A Rock To Tie A String Around

Sometime I think I might living the beginning of the disaster movie.  Maybe it’s a sign that I watch too much television, although in truth, I haven’t had the time in the last year to watch much of anything except Hell’s Kitchen and Top Chef.  But no matter the cause, I sometimes step outside my house and see the world the way it would look if it were in the first fifteen minutes of the disaster movie.

For example:

Today, husband, baby and I started down the street to the park and two Apache helicopters passed overhead so close that the trees moved. At that exact same moment a pack of crows – I believe it’s a murder of crows if you want to be exact – landed on top of the house and began yelling at a squirrel.  Then, our neighbor, known only to me as Dionysus (his Halloween costume this last October – I never asked his name and now we’re in that awkward place where we both should know each other’s names but I’m embarrassed to ask) but Dionysus stepped outside onto the steps and stood rather epically on his porch while commenting:

“Odd behavior isn’t it?  Strange weather we’re having too….”

This seemingly unconnected series of events was enough to make me cut to the next scene in the disaster movie  – secret underground military bunker where the secret war disaster commander is screaming, “What do you mean it was released!  My god man, do you realize what this means?”

You can see where I’m going with this.  I’m not sure what happens next in the imaginary disaster movie in my mind but I bet the ominous and vaguely aggressive military vehicles would start flooding our little neighborhood and men in contamination suits would start knocking on doors.

It’s not that I want these things to happen, on the contrary.  I’ve seen enough of this movie in various forms to realize how bad it would get and how unprepared we are for such an event.  I am not the character that would get away from the military police and hide out in the woods while secretly forming a militia to take back the free world.  I’m the one who’d be thrown in the back of the prison truck in the second scene and never heard from again.

The writer part of me says I should play on this paranoia and write these moments of paranoia into a novel.  The other part of me says that that novel has already been written, a couple of times and made into movies, hence the reason why I see it so clearly in my mind – it’s already been done.

I think true inspiration comes from not knowing how the opening scene would play out.  I like the idea of being surprised by my characters.  I wasn’t surprised today.  For one thing – I live by the airport, hence the helicopters are hardly a surprise – even Apache helicopters.  It is Memorial Day after all.  The crows are always yelling at squirrels, that’s nothing new, and Dionysus always sounds more epic than I bet he intends, probably because I call him Dionysus.  If I knew his real name I would be less impressed.  Dionysus stepping outside his house and staring ominously into the sky sounds way better than neighbor Phil stepping outside and looking up.

Oh well.

My seniors are going to graduate in five short weeks.  Now is the time when desperation kicks in, the adrenaline starts pumping and the unfocused rage/fear starts spreading across campus like one of those zombie viruses from a George Romero movie.  It’s true.  It kicks in for a variety of reasons – most commonly the kid has screwed up one of their last senior classes and now is facing the fact that they might not graduate.  Another culprit is often the paralyzing fear that they will be verifiable adults in five weeks and in a vain attempt to Peter Pan themselves back to ninth grade, they do everything possible to delay their exit from high school.

It’s been a long day.

I was told today by one of my panicking seniors that the reason that he’s failing is not because he hasn’t turned in two major assignments or because he hasn’t read the book.  He’s failing because I used to be ‘cool’ and now I am not.  According to my student, when I had my baby, I ceased to be cool and am now a raging bitch bent on destroying young lives.   The funny part about this accusation is that he’s not the only one using it.  A couple of students have told their counselor this line.  The best part is that none of these students actually knew me before I had my son, so they in effect have absolutely nothing to compare.

I would’ve forgotten about this by now except that I’ve heard this same accusation from other parties over that last fifteen months.  Most notably, my husband’s aunt – who in an entirely unrelated incident sparked a near WWIII amongst the family when she proceeded to tell me my house was filthy and I needed to hire a maid.  When I told her she was being rude, she said I was oversensitive and had been ever since the baby.

It’s made me think though…have I changed?  I think, yes.  I have changed.   I think it’s impossible to go through the process of having and raising a child and stay the same.  I think it would be dangerous if I was the same person I was before my son was in my life.

