Category Archive

Before you close this page and vow never to darken the doors of my Small Corner again, rest assured that my prejudices are not related to race, gender, sexuality, or religion. Well, I’m not really fond of the Baptists, but that’s a generalization I’m working through. No, my prejudices have nothing to do with skin color or lifestyle–unless you are, say, a gay Asian Catholic who happens to be OBNOXIOUS. Yep, that’s right, I don’t like obnoxious people. There, I said it. Do you still love me? Can we hug?

Seriously. I suppose I have always known this about myself, but in my insular little world, where I get to choose (for the most part) the people I encounter, I don’t often have to deal with it. I shop at the same grocery store every week, eat at the same handful of restaurants, buy coffee from the same Starbucks. Sure, there are obnoxious people at those places, but I have learned their patterns, because they, like me, are creatures of habit. That woman in the white Lexus SUV is always going to cut into the Starbucks drive-through line without going around like everyone else, and that surly teenage girl at the supermarket is never going to be happy when she sees me coming through the U-Scan line with all of my reusable shopping bags. There are even obnoxious people at work, and I know how to minimize my face time with them. I should note that kids don’t count because they are pre-programmed to be obnoxious, particularly teenagers, and while it’s annoying, I try not to hold it against them. It’s the Obnoxiuos Adult that bothers me, the individual who ought to know better, and probably does, but still chooses to wave his (or her) Ass Flag high and proud. And there’s no place like a touristy vacation spot to see those flags waving. Consider the following scenarios:

Scenario 1: The Restaurant

Last Wednesday while at the beach we had dinner at That Restaurant Owned by the Cool Dude Who Sings the Anthem to a Particular Tequila-based Beverage. We were on the patio where there was great live music and a nice breeze coming in off the fake lake surrounding the place. It was a great. Everyone was having fun–the waitstaff, the people standing in line to get in, even Mia, who was flirting with the waiter and shaking her little booty to the music. She even loved that every 30 minutes the lights would dim, and Jim Cantore from the Weather Channel would appear on the big screen TVs to announce a ”Hurricane Party Warning.” Inside the restaurant (which we could see through a huge picture window) an enourmous fake hurricane funnel would start spinning, complete with lightning and thunder, and a giant bottle of tequila would emerge from the center of it and appear to pour tequila into a giant shot glass. Then Cool Dude Restaurant Owner would sing his tequila drink anthem on the big screens and the entire place would clap and sing along. The first few times it was a blast. Then the Obnoxious People came.

Apparently, unbeknowst to the rest of the restaurant’s patrons, there was a So You Think You Can Whistle contest going on at the Obnoxious People’s table. At completely random intervals and for no apparent reason, one of the Obnoxious People would whistle. By whistle I mean he would insert his index fingers into his mouth and let out an ear-piercing scream of a sound that made people jump, and that is saying a lot considering how loud this place was. And just when everyone had recovered from the last whistle, he, or one of his Obnoxious Friends, would do it again. And every time one of them whistled, Mia would have a total meltdown–a pitiful, startled, shaking, fingers-gripping-my-shirt meltdown. I would have her calm and ready to go back into her high chair when the next whistle was dispatched, and with each whistle she calmed less and less, so that by the time my food came she was a wreck and I had to put my meal in a styrofoam box and go sit with her on a bench outside the restaurant.

Scenario 2: The Pool

You know in cartoons when they play ominous dramatic music to indicate that something bad is about to happen, and then you see what appears to be an enormous menacing figure in shadow wielding what looks like the world’s longest Samurai sword, but then the angle changes and it’s just a cricket in front of a light with a blade of grass in its mouth? Last Wednedsay afternoon at the pool the scene was the exact opposite of that. There was cool music playing on the pool sound system, and I was floating dreamily along in the lazy river with Mia stretched out in front of me. The sun wasn’t too hot, and the breeze wasn’t too cool. And then some people came into the pool area–three or four kids and three grown women who had obviously come in off the beach and were looking to settle at the pool for a while. Groovy, I thought. And then three things happened: they settled right next to the lazy river, they started talking, and they got IN the lazy river. I watched in horror as the cute little cricket morphed into a murderer of peace.

For starters, they took up the entire pool deck area next to the lazy river, part of which was intended to be a walkway, and if someone needed to get by, well tough shit. They weren’t moving. Not even if you said excuse me, or if you were carrying a squirmy toddler. Once they got settled in they started talking–some of them to each other, and some of them to remote parties via cell phone, and some of them to both at the same time. I don’t tend to be one of those people who gets all irate when someone is having a cell phone conversation in public, but there are cell phone conversations, and then there are CELL PHONE CONVERSATIONS. In this particular scenario it was the latter, and there was lots of crowing and hooting and screeching involved, as well as lots of stopping in the middle to repeat to someone at the pool what the person on the line had just said. But all of that was nothing compared to the lazy river.

At first it was just the kids, and as I said before, kids this age (12-15 or so) are often pre-programmed to be obnoxious. Unless their parents are watching them, and then all pardons are off, because HELLO, if your kid is actually knocking people off of their lazy river floats, you should do something about it. But it was soon clear that this was acceptable behavior, because when the adults got in the lazy river a few minutes later, they acted exactly the same way. Yes, people, I watched grown women knock little children into the wall and into the water of the lazy river. I had gotten out by this time, so I had a prime view of the action: the women made a dramatic point of walking into the lazy river with no floats, then decided to get on the floats in the deeper water where there are no helpful steps to aid in the process. There was a LOT of screaming and splashing, and they completely stopped the flow of traffic, and then, oh good lord in heaven, one of them fell off and GOT HER HAIR WET. I am surprised that no hotel personnel or beach lifeguards came running, because her shouts of, “Oh God, my HAIR! MY HAIR!” were so loud and desperate that she might have been saying, “Oh God, my HEART! MY HEART!” Thankfully, the trauma of WET HAIR IN A SWIMMING POOL was enough to drive them back to their rooms for the remainder of the afternoon.

Scenario 3: The Wrong Room

Their rooms, which were on the same floor as our room. Which is how it came to be that the next morning at 7:45 there was a loud insistent pounding on our door. Guess who! It was one of the ADULT WOMEN, and when the door opened revealing total strangers she said, “Sorry, wrong room,” and then turned around and yelled, without leaving the vicinity of our door, “IT’S NOT THIS ONE! TRY 317!!” So yeah, they were just knocking on doors. At 7:45 in the morning. Hoping to find…I have no idea.

And yes, in case you were wondering, my daughter, who slept through a 45 minute alarm and evacuation, woke up when she heard the pounding on the door.

So maybe I am being unreasonable (and I know I can count on you to tell me if that is the case), but there seems to be a definite lack of consideration for others on our planet, especially among the vacationing (is this because people throw their manners out the window on vacation?). I can admit that encountering bad behavior makes me prickle and fantasize about payback, but I’m not really a vengeful person, and I’m definitely not interested in putting more obnoxious juju out there in the universe. Mostly I want to teach my offspring how to be kind and compassionate, even when she is faced with a singular lack of kindness and compassion, and I don’t think hearing her mother say, “Yeah, bitch, WRONG ROOM” is an appropriate lesson for that objective. So what’s a girl to do? How do you deal? And if you have kids (or are planning to), how do you teach them to wave their peace flag high, even as the wind from the waving of those other flags blows sand in their eyes?

So I have this giant bald place, and it was completely and totally a result of the resort emergency alarm, which apparently was “falsely activated.” Do you know what that means, people? Do you? It means that some punk kid (or obnoxiously immature adult, which I’ll get to another time) pulled the fire alarm lever and ran away. I know this because I work in a high school, and it happens there all the time. Kids think its hee-freakin-larious to interrupt the normal daily activities of several hundred people, which is why I rolled my eyes two years ago when the fire alarm went off during the lunch period while I was teaching a 9th grade English class. Schools don’t have fire drills during lunch, so it had to be a prank. I told my kids we’d be back in within minutes, and we all left our stuff behind without a second thought. Except it was real, and within 24 hours the building was a shell, and all that “stuff” we left inside was either crispy or completely waterlogged from the fire hoses. So you can imagine my panic last Tuesday evening when the alarm sounded. Shaking, I held my frightened daughter and whispered in her ear (”That’s a fire truck,” “Look at the clouds,” “Can you hear the ocean?”) while I nervously watched emergency vehicles surround our hotel.

And then I read this little sign in the elevator the next day: “Please help us. If you see anyone tampering with the fire alarm pulls, please alert the front desk immediately.” Since the little sign didn’t read, “We apologize for the inconvenience, but our alarm system was being tested,” or “We are sorry for the alarm scare–the system malfunctioned but has been repaired,” or even, “Your safety is our biggest concern. A _____ (gas leak, grease fire, terrorist, swarm of killer bees) was reported and evacuation was necessary,” I can only assume resort personnel had nothing to do with the alarm and were simply looking for some unknown culprit to arrest (did you know pulling a fire alarm in jest is a federal offense?). This made me furious–12 year classroom veteran sick of immature little teenage brats furious. I wanted to find the little jerk and go all teacher on his ass.

And then the alarm went off again on Thursday morning.

MORNING.

At 5:45.

In the morning.

While my daughter was sleeping.

While I was sleeping.

