“Professor Raskowitz, have you been listening to anything I’ve been saying?”
The academic sighed. “Sorry Zaya. Just got distracted by a news item on my laptop’s feed.”
“An’ you just had to read it?” She snapped.
“Well, yes,” he replied. “I’m going up for tenure this year.”
“Every prof at Peach State College is worried about it these days,” Zaya stated. “I hear things when I work in the caf, you know.”
“Well, it’s a big deal to me,” the professor lectured her. “And you need a really big file…and, well, you just wouldn’t understand.”
“Because I gotta kid an’ hafta work my way through college on one income?” she shot back, eyes blazing. “I made an A- on your Constitutional Law class, you know. I could probably understand you.”
He looked across his desk at her, sitting there, tapping her bargain-basement heels so firmly he could hear it even with the rug. He had so many students in his classes that he couldn’t keep tabs on all of them.
“So Zaya, to get tenure, you have to publish a lot. You need good teaching evaluations. And you have to sit on a lot of committees, present at a number of conferences, and you have to keep current.”
Her right eyebrow shot up. “What’s keep current mean?”
The professor gestured toward his laptop. “You have to follow what’s new in Washington DC, as well as in government here in Georgia. You have to keep up on current events, like Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the ex-Filipino President going before the International Criminal Court. That’s what keeping current usually means.”
Zaya fixed him with an icy stare. “If you want to ‘keep current,’ I’ll give ya current. Landlord raised my rent, and daycare prices went up twenty-five percent. I have to pull a double-shift, picking up night hours in the campus grill, and snag soup cans for me and Jalen out of the ‘little free pantry’ in downtown Alexandria. That’s what I was tryin’ to tell you about, why ah need an extension on my research paper, while you were keepin’ current on the Philippines.”
Raskowitz leaned back in his chair, reddening. “I…didn’t know….”
But Zaya was now standing across the desk from him. “Speakin’ of current, did you know that Patty has got Type II Diabetes, and can barely afford her insulin shots? Rafe—the guy on crutches…he’s worried that his ACL tear will keep him off the basketball court, and he’ll lose his NIL deal. An’ Tommy Esposito—didja know his daddy’s a union guy, who’s on strike at the mill here in town? He’s having to work at the laundromat overnight just to help his family make ends meet. Is that current enough for yah?”
The professor’s mouth dropped open. He looked back at his laptop at a newsflash about a coup in Ecuador. He slammed down the laptop and said “Okay, Zaya. I’m ready to be current now.”
INSTANT NOODLES 