintalicious flavors, all except for the one I was looking for. I had a flashback to the scene in the movie Goodbye Lenin when the main character enters his corner grocery store for the first time after the fall of the Berlin Wall and stares blankly at the newly-Westernized shelves, containing a world-wide selection of pickle varieties, all except for the local East German product, Spreewalder Gurken. It was "ein buntes Warenparadies"--A colorful consumer paradise!

Finally I spotted the Mist. It was hiding behind a hot pink product called a Fuzzy Wuzzy hanging off of the shelf above. I didn't stop to investigate what a Fuzzy Wuzzy was doing in the gum aisle.

Ultimately, though, I did allow myself to be swallowed into this glorious land of endless product choice. Feeling guilty about putting a three-dollar charge on my credit card, I wandered the store until I came up with a decent handful of things, and finally emerged into the cold wet mist outside a half-hour later.

My car was not hard to spot for once, as I was still driving the giant white van with USD 501 on the side. I trudged towards my "car," meanwhile reminding myself to return the school's gas station credit card first thing in the morning (or risk the friendly wrath of Debbie, Topeka West Bookkeeper Extraordinaire).

And I reminded myself not to leave the scholars' bowl buzzer system in the van when I checked it in. The last time that happened, I realized it at 5 am, jumping out of bed with an "oh shit!" and speeding to the van service center on the other side of Topeka so I could retrieve the buzzers before our 7 am Scholars' Bowl practice. The expletive was well deserved for that trouble, but I had immediately afterwards resigned myself to the fact that that was just the way things were; It was my error that forced me to wake up a half-hour earlier, and it was my initiative that would solve the problem.

As I walked from Dillons to the van, my arms full of toilet paper, canned soup, and Mist gum, going over a mental litany of do-not-forgets, I realized that at some point in the last few months... I became some version of what people might refer to as a Responsible Adult.

For anyone who knows me fairly well, this may not seem to be a particularly surprising transformation. After all, I was an exemplary Responsible Teenager; and I was wonderful at being a Responsible College student, or at least keeping up with a long list of responsibilities in spite of certain irresponsibilities on the side.

The difference in the switch to being a Responsible Adult is that you may do many of the same things as Responsible Not-Adults, or likely even more of the same things, but people stop being quite so impressed and appreciative of your responsibility. You're not particularly outstanding in the world of Responsible Adultss, and anyway, all of the other Responsible Adults are so busy being responsible for so many things, that they do not necessarily have reason to know or to care whether you are doing your responsibility or not.

I don't feel negative about it. There's a little bit of excitement involved. There's a little bit of "ha, I'm meeting up to a challenge" involved.

Maybe, in the end, there is a little bit of pride involved, the pride of a martyr, when I roll into the dark parking lot, see the children safely to their parents' cars, unload and clean out the van, and finally leave, unnoticed, in one of the last cars left at the school...