No longer was I feeling the anger of a sick-and-tired teacher. Now I was pissed in the way only a mother can be pissed, and as I scooped my sleeping baby up onto my shoulder and covered her head with a blanket and joined the sleepy masses stumbling down the stairs, I glared at anyone who dared make a noise near me or who came remotely close to bumping into my sleeping kid. You see, Mia is a late-to-bed, late-to-wake sleeper, and it doesn’t matter how early I get her up, she is still late-to-bed. The difference is that if she has to wake up early, she wakes a totally different child–a child with a serious anger-management problem and a penchant for hurling objects and screaming. I didn’t want to spend the day with that child. And so I lay down on a dew-covered lawn chair and held her and muttered curses at whoever thought it would be cute to see hundreds of resort patrons milling around in their jammies at 5:45.

I’d love to tell you there is a satisfying ending to this tale–that the resort security guys found the alarm puller and held him/her screaming for mercy over a ravenous shark just beyond the breakers. Or, you know, something equally appropriate. But if anyone was apprehended they never told the rest of us, and that’s probably a good thing, because I can only imagine what I might have done had I come across the little brat. And believe me, I can definitely imagine…

No, the real ending is this (and some of you will roll your eyes and think, “Why did I bother, that’s not a real ending,” and to you I say, “Hey, no one forced you to read this post!”): MY KID SLEPT THROUGH THE ENTIRE THING. Through the screaming kids running around, and the old man who took a piss in the bushes just a few feet away from us, and the alarm sounding continually, and the fire truck sirens, and the sunrise. She never even opened her eyes, and when we went back up to our room and I put her back in bed she curled up and sighed contentedly like she’d been sleeping there the whole time. So now when she wakes up after a 37 minute nap because the cat meowed at the other end of the house, I want to look at her and say, “WTF, kid? You slept through a 45-minute EMERGENCY EVACUATION! GO BACK TO SLEEP!”

Did you ever see that episode of “Friends” where the guys go on a police ride-along with Phoebe’s boyfriend du jour, and Ross gets all “I have a new lease on life” because he thinks someone took a shot at him? And Joey threw himself onto Ross to “shield him from the bullet”? But it was really just a car backfiring? And Joey was just saving his sandwich? And for the next week (or however long 22 minutes is in a sitcom) Ross walked around all starry and dreamy because he truly believed he had been inches from death? Well, last Thursday night I was Ross, but instead of being on a ride-along with a cop, I was glued to the local weather report, and instead of thinking I was being shot at, I thought a tornado was going to rip my house out of the ground. Also, there was no handsome Friend diving on top of me to save his sandwich. I was mostly doing the diving, and there was no sandwich, only a small, sleeping 16 month-old who finally woke up after the worst was over, reached up and touched my face in the dark, and said hi like being curled up next to your mother in the bathtub in the middle of the night was the most normal thing in the world.

I have talked about my fear of tornadoes on this blog, but I have never been as afraid of a tornado as I was last Thursday night. In the past my tornado horror fantasies were pretty scary–I was pulled right out of my house through a gaping hole in the roof, or I was in my car and the funnel cloud lifted me right up into the air a la Dorothy Gale–but I was always fighting, clawing my way to safety. The tornado never got me, because I was all I had to look after, and I’ve always been of the opinion that I can survive anything. But add someone else to the equation, someone smaller or weaker, or smaller AND weaker, and all bets are off.

I was a tree-climbing, no-helmet-wearing bike-riding tomboy as a kid. I hung upside down on the highest monkey bar on the playground and stomped around barefoot in the woods. I played on the railroad tracks behind my childhood house and stood a mere foot or two from the trains as they passed. I never thought twice about any of this until Middle Sister and Little Sister were born. I remember watching them climb and romp and dangle when they were little and I was a seasoned 16, and I constantly saw potential injury. When I was older (you know, like 17) our family went to a local amusement park and I literally broke out in a cold sweat watching Little and Middle stand in line for that stupid pirate ship ride that hangs upside down. Every time I closed my eyes I saw my tiny sisters raining down out of that boat. All that danger was fine for me, because I could take care of myself, but watching them interact with danger was torture for me.

Do you see where I am going with this?

Last Thursday was the scariest moment of motherhood thus far, scarier, even, than that first moment when Dr. T placed Mia in my arms and I came face to face with the magnitude of her existence and all it entailed. Last Thursday there were a few moments when I doubted my ability to protect her, when I saw the potential for danger all around me and was not sure if I could keep her safe. That, my friends, and not the tornado, is now my greatest fear.

It was around 10 p.m. when I tuned into the storm coverage on a local news channel–and that I typed those words without any implication of mockery or sarcasm should give you some idea of how scared I was, because I do not watch local news or weather. At first I was convinced it would fizzle out by the time it got to us, that there would be some lightning and thunder and rain, and I would go to sleep wondering if my mostly deaf dog had even registered the event. There had been tornado warnings all night, but no actual tornados had been spotted, kind of like those blizzards that never reach the ground during winter in the South. I kept telling myself the NWS was just being cautious. The weather guys thought as much. As it turns out, we were all wrong–the storm just got stronger, and the tornados found their way to the ground–three of them. The weather guys were using fancy weather words I’m sure they don’t get to say much, but there was an edge to their delivery, and it made me nervous. It wasn’t the typical ominous tone local weather people use when there might be bad weather. There were no mights, no maybes. This was for real. When they started naming streets less than a mile from my house, streets I drive every single day, and when they urged people on those streets to take cover, I tossed every pillow and cushion and quilt into the windowless hall bathroom, built a nest in the tub, and pulled a soundly sleeping Mia out of her bed. I pulled pillows and blankets all around us and formed a shell over the baby with my own body, and then I held onto her as tightly as I could without waking her. And then I prayed.

I was raised in a family that prayed, a family that believed an all-powerful God heard those prayers. As an adult I don’t talk much about religion, and my spirituality is very personal to me, but I would be holding back if I didn’t tell you that last Thursday night I prayed. I have never prayed so desperately or so sincerely–or so simply–in my life: Please please please please protect us, please keep us safe, please please please. Later I would think of Anne Lamott and her books about faith, and how she wrote once that if you can’t think of what to say to God you could just start with “please” and maybe add a ”thank you.” But at the moment, when that first deafening roar swallowed my house, and then when it returned a second time a few minutes later, I was only aware of two things: the word “please” coming out of my mouth like some primal animal wail, and smell of my sleeping daughter, sweat and soap and skin pressed against my cheek.

Later, when it was all over and she was wide awake and amused as hell to be lying on a bunch of pillows in the tub, I got around to the “thank you” part, which was more like a gigantic sigh of relief than an actual prayer. But the next morning was a different story. No one in my neighborhood lost homes or cars, or, to my knowledge, was even injured–not like those poor souls a few towns over whose homes were literally flattened. My neighbors’ yards were littered with branches and leaves, overturned trash cans and chairs and other yard items. The trees on our cul-de-sac looked like they had been hastily shaved after two rounds with quarter-sized hail. But at my house there was little out of place–a few holes in my hostas from the hail, a small littering of rose petals on the driveway from the wind, and evidence of the heavy rain, but that was it. My plastic Adirondacks hadn’t moved an inch. The big blue exercise ball that Mia likes to push around the yard was exactly where I’d left it. When I walked outside on Friday morning I almost felt ridiculous, like I had panicked for no reason. And then I opened the morning paper.

Pictures of mangled planes and stacks of cars initiated my first round of “thank you thank you thank you” that morning, but it was the story of the mom and her two small children being trapped under the debris that was once their home that really got me. That could have been me, my kid, my house. There were at least three tornados on the ground that night, and two of them were within a mile of my house, maybe closer, and they didn’t even rearrange the stuff in my little yard. You can tell me that storms like this one are unpredictable, that they can level a house and leave the one next door standing, and that I simply escaped a random act of destruction. You can tell me that it was the sheer power of my own will that protected us from harm. You might even tell me that yes, some higher power heard my call for help and shielded us from the storm. Like I said, spirituality is a private matter. But last Friday morning I truly felt like I’d been spared something awful, and every breath I took felt like a prayer–Thank you thank you thank you–and when I stopped outside Mia’s room to listen to her breathe on my way out of the house it was like getting a response from the lips of God himself: you’re welcome you’re welcome you’re welcome.

• I forgot that tonight was “career night” in my library administration class. We were instructed via email to dress professionally, as if we were attending an interview. When I got to class I had a smiley face sticker on my right boob, snot on my left shoulder, and enough cat hair on my black polo shirt to make a kitten. Good thing I already have a job.
• I found out today, due to oblivion, the inability to read, or just plain denial, that the group assignment I’m working on for the aforementioned administration class is due one week earlier than I thought, and that there is ANOTHER assignment, one I didn’t even know about (see previous re: inability to read, etc.), due FOUR. DAYS. BEFORE. GRADUATION. I did not have this assignment on my little Checklist of Sanity, and so it simply did not exist–until a classmate physically showed it to me at the very, very bottom of the syllabus. Still, I kept pointing to my checklist, saying, “But it isn’t on HERE,” and she kept saying, “But it’s here, see,” and I was like, “But look HERE, it’s not HERE on my LIST,” and it went on like that until I crammed the syllabus up her left nostril and ran away. 
• Lately I have spent quite a bit of time in the presence of groups of children whose teachers are trying BY GOD to educate them and learn them how to read stuff in those book things, but mostly it doesn’t go well. Today’s teenagers are accustomed to typing into Google the topic they have been assigned to “research”–for example,The pros and cons of moving large American companies to Latin America–and then writing down, NAY!, copying and pasting into Word, whole chunks of information they have not even read. Never mind that the article, according to its HUGE GIANT BOLD title, is actually about Pros in the American Baseball League who con large moving companies into taking Latin. Or, you know, something else totally unrelated to their topic. My point here is that these children do not know how to read, and until someone figures out a way to Google an actual book, Lord Jesus and Buddha help us all.  I actually witnessed this conversation today during a world history class during which the students were supposed to be researching topics related to terrorism:

Kid: I can’t find anything on my topic.