For one, I expect more out of people.  My standards have gone way up.  Maybe it’s a patience issue or a heightened appreciation of time that’s sparked a fierce defense mechanism when I sense someone’s wasting mine.  But I think it goes beyond that.  I will accept that people will be rude to me, even treat me badly on occasion, but the thought that my son would have to suffer such inequities makes me crazy.  So yeah, I call people out on their rudeness, I tell my students to stop their jackassery, because if I don’t they will carry it out into the world, and it will eventually reach my baby.

I can’t help but look at my students and see them the way their parents must.  When I look at my seniors I see the hopes of their families.  Many of my students are the first in their families to graduate from high school or to think about college.  I see my son in all their faces and so yeah, when they start messing up and jeopardizing their graduation, I get mad.   I didn’t used to get mad.  I didn’t used to care.  I went home, and the husband I went to happy hour at the bar in the marina.  I can’t do that anymore.  I can’t pretend that it doesn’t matter.

So sorry kids.  I am a different person.  I’m proud of it too.  So suck it and do your flippin’ homework.

If you follow Los Angeles news you’ve probably heard of the mess our district is in with layoffs and budget deficits.  You’ve read how the district gave preliminary layoff notices to thousands of teachers and threatened to up our class sizes to record numbers.  We were going to strike on Friday, but due to a whole lot of legal wizardry that I have failed to fully comprehend, the strike is cancelled.
In times such as these there are a whole lot of teachers bemoaning their fates and complaining about their jobs.  I’m not really knocking them, I have my days when I wonder what I was thinking when I went back to school, but today isn’t really one of them.  In the midst of all this craziness, I found myself mentally listing all the reasons that teaching really is a sweet job.
I have cause to compare too, I have held a variety of crappy jobs all with varying degrees of suckage.  I’ve waited every possible type of table, I’ve worked pretty much every job, save the kitchen, that you can work in a hotel, I’ve worked in factories, I’ve worked in offices.  I’ve found reasons to gripe about all of them.  But in a general kind of way, I have to really look for reasons to gripe about my current employment.
Here are a few reasons why:
1.    No other job on the planet gives you four months of paid vacation.  I know, I know, teachers say it’s not really ‘vacation’ because they spend the whole time planning for the next school year.  Bullshit.  Maybe those teachers exist, but I certainly haven’t met them.  Personally, I take my son to the park, watch a lot of television, write, work on my vegetable garden….pretty much it’s like a long, four-month weekend.

2.    I’m master of my own domain.  I rule my classroom and rarely do I ever have anyone breathing down my neck and making sure everything is being done just so.  I make the rules within the confines of my room and everyone must listen to me.  There is a brilliant teacher at my school who told me once that the power-trippyness of teaching breeds antisocial behavior such as hoarding and irrationality.  I agree.

3.    Conference Periods.  Need I say more?  Out in the real world I never had an hour and a half where I didn’t have any set responsibilities other than to plan for my day and get caught up on paperwork.  I can even leave during my conference period if I feel like it.  Try doing that at your office job.  I dare you, get up, go sit in the local coffee shop for an hour and then saunter back to your office and see your boss responds.  Mine doesn’t care, that’s why this is a sweet job.

4.    Movie Days.  In December I got hit with the worse bout of flu I’ve ever had.  I stayed home for a few days and when I could form coherent sentences again I came back to school.  But, I admit that I put in a movie that vaguely related to the material the kids were reading and sat at my desk and watched them watch the movie.  Now, I don’t do this often.  In fact, it takes a bout of flu to really make me resort to movies, but my point is this:  I have the option of basically not working and popping in a video instead.  Try this next time you have to give a big presentation at your office job.  Walk in, pop in a copy of Dead Poets Society, turn out the lights and record the look on your boss’ face.

5.    Last but not least – substitutes.  There is basically an army of replacements that are trained and ready to do my job for me in the event that I cannot perform my duties on any given day.  I don’t have to scramble to call my co-workers to see if someone can take my shift at the last minute, I don’t necessarily have to come back to cyclone of work that’s built up on my desk as a result of my absence.  No.  I call a substitute and in theory they are me for a day.  Now, you get varying results – I’ve had subs fall asleep and let the kids tear the room apart, I’ve had volatile, crazy subs who yelled and threw things at my kids.  But for the most part, they’re just fine.

