A First First

I had my first tutee on Tuesday! I celebrated, as advised, but with a peanut butter milkshake and, as I sipped, I thought about the flutter of the butterflies in my stomach in the first few minutes of the session. It made me think of trickster (and I am deliberately not capitalizing the term) and of the openness of those few first moments before perceptions begin to solidify into recognitions. All seemed so open to possibilities. And then, I started reading, and trying to make sense of a text as rapidly as possible, and worrying a bit about the time, about whether it was going to be well spent and how much of it there was, and ... You get the idea. I would like to be at the point at which my internal time measuring device is capable of indicating how far into a session I am, which will probably happen at some point. I would like to be "there" because I would like to keep that fluttering openness, that being on the verge of something, sort of suspended between all of my (self?) (knowledge?) (expertise?) and the unknown (for lack of a more precise term), a non-space of unactivated assumptions. All of this is to say that I enjoyed this first encounter very much, that it contextualized trickster, that it incited a desire for experimentation. Of course, I suspect that the student's level of writing command, which was rather high, contributed in one way or another. But even that, at some point, I think and hope to be right, might not be of consequence. Either way, I thought I should share this first moment with you, a moment the intensity of which continues to reverberate, as you can see, two days later.