Teacher: What’s your topic?

Kid: Al Qaeda.

Teacher: I see. What are those things there in your hand?

Kid: I don’t know, books. There’s nothing in them, though. I already looked.

Teacher: What are those books about? See there, on the covers? The titles? What are those books called?

Kid: I’m not sure, Al Somebody. Is he a terrorist?

And recently, during a peer observation of a fairly bright, above average honors 9th grade English class–the kind of class that makes me miss the classroom just a tiny bit–a girl raised her hand after reading William Carlos Williams’s “Danse Russe” and asked, “What’s a kathleen? Is that, like, a name?” Like, I’m totally NOT making any of this up, yo.

• And finally, Feeny specifically requested that I discuss the topic of Mia and tampons, which is listed on my Virtual Sticky Notes. Sorry, E., it’s not as dramatic as it sounds. See, what happens is, when I go into the bathroom for any purpose, Mia follows me and requests “dese, dese, dese,” which is Baby for, “Hand me that object there, Woman, before I fall over and bang my head into the linoleum out of pure boredom!” Sometimes “dese” refers to a makeup brush designated for pretend makeup brushing, and sometimes “dese” refers to a few strands of Mardi Gras beads that live in the bathroom to occupy small bored people, but most of the time “dese” refers to a box of Kot.ex tampons. She likes to take them all out of the box. Then she likes to put them back in. Then she likes to take them all out. Then she likes to put them back in. Then she likes to line them all up on the floor. Then she likes to hand them all to me one at a time. And then she likes to put them all back in the box. And sometimes she likes to put them all in the trash. And that is why “dese” are out in the open all the time, and not just a few days during each month, because I will do whatever it takes to brush my teeth, wash my face, and pee in peace.

*I actually heard both of these phrases in casual, normal conversation today. Ah, the language of the South.

Today I was in line at a Super Mega Grocery Useless Crap store behind an elderly woman in silk pajamas, a housecoat, and bedroom slippers. I am not even kidding. Does this only happen in the South, because I cannot recall ever seeing a granny in her PJs out in public in any other place I’ve visited. I hope I have the nerve, or  maybe the joie-de-vivre, to wear my jammies to the supermarket when I’m 80. Or, if I’m wearing them because I’ve completely lost my mind, that my children will make sure I’m wearing pants under my robe.

It’s been a busy week so far, and it’s only Tuesday, so I’m expecting the trend to continue. I’m hoping to find an hour to do some actual writing and reflecting tomorrow. Meanwhile, thanks a million to whoever it was who commented on the baby’s haircut post. I’ve really missed all that grammar correction I used to do when I was a classroom teacher. You gave me some nice editing practice today at lunch. Good thing you chimed in, too, because I had planned to spend that time weeping over my chipped nail polish. Thank goodness you clued me in–from now on I’ll be sure to worry about life’s more important…shit.

This is how over graduate school I am: on Monday night I spent a considerable amount of time trying to create a stick figure with a big butt. I did it, too, so the night was not a total loss. The key, for those of you now pulling out a pencil and some scrap paper, is to draw your figure facing either the 5- or 7-o’clock direction, and to emphasize the curvature of the upper back leg.

There is more to this (the graduate school bit, not the stick figure bit)–an entire post, in fact, that I pencilled in my notebook after the stick figure victory, plus another hand-written one after that, not to mention the three remaining drafts I have saved in wordpress. The trouble is that I don’t have time for completion. I spent a guilt-filled day at work not working on work-related work, opting instead to pour myself into an assignment that is due in one of my classes on Friday. Seven straight hours I analyzed the demographic statistics of my school. Seven, and I didn’t even finish. So after I put my kid to bed at 10:30, I will continue to analyze demographics, and I will be careful not to mention in the part about school climate that the reason we have behavior problems at my school is a direct result of Satan being a blood relative of 75.4% of our student body.

Meanwhile, I know you are all jealous. “What? Statistical analysis? Lucky bitch!” So here are some statistics for you to pour over:

• 13: the number of months my daughter mysteriously turned last week when I wasn’t looking
• none: the amount of elastic remaining in the underwear I am currently wearing
• 64: the number of times I have reached down the back of my jeans to pull up my underwear
• 6: the number of days it has been since I vacuumed
• -1: the number of hours I will have to vacuum when I get home tomorrow in preparation for my friend Linda’s visit, because she is scheduled to arrive before I even leave work
• 11: the number of weeks that have passed since I last had a haircut
• 2 billion: the number of times in the past 5 days I have considered shaving my head
• 7: the number of times my kid has tried to get my attention in the past 10 minutes that I’ve been sitting at the computer
• 0: the amount of time I’m going to continue thwarting her attempts to play with me

Now with pictures!

It’s New Year’s Eve, and I am finding it hard to type, what with being jacked up on Albuterol and all. I had heard that phrase before–”jacked up on Albuterol“–and I assumed it was some sort of anti-depressant. Turns out it’s an asthma treatment. Huh. And that’s the end of the story of my bangin’ holiday vacation. Considering that I can actually inhale now, it’s actually a happy ending. Oh! Did I mention? I don’t even have asthma! It’s been quite the series of primarily unfortunate events, with a few sunny moments thrown in. The following, for your entertainment on the last day of 2007, is the story from the top.

Wednesday, December 19: While not technically a part of my vacation, I discovered late Wednesday afternoon that the 60 holiday cards I’d ordered from one of the cheaper online photo places (instead of the more expensive place with the prettier cards, oh no! because that order would have been about 80 bucks) were indeed WRONG. As in, “Our wish for 2007…” You know, the year that’s ENDING in a half hour. My mistake. Turns out, I should have held out a few more wishes for 2007, as you will soon discover. Instead I reordered the cards with the correct year, thus bringing my total payment to Cheap Photo Place to–yup–80 bucks. On the bright side, my mom, Little Sister, Mia and I picked up Middle Sister from the airport, so things seemed to be looking up by the end of the night.

Thursday, December 20: This should have been my last day at work before the holidays, but I took the day off to accompany my mother, aunt, and sisters to my five-months-deceased grandmother’s house to collect what belongings her asswipe husband deigned to share with us after all this time. My father was with me, he who has space to store the furniture my grandmother left me, and we left my house right after he fixed my dryer, which had been broken for over two weeks. I was starting in the black, see. We got there and did what we went to do and we left, and that’s really all I want to say about that particular segment of last Thursday for the time being.

My dad left from my grandmother’s with a truckload of stuff, and I flew home as fast as my car would carry me because from my grandmother’s we were all going to Charlotte to have Christmas at my aunt’s new house. Charlotte is a little over an hour from my house, and my plan was to leave home in time to feed Mia dinner by 7:30, which is pretty much her absolute threshold for the evening meal. I left my driveway at 6:00. At 6:15 as I pulled onto the sideroad that would take me to the interstate, I heard a loud ka-thunk-ka-thunk-ka-thunk sound. At first I thought it was the annoying music coming from the car behind me. It wasn’t, of course. It was coming from my car. Specifically, what used to be the right rear tire of my car. 

I’ll skip most of the details. My roadside assistance service arrived 40 minutes later. In the interim I tried to entertain my kid, who was becoming hungrier by the minute and not at all happy about being stationary in a dark car. The tow truck sound scared her. She cried through the whole spare tire experience. I drove to Gayle’s and she fed Mia while I transferred all my crap to her car. My new goal was to be in Charlotte by 9. Having never been to my aunt’s new house, I set her address on the navigator on my phone and hit the road. At 8:45, a mere 19 miles from my destination, traffic came to a dead stop. I could see red taillights for what seemed like infinity. I called my family to tell them I was stuck in traffic, and it was during that conversation that I discovered the following: earlier in the day while we were still hauling stuff from my grandmother’s to my mom’s, my aunt and my sister Little NOTICED THAT MY TIRE WAS FLAT. BUT FORGOT. TO. TELL. ME. People, when I FINALLY discovered the state of my tire, the wall was completely shredded from the tread. I had to get a new one. There was no repairing the damage. I don’t know about you, but I think Aunt and Little owe me a new tire.

I arrived at my aunt’s house at 11. It was raining. My kid, who had been asleep for most of the traffic stall (apparently caused by some sort of explosion earlier in the evening–seriously, a part of the metal guardrail was melted) turned into the Energizer Bunny as soon as we walked in the door and went to sleep at 2:30 in the next morning. The next day was great; we celebrated Mia’s first birthday with the family and left around 4 that afternoon. At home later that night I remember thinking to myself, “This is good. Now I can relax. NOW my vacation can begin.” Stupid, stupid woman.

