Still recounting the events of July 31, 2006, when I met my extremely intriguing philosophy teacher (who, from this point onward, will be given a pseudonym to protect his privacy).
After philosophy class, I had two hours of free time before my Digital Composite lecture. I had lunch and decided to troll around the school computer labs.
By this time, I was insatiably curious to find out where my teacher was from, since I still couldn't figure out his accent. I knew his name, so I typed it into a Google search to see what I could glean from the results. Naturally, I wasn't expecting any articles or websites that were about him, specifically-- I just wanted to find out which country had people who shared his last name. For example, if you do a search for the name "Schtauffen", you may come across a lot of German sites because it's a German name.
I wound up getting a lot of search results that featured a college in Romania. When I clicked on them, I found out that a man with the exact same first and last name as my teacher was an assistant philosophy professor at this college. Further exploration revealed that this man was a well-respected member of the Romanian academic community, and that he'd had several of his articles published in magazines, newsletters and journals.
My curiosity was further piqued. Since there were no pictures, I didn't know whether this guy mentioned on the websites was the same eerily charismatic teacher I'd met that morning. I dug around some more.
Several search results later, I had my answer: Yes, he was. The contact details for the Romanian professor who had written the articles, and the contact details for my teacher, were the same.
I rubbed my chin in thought. This discovery was quite daunting. However, it gave me some insight into why my friends and I felt uneasy around him. Judging by his extensive academic background, I drew the conclusion that he exuded an aura of confidence and intellectual passion that we, as students, couldn't relate to or fully understand.
Still, there was that creepy, tooth-bearing smile, and that intense, almost scorching gaze. I chuckled to myself. He was from Romania, so from that moment on, I'd nickname him Vamp (after the knife-wielding Romanian character from the video game Metal Gear Solid 2). Or Dracula.
In the days and weeks that followed, I referred to my teacher as Vamp or Dracula among my friends, and it became an inside joke among us. The philosophy classroom was dubbed "Dracula's Castle", and I made little cartoon drawings of my teacher with a vampire's cape and fangs. It was extremely childish, but it reduced my uneasiness a bit and gave us all something to smile about whenever we made our way to his class.
These days, I still joke about him being a vampire-- not sneakily aside, to my classmates, but directly to his face. We laugh together, he and I. It's our inside joke now, a funny little thing that we share.
How did it get that way? What changed? What made me go from being a meek, frightened student to being his friend and lap-dog?
Well, that's another story.
-end of part 2-
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