Reassurance

The layoffs at the Tulsa World had me pretty down last night. Of course I was sad for all the people — some of them friends of mine — who had been laid off, but I was also reliving the pain of having my staff torn apart and flung to the four winds last year, and I really needed the message one of my students delivered this morning with a pair of innocent questions.

As she was turning in a paper this morning, one of my girls asked: “Ms. Priddy, have you ever seen Pulp Fiction?”

Have I seen Pulp Fiction? The Southside/Westside staff could carry on entire conversations using nothing but lines from Pulp Fiction.

As we discussed this fact, she asked a second question: “Have you ever seen the GI Joe cartoons on YouTube with the new voices dubbed in?”

The only thing my crew at the office loved more than Pulp Fiction was the off-color but hysterically funny “pork chop sandwiches” video on YouTube.

I cannot begin to calculate the statistical odds of a sophomore making reference to Pulp Fiction and the Fensterfilms series in the same conversation, on the very day I most needed reassurance that my friends from the World would be OK, but I can only conclude that my student’s seemingly random questions were the Father’s way of reminding me that in the end, a job is really nothing more than an expression of spiritual qualities, and no one can separate us from Spirit.

Emily