Saturday, December 22: I had a long list of things to do–unpacking, cleaning, laundry–and did none of them, opting instead to stay in my jammies all day long and play with my kid, who also stayed in her jammies all day long. Which meant that on…

Sunday, Christmas Eve-Eve: …all the things I didn’t do on Saturday had to be done, plus all the other things I’d planned to do on Sunday in the first place. One of those things was having the dog bathed. Suzanna has been living in the garage since September, when she brought fleas into my house (yet another saga from the past few months I won’t get into now), fleas she got from the stray cat I adopted last year and am now trying to relocate. Cat, anyone? Sweet disposition, updated shots, no uterus. But I digress. I unloaded a large amount of money at National Pet Chain Store to have my poor flea-allergic smelly itchy dog bathed, de-fleaed, un-hot-spotted, and settled into a brand new bed. That night she woke me up four times during the night begging to go back to the garage. And the scratching, good lord, the scratching. The stuff I sprayed on the hot spots made me sneeze, or maybe it was the shampoo, and yet, the scratching never stopped. I decided she was just readjusting to the house, gave her some benadryl, and tried (unsuccessfully) to sleep.

Monday, Christmas Eve: The stuff I didn’t get done on Sunday (do you see a pattern here?) was waiting for me on Monday. I was exhausted from the previous night of no sleep. Mom, Middle, and Little were coming for dinner, a dinner I was making and for which I had no ingredients. This would be a great time to sing the praises of the most wonderful child on the planet. Not one time during anything I have described, nor during anything I will describe in the next several paragraphs, did my daughter lose her cool. No crying (well, except for the tire-changing incident), no fussing, no public outbursts. If not for her, in fact, I would probably still be sitting on the side of the road next to my grotesquely flat tire.

I was halfway through dinner preparation when my family arrived with a moving van full of presents, and we had a nice meal–a ratatouille dish much like the one from the cartoon (laugh if you want, but it was amazing) on a bed of couscous with goat cheese and french bread. Little and I stayed up until 3 a.m. watching Harry Potter 5, and everyone, including my daughter, slept until almost 11 Christmas Day.

Tuesday, Christmas Day: It was wonderful–a bright spot in a series of distressingly eventful days. It is best viewed, not described.

Wednesday, Mia’s Birthday: Mia and I went to my mom’s to help her go through all the stuff we took from my grandmother’s house. Did I mention? I don’t want to talk about that yet. We hung out with my mom and were (I’m afraid) more messy than helpful. We got home just in time for bed, and I was welcomed by a puddle of pee next to the front door. By this time the dog was really starting to wear out her welcome. I didn’t sleep well because my throat was scratchy and my nose was a bit runny and I had a bit of a dry cough. The smell of Suzanna–I’m not sure if it was the hot spot spray or the shampoo from Sunday’s bath or just her own weird smell–permeated my room…and my sinuses.

Thursday, December 27: Mia’s 1 year well baby check-up was at 1:15. She got shots and cried pitifully. Gayle came over and we had lunch and went to Target to buy cute little plates and napkins for Mia’s Saturday birthday party, which was being held at my friend and coworker MJ’s new house (because I wanted to invite more than 5 people, see, and my house is TEENY). Late that afternoon my throat felt really scratchy and I couldn’t stop coughing. I said out loud at one point, “I feel like I’m getting sick.” Mia’s eyes were watery and she had a slight runny nose. I decided that Suzanna could not stay in the house any longer because I was convinced that her weird smell was contributing to our allergic demise. I felt horribly guilty about giving Suzanna the boot, but she seemed okay with the arrangement and I had a party to plan. I bought wine and beer, cake supplies, chips and dips, and ingredients for a baked brie and some spinach rolls I found in a magazine. I was pumped. And I felt like shit.

Friday, December 28: We didn’t leave the house. Mia had a fever; I couldn’t breathe through my nose and my cough had deepened. By dark I was wheezing and Mia was a veritable fountain of snot. I decided that if she had a fever the next morning I would cancel or postpone the party. Still, I stayed up late and made the cake. You know, wishful thinking and all.

Saturday, December 29: If you guessed that my kid still had a fever on Saturday morning, you guessed wrong. She was fine–a bundle of energy and all smiles. Snotty, but smiley. I, on the other hand, was having trouble inhaling. My cough had worsened. The wheezing was audible. My head ached. I seriously considered sending Mia to her party without me. But I didn’t. I went on with it. I hauled all the food and the drink and the kid to MJ’s house (thankfully no presents–Mia has a registry at Heifer.org and has raised almost $500 for the organization in honor of her birthday). 

Anyway. I think the party was a success. I think people had a good time. Mia loved her cupcake, and friends of mine from different circles were mingling and making conversation, and the handful of kids who were there played like the best of friends. But honestly, there are parts of the afternoon I don’t particularly remember. By now my chest was actually hurting, and inhaling deeply was a physical impossibility. I was starting to get a little freaked out. Which is how it came to be that immediately after the party I found myself at an urgent care center near my house. While Mia played with Gayle in the waiting room, I got a shot of steroids in the buttocks and received a 30 minute Albuterol treatment. Comedienne Suzanne Westenhoefer does a bit in one of her old shows about how some Amish people in a community near where she grew up in PA got addicted to crack, and how they must have been speed-quilting and putting up barns single-handedly in mere hours. That’s how I felt after the breathing treatment. Like I could have cleaned my carpet by washing each fiber individually in 15 minutes. My organs were trembling, and I could feel them. My hands and arms seemed to be propelled by forces beyond my control. It was horrible. But not as horrible as not being able to breathe. That part was an improvement. The doctor sent me home with a high-powered expectorant/cough suppressant, a five-day round of steroids, and an asthma inhaler. He didn’t actually diagnose me with asthma but indicated that I could develop a chronic form of it as an adult, or even just have an acute case in the event that my immune system had been compromised for whatever reason. You know, like dead grandmother stuff and sleepless nights and weird dog smells and flat tires and the general stress of the holidays. Or something like that.

Sunday, New Year’s Eve-Eve: The twitches finally wore off after midnight and I slept well for the first night in over a week. I figured out that if I take Tylenol when I use the inhaler, I’m not quite as crawly and my sleep is not as disrupted. Mia is still a little font of snot, but she is undaunted and is equally interested in her birthday balloon (under strictly supervised circumstances, of course) and crawling under the table as she is in playing with her load of new toys. We’ve been playing a lot, and she’s been napping well, which means I’ve been lying around watching lots of movies. It sucks to be sick, but–fingers crossed–the major drama seems to be behind us.

Monday, New Year’s Eve: Actually, according to the TV in the background, it’s no longer New Year’s Eve. I can hear fireworks outside, and the ball just dropped, and I’ve kissed my sleeping daughter on the head. Let’s put ‘07 to bed, people. Here’s to a brilliant new year.

I’m in class. Cataloguing class. A class I am paying almost a thousand dollars to take, and yet, here I sit, blogging. My classmates are doing other various and sundry non-cataloguing activities: playing games, instant messaging, talking about drinking games. Our professor is flipping through a magazine. If I am joking, may I be doomed to catalog Republican Party propaganda in some dank library basement for the rest of time.

I know my last two posts (counting this one) have been lame, but this NaBloPoMo thing is a good thing for me. For one thing, I have a monster draft in the works, something I have been needing to process and write down for months. Working my way through it is allowing me to write about other things, regular fun everyday things. I actually look forward to writing, even though I don’t always get to do much of it.

Like now, because, glory of glories, it’s almost time to go and I don’t want to waste unnecessary time shutting down and packing up.

On Monday my fellow media specialist* (henceforth known as MJ) and I were given the green light to order a third of the library collection planned for our new library. You know, the one at the new school, which is still a flat expanse of red mud? The one that probably won’t be ready for student occupation until, oh, I don’t know, 2020? Our accreditation organization recommends that we have a minimum of 10 books per student and we currently have about 2.5. Pre-fire we had around 11 per student, so we have a lot of catching up to do, and we convinced the People With Money that we needed to start catching up now. And that is why both MJ and I spent every minute of the last 4 days of work–approximately 32 hours–in front of the computer ordering 4000 books. Four. Thousand. You librarians out there–you will understand this: we started with great enthusiasm, but by the end of the day today we were both all “We’ve covered the gays, the anorexics, the African Americans, the scientists, the dead famous people, the athletes. Who have we left out? The golfers? The race car drivers? Sure, order golf books. NASCAR books are good.” In the end we only managed to come up with 3700 because, seriously, 4000 books is a lot of damn books.

It was quite a learning experience, my first book order. For instance, did you know there are 8 billion different Chicken Soup for the Soul books? There is chicken soup for every kind of soul you can imagine. Jack Canfield, if you are reading this, you need to publish Chicken Soup for the Poor Public School Servant’s Soul, and the pages need to be made out of 100 dollar bills. That would warm my soul right up.

