Four-and-a-half-hour staff meetings?

No, not "Four half-hour staff meetings." If that were the case, I probably wouldn't be lying on my couch right now, slightly comatose, eating chocolate and biscuits, and feeling that my usual slightly witty writing will not emerge.  But it really was a four-and-a-half-hour meeting. Today, that was my entire afternoon at work, with afternoon classes canceled so the faculty could sit in a classroom on a hot day for over four hours.

Although there was the obvious difficulty of staying awake in a small, hot room with no ventilation for that long, listening for the most part to the Chair of the Meeting the entire time, there were some moments of amusement (even besides my doodling penguin-parrot hybrids on a copy of the agenda).  For one, the dulled, glassy-eyed looks of some of my colleagues after the two-hour mark were pretty priceless. Then, around the four-hour mark, there were looks of exasperation when yet another colleague brought up yet another new point which was inevitably to be misunderstood yet again by the Chair who would then talk for fifteen minutes about something irrelevant, with one of his 'jokes' added to the end of his misguided explanation. 

I can't claim that I didn't drift off several times throughout the meeting, day-dreaming about lying on the beach in Costa Rica or hiking surrounded by colorful fall foliage in Connecticut or simply just thinking about how great it would be if I were standing outside the room where the meeting was held. Then I could have run away. And gotten lunch.

At one point during the meeting, around 3 p.m., lunch was brought in for us. Rice with chicken or beef in individual Tupperware containers was passed out to each staff member. Because I don't eat meat and there was no other option, I declined. About ten minutes after everyone started eating (the meeting continued throughout lunch), the Chair was struck by this astute observation:

Chair: (Looking directly at me, he interrupts what he's been talking about and says): I see some people aren't eating.

Me: (completely deadpan and monotone) I don't eat meat.

Chair: But there's chicken!

Me: (same tone and look...I mean, do I have to emote after three hours in a boring meeting?) I don't eat meat.

Chair: But there's chicken.

Me: Chicken is meat.

Chair: Ohhhhh.......

This exchange was exceptionally funny to me because: 

1) He knows I'm a vegetarian and has even had me to his house for dinner where careful arrangements were made about what to prepare for me. 

2) He was so emphatic about the chicken, as if it were the quintessence of vegetarian eating. CHICKEN. How can you not eat chicken?! It's chicken! (Yup, no matter how much you emphasize the word, it's still meat.)

3) He practically sang his "Ohhhh," as if it went up a mountain and back down again, like one of the tones in Chinese. Low-high-low. It was an epiphanic sound, as if he were a five-year-old witnessing a wondrous natural phenomenon, like seeing, for the first time, a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis.

In that magical teaching moment, I could have explained about other meats that might be slightly confusing (Spam, lovely Spam, wonderful Spam), but I'd been sitting on a hard school bench for three hours already, vaguely paying attention. And that was taking a lot of work. So I let the teaching moment pass and got back to my very important doodles.