The view from the top

I don't know how to say this without sounding ridiculous or conceited or both, so I guess I'll just say it anyway. I was really surprised this week to find out that I have groupies. The occasion was the second incarnation of my watching TV online workshop, which 7 people attended. This is fewer than the 10 people that attended the first time, but still pretty good because our attendance has been very low this quarter, probably because the weather outside has been so beautiful. Would you rather spend your noon hour snogging on College Green or learning how to research newspaper articles?

At any rate, the 7 people who attended fell into two categories: people who work in the library, and those same girls who always come to my workshops. And so it dawned on me that the latter have become my, well, groupies. But I certainly don't know why. Why would you want to follow me around when you could have someone really cool like Chris or Char? The very idea of it baffles me.

Of course, I've been a groupie for several different professors during the course of my life, and I know that it's always been difficult to explain exactly what it was about them that I wanted. I know that some of the professors I've adored have been despised by the majority of students, and I also know that some professors I couldn't stand at all had their own contingent of groupies waiting in the wings. So obviously the quality we're talking about here is very subjective.

How to put this next part delicately, without sounding as conceited as Miss Piggy? If it were a bunch of young men who wanted to follow me around and hang on my every word, I guess I wouldn't be as surprised. I've always been good at getting the attention of the male sex, just not very good at keeping it in the long-term. But, as my ex-husband put it very brashly, "Other women don't like you, and you don't like them." And although I don't think he was absolutely correct, there was a grain of truth there. I tend to see other women my age as possible rivals, I guess. So to think that there's a group of young girls out there who want to be me, well, that's kind of confusing.

So now that I have groupies, what do I do with them? It was interesting to note that none of them showed the slightest interest in talking to me before or after class, so my initial idea of taking them under my wing and making them my friends isn't going to work. I guess I can start giving a series of increasingly esoteric workshops and see how far they're willing to take this thing!