Unfortunately, what I didn’t learn during the book order was how to catalogue. Incidentally, that’s what I’m supposed to be learning right now, in my cataloguing class. That’s right, folks, I am blogging in a master’s level class I paid almost a grand to take. In my defense, if I sat here and tried to focus on what’s happening (or not happening**, in this case) at the front of the room, I would stab myself or one of my classmates, or probably my professor, and the subsequent results (bail, lawyer fees, etc.) would cost way more than a thousand dollars, so this is really the safer and cheaper option for me. So if you are a librarian and cataloguing wizard, please share your secrets with me, and if you are a librarian and not a cataloguing wizard but made it through cataloguing with flying colors, or any colors at all, please tell me what I need to know to survive.

For now, I will amuse myself by imagining your brilliant responses to this request: who else needs chicken soup? In the comments, or on your own blog, suggest more titles for Mr. Canfield’s consideration (and if you’re feeling really creative, write a nice entry that might appear in your version, because that would make me really happy).

*fancy public school name for librarian

**teaching, in case you hadn’t already figured it out

To clarify: I am taking cataloguing because my program requires it, not because it will EVER be a useful skill in school media. We use one of the jobbers Jen mentions in the comments, and they do all the hard work for us. As they should. Book-buying is expensive. Also,when the new school opens, the school system will order the “stock collection” for us (also mentioned by Jen); what we ordered this week was mainly everything we needed to support the specific curricular studies (and recreational reading needs) of our current students.

But more importantly, WHERE ARE YOUR CHICKEN SOUP TITLES? C’mon, AdProb, I know you’re holding out on me!

I know you weren’t planning to help me clean up after my neurotic dog when you came to pick up your cat Snowball at the pet wellness clinic this afternoon. Hell, I wasn’t planning to clean up after her, either. I can count on one hand the times she has taken a big dump indoors in her adult life: once, today, at the wellness clinic. Go figure. Perhaps she was picking up on my own nervousness, what with having taken today off to be my own childcare, only to find out that I don’t have childcare for work tomorrow, not to mention my three-hour class tomorrow night.

Anyway, when I realized that Suzanna had littered the floor with her own waste by stepping in it with my left foot, I was literally frozen with shock. There I stood, a wiggly 8-month-old in the carrier on my back, and my dog attached to a 15-foot spiral tie out (because of course I forgot the leash and for some reason had this useless, even under good conditions, piece of crap, no pun intended, in my car), staring down at various dog turds, one of which was smushing out from the sides of my Reebok, and not a single person in the room made a move to help me. Finally the girl behind the desk slowly stood and left the area; she returned a good two or three minutes later with a bottle of disinfectant and a roll of paper towels, and when she handed them to me she didn’t even make eye contact, as if somehow it was my fault that my dog just shit in the floor of an ANIMAL CLINIC where I’m sure NO DOG HAS EVER SHIT BEFORE.

But then you, Lloyd, and you, Lloyd’s Mom, arrived to pick up Snowball, and I don’t know if you noticed that I was slowly dissovling into tears, having just knocked a box of fliers off the counter into a pool of disinfectant during the shit cleaning process, or if you are just nice people and saw that I needed help. Whatever your motivation for helping me, you are the reason I didn’t just drag my dog and my baby out of the clinic and leave. Lloyd, I really appreciate you getting that one turd I hadn’t noticed, and I’m much obliged to you for holding onto my dog while I went to the bathroom and washed my hands so I wouldn’t give my child some dog-turd-borne illness. And Lloyd’s mom, it was so nice of you to spray disinfectant on the bottom of my shoe while I balanced on one foot and tried to keep my dog from wrapping her lead around your legs. You continued to be nice to my daughter by cooing to her and later introducing her to Snowball, and even though Snowball looked like he had just snorted several lines of coke, my kid thought it was funny that his eyes were so big and his mouth wide open in a constant yowl, and for that brief moment of entertainment I thank you.

In short, Lloyd and Lloyd’s Mom, you renewed my faith in the kindness of strangers today. I hope that if I am ever in a similar situation, I will help some bedraggled, teary mom clean up her dog’s shit and enterain her baby and not sit around on my ass and watch like the other sons of bitches in the waiting area did me this afternoon.

Yours truly, hd

I am already flinching at my own anticipated disorganization of thoughts to follow in this post,  but when there is too much to say and not enough time to say it, disorganization is to be expected. To soothe my type A anxiety I will use bullets, which will perhaps lend the appearance of organization. Humor me.

• Mia and I went to West Virginia for my mom’s family reunion on Saturday, where Mia finally met her numerous great-great aunts and uncles and her equally numerous cousins, most of whom are boys. She was the most interested in her cousin Micah, age 8 months, who was also quite smitten with her. There are pictures, but they are still trapped in my camera. Hopefully I’ll get to them later this evening.
• Remember our visit to Georgia Easter weekend? We went mainly to visit my grandmother, my dad’s mother, because my dad wanted her to see Mia. The Monday after Easter she fell in her yard and broke her femur. Major surgery followed; rehab and physical therapy followed the surgery. Mother’s Day weekend she went to stay with my Aunt Mary until she could get around on her own (she is fiercely independent and wanted to be back in her own house). This past Friday Mary took her to the ER on suspicion of a blood clot in her lung, a common problem with elderly people who’ve recently had surgery, and on Saturday the doctor said she would be fine,  that the blood clot had resolved. She died Sunday morning. The funeral will be in WV where she lived most of her life, so the kid and I will be heading back to Dad’s on Thursday.
• Technically I have 8 days left of work, but I will only be working 6 of them because of the funeral. I am still trying to plan my “things to look forward to,” but it’s getting increasingly more complicated. For instance, on Friday I did J’s suggestion (Sin Night), but it was on the calendar for THIS Friday. Also, my sister couldn’t come with my mom to keep Mia today, so we will not be playing Scrabble. What I am most looking forward to right now is next Sunday, when I will be at home and the funeral will be over, and the family drama that is a whole other story I won’t delve into here will be behind me. If you are the praying/light-sending/good vibes wishing type, please know that I am at peace with my grandmother’s death and use your prayers/light/good vibes in an attempt to keep my aunt and uncle from having a fight in the middle of the funeral mass.
• My daughter has started eating solid foods. Her first experience with the fruit/vegetable food group was apples; she gagged, spat, and made horrible sounds upon her first bite of apples, and while she is tolerating them just fine, she doesn’t lap them up like she does the cereal. Given the fact that the apples taste good to ME, I was really concerned about her reaction to carrots. My. God. She sucked down carrots like she’s been waiting her whole life for them.
• Mia turned 5 months old on Saturday. As usual, I will be posting her monthly letter late.
• My students are the spawn of the devil. Have I mentioned that lately? Have I mentioned that I am busting my ass to prepare them for a state end-of-course test that will literally determine whether or not they have to repeat my class, and I have to fight with them daily in order to get them to complete the reviews? Have I mentioned that I will be happier to be rid of them in 8 days than I would be if I won the freaking LOTTERY?

Teacher: We need bees to pollinate flowers–if not for the bees we’d have a shortage of plant life.  

Student: Why do we need flowers anyway? We don’t eat them.

Teacher: Most fruits and vegetables start out as flowers. If there were no flowers we’d have no fruit.

Student: I don’t eat fruit. I eat meat.

Teacher: What about grass? The cows need grass.

Student: Man, there ain’t no flowers on grass. You crazy.

Teacher [trying to change the subject]: Trust me. We need the bees. Now, moving on…

Student [muttering]: I wish we ain’t had no grass. More room to build things on, yo.

And also….

Teacher: Pollen spreads many different ways. For example, water can move pollen.

Same student: So if you swimming in water that has pollen in it, you swimming in sperm, right?

This is my last post on Blogger, and my first post on my all new blog at WordPress. Call me a follower, a copycat, a bandwagon-jumper–whatever you call me, please keep visiting, and if you link to my site, please adjust your site accordingly.

The truth about the change is that I don’t like being forced into things. I have a hard enough time with change as it is, but when someone says, “You must! You have no choice!” I tend to resist. So that’s why I’m moving. It’s not just because lots of other cool people have moved. Well, not entirely. I do tend to like that bandwagon.

~~~

And speaking of moving, I may be buying another house. I say another house because I haven’t sold the house I’m living in now. But I’ve stumbled upon a house that may be too good to pass up, and since it’s unlikely that my house will sell in, like, a day, I may have two houses for a while. I’ll send you my address at the institution, where I will no doubt end up if all of this comes to pass.

~~~

But now for the biggest news of all: I have a new principal. Yes, that’s right. New. As in, Principal is on “extended medical leave” through the end of the year. If you believe that, please contact me as soon as possible so I can share with you the meaning of life and introduce you to my best friends, Tom Cruise and Oprah Winfrey.

No, the truth is, some higher-ups found out about this, plus all kinds of other unethical and borderline illegal things Principal has been up to, and since bad publicity is not allowed in my school system, they made up something to tell the public and then pretty much sent her packing. Honestly, though, knowing Principal, having someone find out she is not perfect is probably enough to send her to the looney bin–that’s even worse than having your school burn down–so she may well be on actual medical leave. Who knows? What I know is that going back to work in two weeks will be just slightly more bearable because there is nowhere for my school to go but up at this point. Of course, that’s not the case for my students, they who are running amuck in my tiny classroom, making huge messes, slacking on their assignments, and scanning their faces into my password protected computer (seriously, every teenager should be considered a dangerous hacker). No, my students are going down.