On the downside in regard to teaching, I think it’s particularly vile that the young, bottom of the salary scale teachers get whacked first when layoffs happen.  In every other industry it’s the old, expensive, non-productive employees who get laid off first.  Not in teaching though, there are some seriously bad teachers at my school who have been making an active effort to not teach for the last twenty years.  The really screwed up part is that they are protected by the union to such a degree they would have to burn down the school before they got fired.

Maybe the real problem is that  we need to rethink this strategy, maybe a little bit of the corporate world should leak into education and hopefully up the logic level of operations.  I can’t imagine there would be much talk of a strike if the district was laying off the teachers who show movies every day of the week, or the ones who sleep through class while their kids run wild.

Maybe I’ll feel differently when I’ve been here longer, but I hope I don’t.

Mia Farrow has officially stopped her fast today after twelve long days. Mia is protesting the genocide in Darfur, and while she held out for twelve days, her doctor has officially ended her fast. The good news is that Richard Branson has taken it over for her for at least the next three days. So relax friends, a rose blooms in Darfur after all.

I’m just saying, I admire dedication to a cause, I admire the resilience it must take to fast for that long. But, I’m skeptical that anyone cares. I can’t see genocidal troops in Darfur stopping in their tracks, putting down their weapons and saying “Hey guys, do you realize that Mia Farrow isn’t eating?”

Likewise, I can’t see that at the next UN meeting, the president of any influential country standing up and saying “Uh guys, we really need to do something about this Darfur thing, Mia Farrow isn’t eating.”

And Furthermore, I have trouble believing that even every day citizens halted what they were doing or even as so much interrupted their routines and said to themselves “Jeeze, I wish I could help Darfur, Mia Farrow isn’t eating.”
I realize that the point is at least partially to raise awareness. I would argue, however, that generally we’re all pretty much aware of the hell on Earth that Darfur has become. In fact I thought about including it on my list of potential vacation spots that are worse than Wyoming.

So eat up Mia, you deserve it. I hope someone was listening.

I’m feeling particularly at peace with the universe today.  Too often, perhaps, I use this blog as a means to vent unfortunate experiences.  Today, however, we have reason to celebrate.  Why you might ask?  Well for one thing, I received the following comment on my blog ‘5 Reasons to Celebrate Bravo’.  I know, some of you naysayers are going to tell me it’s nothing but a big slimy ball of spam.  I like to think of it as existential poetry.  Enjoy:

Trsiel pointed nifedipine almost ready they will cefzil ogre ancestry threw fire valtrex his sort wind and wellbutrin could hope always return nicotrol olph has around this sibutramine which neither trees arch diovan with just fulfill their hydrocodone hen that was already fulvicin exactly coincidenc hardly assume nicotine massive ogre skeletons had methylprednisolone not actually strange for alendronate searching for skull turned Nasacort.

I have only included a small portion of the genius that landed in my inbox.  I felt the words were too powerful to actually approved the entire comment, therefore you will not see it attached to the actual blog.  Who is Trsiel?  And who would dare question his ogre ancestry?  I don’t blame him one bit for throwing his fire valtrex, and even Psychic Sylvia Browne couldn’t have predicted that the nicotrol olph would return.  Riveting stuff really.

Too often I think we don’t properly acknowledge the quiet genius that is behind these apparently nonsensical emails.  And yes, I know the intent, I know the real reason is to include as many key words as humanly possible.  I submit that this is not a new exercise, rather one in keeping with all the great literature writers.  For example:

“His excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849, and in the salute of Almidano Artifoni’s sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door.”

Spam or Literature?  Before you answer – here’s another one:

“Three crates of Private Eye Lettuce, the name and drawing of a detective with magnifying glass on the sides of the crates of lettuce, form a great cross in man’s imagination and his desire to name the objects of this world.  I think I’ll call this place Golgotha and have some salad for dinner”

Think you know the answer?  I’ll end the suspense – the answer is Literature. The first comes from the great James Joyce’s Ulysses; the second from one of my favorite writer’s the devastatingly poetic Richard Brautigan.  Is Trsiel’s story really so different?  Is it right that we overlook some poetry as spam and celebrate some as art?  From now on, I intend to lend more appreciation to my inbox, and treat my spam with the proper respect – I’ll just make sure not to click on the links…..