In my last post I attempted an allusion, but I royally screwed it up. Not once but twice. The word I was actually looking for was SLOUCHING. This is what I was TRYING to allude to:

Slouching Towards Bethlehem
W.B Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

1. Note to self: a DiGiorn0 thin crust pizza comes with a very thin piece of cardboard under it. You should NOT put the pizza in the oven WITH the cardboard under it. Bad things could happen, and you are damn lucky they didn’t.

2. What’s all this hype about Blogger Beta? Do I want to convert? Pros and cons, please, because that little “You can’t go back!” warning scares me.

3. Today is Tuesday. It’s 8:29. My final paper of the semester is due next Thursday. I have most of the research and none of the writing done, and I am now on my way to bed. Pray for me. I’ve come too far to blow it all by not getting my paper written because I’m so worthless when I come home that I watch an hour of “Friends,” eat a bunch of M&Ms, and collapse into bed wearing my glasses, a t-shirt and no pants.

4. Note to Feeny: Um, NO, the school did not purchase this magnificent laptop for me. You’re funny.

5. Note to Bri: KFC’s chicken/potato/cheese bowls? If Wes leaves you for eating one he can always come live with me. I have actually TURNED THE CHANNEL to avoid seeing ads for them. I can handle my food touching, but that kind of intermingling of substances is just WRONG. Sick and wrong.

6. Logic question: I usually stop at St@rbucks on Friday mornings on my way to work for a latte and a pumpkin cream cheese muffin. Tomorrow is Wednesday, but I don’t have to work Thursday and Friday, so technically, tomorrow is like Friday. Therefore, shouldn’t tomorrow be latte/pumpkin cream cheese muffin day? I just knew you would agree.

*Allusion, anyone?
**I meant to type “stumbling.” STUMBLING Towards Normalcy.

Now that I have this in my possession you’ll be hearing more from me. My brain is practically exploding. Make yourselves comfortable.

I.

In 11 years as a classroom teacher, I have asked the following journal reflection question close to 70 times: “If your house was on fire and you had the chance to go back in and retrieve one item, what would you take and why?” The answers are often the same: photo albums, scrapbooks, televisions, x-boxes (remember, I teach 9th grade). But now, having watched–literally–the place where I have “lived” professionally for the last decade go up, and then down, in flames, I see the futility of attempting to answer this question.

Quickly, right now, close your eyes. Do you know what’s in your desk? On it? What’s hanging on your walls, resting on your book shelves, stored in your file cabinets and closets? What have you been carrying around in your purse or bag? Where are your keys? Your wallet? Your cell phone? Think about it. I’ll wait.

The truth is, unless you exit the building while it is actively engulfed in flames, you really have no grasp on the possibility that you might never go back inside. You hear the fire alarm and assume you are going out for a drill, or that someone activated the alarm by mistake, and that in minutes you will be back to your daily routine. That’s what you tell yourself until you actually smell and see the smoke. Then the internal monologue begins to shift. You are certain they will douse it (it looks small and contained, doesn’t it?). You tell the person next to you, “The rest of the day is probably shot.” When the smoke turns black and begins to billow, when threads of smoke begin pouring from the roof vents 20 feet from the actual fire, when the glass between you and the fire appears to melt like candle wax, you say aloud, “We might not be working tomorrow.” When the evacuation begins and students and staff alike are being herded onto activity buses, you are silent, but inside you are trying to convince yourself that you will eventually be allowed back into the building when this is all over. You tell yourself you will start keeping your cell phone in your pocket. You try not to shake visibly.

Hours later at a friend’s house, you watch on television with the rest of the general public as flames engulf the center of the building. You have given up hope of ever seeing your stuff again, and you try to block out the image of eleven years of work burning to black ash. Your car is still in the parking lot, and friends have gone back for it on your behalf. Later you’ll learn that they lied their way into the parking lot and were unlocking your car doors just as the roof of the building collapsed and flames shot 100 feet into the air. You watch this happen on TV, and you are scared for them, cursing yourself for insisting that you have your car tonight.

It occurs to you that you can still check your voicemail, and you have 15 new messages. Four are from district relations, left at various times throughout the afternoon, informing you that your workplace is on fire; the rest are from worried friends and relatives telling you to call them. You want to call someone, but you can’t remember any telephone numbers–they are all stored in your cell phone. You are relieved when your friends and your car return safely, and the relief you feel when you sit down behind the wheel of your own vehicle is immense. It is only then that you begin to remember certain details, like the nine-page paper that’s due next week saved on the school laptop, which is sitting on your desk (that’ll teach you to do things weeks ahead of time), or the jump drive containing three years of graduate work, not to mention countless digital pictures you never bothered to print. You tell yourself to focus on the task at hand–driving to Veriz0n for a new phone, since your cell is the only phone you have. Maybe they will not make you pay for a new phone. Maybe you printed a copy of that paper. Maybe your classroom is not burning after all.

In fact, it didn’t. It is in one of the only parts of the building left intact, not damaged at all by the fire, maybe some water on the floor and of course, smoke, but everything inside is safe. Except for one small problem: the second floor has started to collapse and no one will be allowed in, ever again. You will be torn between relief and anger over this, and you will not sleep well for the next several nights. You will be haunted by what could have been, and you will be haunted by what is. You will not be able to stop picturing your desk, your posters and pictures, your books. You will sit glued to the television, flipping between all the local channels, watching images of your colleagues and students in front of the ubiquitous cameras. You will see your classroom window on a news broadcast, the giant Lilo and Stitch window cling you got from the movie theater still affixed to the glass. You will cry a lot, and you will feel lost, and you will, for the first time in a long time, look forward to a Monday staff meeting, the first gathering of your colleagues since the fire alarm sounded days ago.

You will not know it then, but the trouble has only just begun.

II.

It took two days for the school board to find suitable accommodations for 1,046 students, 73 teachers, and 40 cafeteria, office, and janitorial staff. At least they seemed suitable at the time. It was decided that the 11th and 12th grade students would resume classes the following Wednesday–one week after the fire–at a branch of our local community college. One week after that, the 9th and 10th graders would start the second quarter at a state-owned former school for deaf students, a campus with multiple buildings, only a few of which are currently being used by a local university. I teach 9th grade, and I was relieved to be going to a “real” school. I was present for the first day of class for juniors and seniors, and the chaos was overwhelming. Space was limited, student schedules were completely altered, the school day had been extended until 6 p.m. (students would begin their day at noon). My half of the student body surely had the better end of the deal, with only minor schedule changes and a fairly normal school day (9:15-3:55; our original day started at 8:50 and ended at 3:50).

In the days just after the fire I harbored no ill feelings toward Principal. She handled herself well, was a pillar of strength for the community, and reassured us all, through e-mail, phone calls, and news interviews, that everything would be okay. It took four days for the shine to wear off, and the return of my absolute disgust with her failings as a leader were almost comforting, so normal were they amidst the abnormality. She insisted on doing everything herself, even when there were people standing by to help her. She blatantly refused assistance with tasks she was never good at to begin with, opting instead to stay up all night and create bigger and bigger messes. By the day the juniors and seniors returned to class, she was starting meetings by telling us how much sleep she’d gotten (or not gotten), and by then we were beyond caring, because it was clear that the loss of our building was only a temporary condition. We were stuck with her for the duration.

III.

We were allowed to visit our classrooms the night before 9th and 10th graders were to resume classes. We assumed this would be an opportunity to actually set up our respective spaces, haul in the mass quantities of supplies we’d been given by the community, the school system, other schools, and the Parent/Teacher Association, and generally prepare ourselves for the arrival of our students. What were we thinking? The campus was still under renovation; workers were everywhere, furniture was being delivered, and the sounds of sawing and hammering echoed between the three buildings we were set to occupy in less than 24 hours. The superintendent was there, walking the sidewalks, halls and classrooms with Principal, stopping to make small talk with teachers and ask how we were doing. It was hard not to be honest with him, but we smiled to his face, and then we retreated to the parking lot and stood around our cars silently, trying to reconcile what we had just seen.

My classroom, which is part of what was once a large common area, has no doors and a shared ceiling. Four classrooms and a hallway were created by the installation of sheetrock; apparently, erecting the sheetrock all the way to the vaulted ceiling was against fire code. Thus, I am now attempting to conduct class in a cubicle that holds 25 people–uncomfortably. Three other teachers and I can talk with each other and never leave our desks, and the students in the room next to mine can see and have conversations with my students. There are no bells–Principal walks around the campus at class change with an air horn–and in my cube there are no windows or air vents. It is 76 degrees when I arrive, and by the final class of the day the temperature has exceeded 80.

On the bright side, there is a bathroom in my classroom, as well as a sink. We have been issued school laptops, and the network is almost up and running. The campus is beautiful, surrounded by trees and a large creek, and it is only 7 miles from my house, compared to the almost 17 I was driving before. Students and teachers alike want for nothing–books are delivered daily, supplies pour in from all over the state, and we receive constant offers of help. It is humbling to me, almost uncomfortably so, but I am grateful for the generosity. Most of all I am grateful for the one element of normalcy that not even Principal can disrupt: the students. I have most of my original students, and remarkably, we are actually going on with our school lives in spite of all that’s happened. They joke with me about my “pig nose” belly button and tell me how fat I’m getting. They remember things I taught them before the fire. They ask questions, and they answer questions, and most of them do their homework. Some of them behave like humans, and some of them are jackasses, and in four days I have already sent a few to the office. This is as it was before, and as it will always be.

Yeah, a lot of things suck right now, but I’ll take the frying pan over the fire any day of the week.

Next:
My “blogger convention in a box”
An update on the “stuff” in my classroom
Pregnancy updates
Cali’s cool meme

Yesterday I was on my way to a work function that started at 6 p.m. I had stopped to get a sandwich at the bagel shop in my neighborhood and found myself trying to turn left into late afternoon rush hour traffic, so I backtracked to the other side of parking lot and made a speedy right turn. It’s a good feeling, isn’t it, when you think you’ve beaten the system and come out ahead of the game? Sure it is–when it actually works.

But yesterday I found myself trapped in traffic on what I believed would be a shortcut route back to work. I could see traffic stopped in all four directions at the intersection ahead. I could see blue lights flashing. I assumed there was a horrible accident, but it was nearing 5:50 and work was still at least 20 minutes away, so I edged into the empty lane next to me and cut into the parking lot of a shopping center thinking I could avoid the pile-up by going in the opposite direction. When I got to the shopping center exit I found myself–you guessed it–trapped again. Police had the road blocked in all directions. People were out of their cars, milling around the edge of the street, snapping pictures with their camera phones. I was disgusted. Who takes pictures of an accident?

At about that time the woman sitting next to me rolled down her window and another woman, one of the people standing around, walked over to her window and said something to her. After she walked away I pulled up closer to the woman in the car next to me, rolled my window down, and gave her a “what the hell?” shrug. The woman in the car rolled her window down, looked dead at me and said, “That’s your President driving by.”

Yes, folks, the President was in my neighborhood yesterday. He ate at a local barbecue joint and visited a low-performing elementary school to talk about No Child Left Behind. He rode through low-income neighborhoods and waved at people. He caused 45 minute traffic jams.

But here’s the best part. Right before I left home and found myself in this ridiculous mess, I stopped to chat with my neighbor. She asked me, “Did you see your President today?” I replied, “He’s not MY President.” We had a laugh at W’s expense, and I was on my way. And then I was in the parking lot, clueless, thinking there had been a horrible wreck, and the lady next to me looked at me and said, “That’s your President driving by.” Two people in a 30 minute period used the possessive pronoun your to identify the President in conversation with me. Ha. I’d be concerned that I had some pro-Right Wing conservative look about me, but my neighbor and the stranger in the car have something in common that I do not share: they’re black. Apparently, at least in the South, Bush is considered the white folks’ President. I asked a black colleague about this today, and she confirmed it. What scares me is that generally speaking, it’s probably true. So this post is part of my continued effort to bridge the gap, which I started doing yesterday in this conversation with a stranger, the one that started, “That’s your President driving by.”

Me: “He’s not MY President!”
Stranger: (Laughing) “Honey, I know what you mean!”
Me: “Here I thought there was an accident. Now I find out it’s even worse than I thought.”
Stranger: “You’ve got that right–he’s ruined my whole afternoon. I’ve got places to be!”
Me: “Afternoon? He’s ruined the past six years for me. Why should today be any different?”

We both decided we’d vote for Barack Obama if he runs in 2008, and then the police finally let us out and we went our separate ways. People were still standing around with their camera phones at the ready, but I didn’t look back, not even for a second.

The night before my mom flew to California she stayed at my house so she could be closer to the airport, and so she could drop off her favorite child dachshund, Goliath, who would be spending the week with his favorite cousin Suzanna while Mom was away. Goliath is one of those perfect dogs: he’s cute, he does what he’s told, he doesn’t chew on the furniture, he doesn’t mind staying outside, and he is madly in love with you. Yes, YOU. Yes, I know you haven’t met, but it doesn’t matter. Mere minutes into your relationship he will sit at your feet and gaze up into your eyes, like this:

His only fault, if you can call it that, is the barking. Now, my mother lives in the city limits, but her town is in the foothills of Virginia where it’s not uncommon for one’s driveway to appear to go straight up into the heavens, making it seem as though your house is not really IN the city. This is precisely the situation with my mom’s house. Hence, Goliath is not used to actually seeing cars pass by on a regular basis, and when a car does come near the house it means said car is most likely in the driveway and deserves to be barked at in all manners of ferocity. MY house is on a level cul-de-sac, and while there is certainly not a steady stream of traffic during the day, there are apparently a few people who come and go with regularity. And every time they came and went, Goliath barked at them. A lot.

Or so says my neighbor. I should mention that I love my neighbor. I couldn’t ask for a better neighbor. She is kind and funny and friendly, but not nosy, and we have always had a mutual respect for each other’s privacy, needs, and concerns. But last Monday she was waiting for me when I pulled into my driveway, and she was pissed. Apparently she was working from home on a “report” and had a “deadline” and she “simply could not concentrate for the barking.” I was quite clear on these points, because five minutes into the conversation she had mentioned those three facts about 89 times. And every time I responded, “I’m sorry, but he’s not staying in the house while I’m at work. He’s leaving on Wednesday. I’m sorry.” What I really wanted to say was, “You know, there’s a Panera just up the street. They have free wireless Internet. I’m sure it would be a perfectly quiet place to work.” But I was in a hurry and kept moving closer and closer to my house in an attempt to convey my disinterest in continuing the conversation. After all, there was nothing left for me to say and I did not want to grow increasingly angry at a person whose company I normally enjoy. Meanwhile, the entire time this conversation was taking place, Goliath was gazing up at my neighbor with a look of pure adoration on his face. See above. No wonder he’s Mom’s favorite.

I mentioned last week that my middle sister moved to California to attend art school. Last Tuesday my mother flew out to help her get settled. Her flight pattern was Charlotte-Atlanta-Orange County. At least it was supposed to be.

She arrived at my house late Monday evening, as I’m about an hour closer to Charlotte than she is. Her flight was scheduled to leave at 8-something the next morning, but with all the new flight restrictions*, and considering she doesn’t fly much, she wanted to get there extra early. It was a breeze–she was over an hour early and had plenty of time to relax before her flight left for Atlanta. More than plenty, as it turns out: her flight left Charlotte late, and she missed her connection in Atlanta. The rest of the day is sort of sketchy for me, but this is what I think happened based on the frantic call I received from my sister in the middle of the work day**: they booked her on another flight, but lo and behold, it was overbooked and she got bumped. Her luggage, however, did not, so it went on to Orange County without her. She was then booked on a flight to “somewhere in Utah.” Since SLC is the only city I can think of in Utah right now, we’re going to assume that’s where she went. Her flight from SLC was to LAX, not Orange County, so the plan was that the airline would arrange shuttle service to OC once she arrived at LAX.

She was originally supposed to land in OC at 12:30 PT, but when she finally called me once my sister had collected her from the Shuttle of Death (it seems Mom doesn’t care for the 12-lane 70-MPH madness of the Southern California highway system), it was almost 5:30 in Orange County and she was stressed. She claims the shuttle driver tried to kill her by not paying attention to his driving; she confessed that she actually entertained the idea of slapping him with her shuttle voucher. And my sister’s boyfriend’s car has no AC, so not only were they flying down Death’s Highway at frightening speeds, but they were doing so in a hot car. She had to hang up because she needed to concentrate on driving. And she wasn’t even the one driving.

The sequel to this episode, “The One With the Flying Mother, Part II” aired yesterday, and it was much less eventful. No missed connections, no major glitches. She landed in Charlotte at 11 and drove back to my house. Piece of cake. Well, sort of. See, we have this new road in G’boro that allows highway travelers to completely bypass G’boro altogether. If you’re actually trying to get to G’boro and you’re not careful you could miss the G’boro exit and end up in the next town over, which is exactly what happened to my mom when she was trying to get to my house in G’boro at 1 in the morning. She arrived eventually, and all was well, but I think it’s safe to say she won’t be going on any long trips any time soon.

*It seems that you’re not allowed to take a bottle of Jergen’s lotion on a plane these days, but pack all the personal lubricant you want. Mile High Club, anyone?

**I was already worried enough about my mother flying across the country–it’s just my way to worry–but when I got my sister’s message that went something like, “Call me. I have to talk to you about Mom’s horrible plane experiences” I sort of freaked. A word to my family: if you are going to leave a message on my phone in the middle of the workday, please either give me more detail, or give me no detail at all. Another case in point is my mom’s voicemail message on Wednesday: “H., I can’t find Megan. I don’t know where she is. See if you can get in touch with her. Call me.” I’m not sure which category that one falls into–too much or not enough–but I sort of handled it badly.

So it’s September 11, and I’m already miffed at CNN for rebroadcasting all of their footage from 9/11 in real time. To put it mildly, I just don’t think that was necessary. Then I get to work and numerous colleagues are decked out–I mean, DECKED OUT–in red, white and blue. Long faces and sighs and sad looks abound. THEN I check my school email and learn that there will be a 10 minute 9/11 memorial presentation ON THE INTERCOM during 1st period, right before the mandatory* Pledge of Allegiance. Deep sigh.

Please don’t get me wrong–9/11 was horrific, awful, hideous. You know; I don’t need to tell you. But I question some 9/11 anniversary behavior in the same way I questioned some immediate post-9/11 behavior. The flag pins and bumper stickers and “remember” t-shirts…it all seemed false, a convenient way to make a buck. I know there were sincere citizens of this country who didn’t know what else to do, so they put out their flags and bought bumper stickers and wore those t-shirts, but some of it just made me feel bullied and guilty, like if I didn’t stick a flag on my car’s rear window I was un-American.

Which brings me back to the anniversary. I made the mistake of commenting on the parade of red, white and blue, and I wondered aloud something along the lines of, “Why just today? If we are to truly honor people like Mark Bingham and the NYC firefighters and the countless innocents who died, shouldn’t we remember all the time?” Two things happened. One, my friend L. patiently explained to me that “they” are afraid we’ve become too complacent** and we need to be reminded–hence the CNN rebroadcasts and national remembrance movements. Two, my friend E., who was, in fact, wearing red, white and blue, asked me with a sad look on her face, “Don’t you like being an American?”

There, see? Treason by government standards.

But here’s the thing: I agree with L.–we as Americans do tend to be complacent. We think bad shit isn’t supposed to happen here. Our country was outraged on 9/11, and rightfully so, but what about what happens in other countries every day? Hell, what about what happens in this country every day? Homelessness, hunger, child abduction, murder, not to mention hurricanes, tornadoes, rock slides, earthquakes, floods. We are complacent, but mostly what that means to me is that we are not proactive enough on our own soil; we allow children to be hungry within the same city limits where buildings are razed so newer, nicer buildings can be constructed, where churches spend more money on their marble facades than they do on community outreach, and where the five bucks I spend at my local Starbucks on a muffin and a latte would feed a 1st grader a week’s worth of school lunch.

Don’t I like being an American? Well, it depends. If that means being a flag-carrying citizen and supporting the President and believing for one second that the War in Iraq has much at all to do with 9/11, then no, I don’t. What I do like is knowing that for the most part I live a safe existence. Unlike some people on the planet, I do not have to worry about stepping on a land mine on my way to work every day, or starving to death, or being shot because I’m a woman, or a Christian, or a liberal, or an educator. I have shoes and clothes and a family and enough money to pay my bills. I have an excellent education and a stable job. The medical care I receive on a regular basis assures me that my child has a good shot at entering the world strong and healthy. These are all things most Americans feel they are entitled to–things they deserve. If this is what it means to be an American, then yes, I like being one. But all Americans do not have all of these basic “rights.” What of that? And why doesn’t all of this come with simply being human?

So, uh, what does all this have to do with 9/11***? Well, it bugs me when people pour energy into “remembering” something once in a while, when every day we are surrounded by people and issues that could really use that energy. It bugs me when a day meant to honor our fellow citizens turns into a day of fist-wielding and fear-mongering, all wrought with talk of revenge and triumph. It bugs me when pride is confused with prowess. It bugs me when my fellow Americans can say somebody across the ocean needs to be knocked down but cannot acknowledge that somebody across the street needs to be lifted up. Does that make me guilty of “treason?” Eh, who knows? If so I’m in good company.

*A law was passed in my state last year that in public schools, someone must recite the Pledge aloud so that students can have the opportunity to say it if they please. I interpret that to mean that if you don’t please, you’re within your rights to keep your seat and refrain from pledging. However, in MY school (and probably in countless others), if my principal walks by a classroom and students are not saying the Pledge, she insists that they all stand and recite. I have a MAJOR problem with this. I think it’s a right, not a requirement. I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this.

**Actually, I think “they” are afraid we’ve become too unafraid to buy into “their” plans, so reminding us of the horrors of 9/11 via all-day footage is a way to rekindle our fear.

***One final word on 9/11: I wasn’t there like some of my Internet friends. You know who you are, and you know about that day in a way I never will. While I’d never directly ask you to talk about it, I do wonder if my anniversary crankiness is colored by the fact that I was watching from a distance. If I need to be told a thing or do, please don’t hesitate.

School has started. I’m so thrilled. Stomp on your foot, kick you in the crotch, spit on your neck thrilled. You might recall that this is not where I thought I’d be this year. I fully believe the Universe has a script for me, but I have not yet received it, and I’m mad about it in the same way Kim Cattrall was mad when she never got an advance copy of the “Sex and the City” movie script and decided she just wouldn’t be involved, thanks, thereby killing all hope of a “Sex and the City” movie. Except I’m not bailing on my movie. I have too much going for me now, and besides, Kim Cattrall could afford to blow off a “Sex and the City” movie and I can’t afford to blow off the Universe’s plans for me, whatever they are, and I’m afraid I’ve gotten a bit off topic. Where was I?

School has started.

I count it as a miracle to be sitting here at work sending these words out into the blogiverse, as just last week both Blogger and Flickr were blocked by the school system’s filters. Perhaps some creative and enterprising teacher convinced the powers that be that these programs can offer our students a creative outlet. Who knows, and quite frankly, who cares? I’m just happy that at moments like this I can sit down and talk to my peeps in the computer.

For those of you who don’t know me personally, I’ve been teaching 9th grade English for 10 years. By year 11 you would think I might finally be reaping some of the rewards of the profession (a full slate of honors classes, for example). You’d be wrong. I am teaching Strategic Reading and a regular 9th grade class that is made up of children who have failed the state English I test one or more times. That’s the class who’s with me now. Of the 16 students enrolled in the class, there are eight males and eight females. Two of the females are white; two are black; the other four are Hispanic. There are six black males, one Hispanic, and one Asian (Vietnamese). Four of the boys are known gang members. One of the white girls has a house arrest bracelet on her ankle. This is my best class. They are respectful; they get their work done; they get my jokes. It goes downhill after they leave.

The reading classes I am teaching were designed for students who scored level I on the 8th grade reading test (level I basically means 5th grade reading level or below). Given what I’ve told you about my current school’s er, leader, it should not surprise you that there are students in my reading classes who read on a 2nd grade reading level, and there are students in my classes who read on a 10th grade reading level, and then there are scores of them who fall in between. I must confess, I am an old school thinker when it comes to heterogeneous grouping; in spite of what the research says, I think homogeneous grouping lends itself to the most effective instruction. Heterogeneous groups that are too varied are disciplinary disasters waiting to happen. Trust me. Yesterday was Day 5, and already I had to have an administrator take two of my students to the office. Good times.

Today has been a bit better, but the more I learn about my reading students, the more I long to work somewhere else. Like a landfill. Several of my students, at the ripe old age of 14, are active gang members. One of them had to be tasered last year. About seven of them were socially promoted from 7th to 9th grade last year. A quarter of them are likely drug users; over half probably smoke. They were born the year I started high school, which means that many of their parents are probably my age. It’s a scary place, high school.

The good news: I got a raise this year. Woo boy, that extra 35 bucks will really come in handy. I’m thinking bullet proof vest, maternity size medium. Anybody know where I can get me one of those?

Conversation between David Letterman and Geena Davis, after Dave asked Geena how “Commander in Chief” was going:

Geena: It’s a hard job being pretend leader of the free world. It’s a heavy burden.”

Letterman: (laughing) “Well, yeah. Just ask George Bush, for God’s sake.”

Dear Harris Teeter Grocery Stores: A few weeks ago you opened a new Harris Teeter store off of a major thoroughfare near my house. I travel this road often, and I saw the “opening soon!” signs hanging from the building, but imagine my surprise when I saw one of those airport spotlight things shining brightly into the sky from the roof of the new Harris Teeter. Do you really think someone driving down Busy Boulevard is going to say, “We’re out of milk and bread. We need to find a grocery store. Kids, keep your eyes peeled for a spotlight!”

***

Dear Driver of Blue Honda Accord Who Passed Me on Highway 70 Tuesday Morning: When you flew up behind me as if attempting to park your little blue car in my hatchback I swore at you, but when you proceeded to pass me and three other people in the turn lane, I became apoplectic and vowed to catch up with you so I could commit your license plate number to memory. As it turns out, I ended up behind you at a stoplight, and we both turned left, at which point you passed the two people in front of you on a double yellow line. Since there is nothing in that direction but a bunch of houses, some churches, and the local middle and high schools, and since you were in such a damn hurry, I was sure you were either a) an undercover fireman or police officer heading for the scene of some horrible crime, b) in labor and going to your midwife or doctor’s house, or c) some strange person who is so excited about getting to work that you insist on violating three traffic laws to get there. Of those choices, C was the most accurate, because you turned onto the dead end street where both schools are located, but because I park behind the high school I don’t know which school was your ultimate destination. Don’t worry, though, I memorized your license plate and turned it in to the school resource officer. Perhaps there’s nothing he can do about you, but I wish you a cop on every corner for the rest of eternity, you stupid stupid woman.

***

Dear Buttwipe Who Took a Partially Eaten Hershey Bar and a Handful of Change from my Top Desk Drawer: First of all, the fact that you think it’s okay to go through someone’s personal belongings is reprehensible. I know you were here after school hours when I’m not actually at my desk, but that fact does not make my classroom fair game. That you took the change does not really surprise me, but what kind of person takes a candy bar that someone had already started eating? Wha