the degrading thing that i do

Sheeesh. One month into the school year and all my stories relate to school. There has got to be more. Um, I could tell you about my chakras, I guess. I found out via an online quiz that my root chakra is terribly blocked. That is one thing I have recently learned (I have been doing Kundalini yoga, and it is apparently a gateway drug other new agey things?). Another non-school thing is that I talk too much about gluten. See, all of these things are coming together in my mind and making me realize that I might need an intervention. A "please stop talking about school/chakras/gluten" type intervention.

But I don't know what else, so just one last school story before I start living it up in some other way and can tell you about that instead.

There is a thing I do that I don't internally approve of and did not come up with, but that is a needed thing for this one kid in my class. It is a daily update sheet that goes through each part of the day - "Writing," "Math," "Snack," etc. I have to assign a smiley face, a straight-mouthed face, or a frowning face for each part, as well as comments. Anyway, I started thinking about what it would be like if someone was following me around all day with a clipboard containing that sheet. Hoooo. That's a horrible, horrible thought.

Getting up: Frown (major abuse of snooze)
Drive to school: Straight line (went kind of fast on the curvy road)
Pre-student-arrival: Straight line (could have been more sharing with the copier)
etc.
I would have gotten a smile at snack (ate all of her banana! GREAT JOB!!!) and possibly at science (effectively used a healthful flower at second dissection attempt!).

But, oh my god. It just adds a whole new perspective. Especially if I have to imagine that the kid actually has to complete the sheet. How degrading!

Lilified

Just when I start thinking I can drink many glasses of wine on a Thursday night without fretting about my extra-long teaching day on Friday comes one like today. i really, really could have used all of my brain functionality today. Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered, really. It went something like this....

Wouldn't a flower dissection be an interesting way for kids to learn about the parts of flowers? Why yes, it would! Pistil, stamen, anther, etc. - I brushed up on it a bit, but in the end I felt like I needed to buy flowers with as clear-cut examples of these parts as possible. Looking at the alstromeria at Trader Joe's, I couldn't see everything. The more expensive lilies, on the other hand, were gorgeous, big, and very obvious in their anatomy. I decided to buy an extravagant amount - one for each kid, plus a bunch left over to brighten the classroom. I spent a bit more than I meant to, but I thought, fuck it. A lot of things have been hard/upsetting/disappointing lately, and I should buy the prettiest flowers possible.

I walked into school this morning all Miss America-like, with this big spray of lilies across my chest. I was so excited, and expected the kids to immediately start quizzing me about them when they walked in, the way they start quizzing me if my hair is sticking up or I have accidentally worn a similar outfit as the day before. No one said anything about them, though, which I was also kind of happy about, because it would be such a great surprise come science time.

The room was all lilified and fragrant by 11:00. The tighter blooms had opened in the sun. I cut one for each kid, and gave the first set of directions: to make a sketch from the top and one from the side. As I was cutting, I noticed that the anthers (yeah, I've internalized at least that vocab word) were fucking full of pollen. Like, tons of pollen spilling out. I'm not that smart and didn't think much about it except, "Wow. That's a lot of pollen."

Soon, coughs started up around the room. Kids started clearing their throats. "I don't feel right," someone said. "Me either." "My throat itches." "My eyes burn." "My head hurts." "I'm dizzy." Then my personal favorite: "My tongue feels funny."

That did it. As a person with long-standing tongue-feeling-funny paranoia, my attention was caught. I took a good look around at a sea of watery eyes, blotchy skin, and woozy expressions. Shit. I had triggered a mass respiratory event in my classroom! Now my throat was itching like mad, too.

The next minutes were a blur of emergency lily confiscation, rapid-fire hand washing, and classroom evacuation to the fresh air of the outdoors. My fears worsened when about half the class opted to sit listlessly in the wood chips on the playground rather than actually play. I pounded on a colleague's classroom window and asked her to remove and destroy the lilies, open my windows wider, and alert the principal. This colleague later reported that the lily smell upon opening my door was overwhelming, sickening, unbearable...

I gathered the kids in a temporarily empty classroom and read to them, hysterically noting in my mind who was reacting normally and who was not, hoping my voice wasn't betraying my own swollen throat. My students were bizarrely sedate, glassy-eyed, zombie-esque. One girl's throat bloomed with red splotches, and I sent her to the office to be watched over.

I finally took them to lunch, then cried a little from stress and worry. This day was a low, low point in my teaching career thus far. Almost any job seemed preferable. I would have strongly preferred to be a fish-catcher, and I have deep existential fear of both worms and fish.

Instead of eating my lunch, I scrubbed every possible pollen-harboring surface and sniffed the air fretfully. By the time the kids came back in, only a lingering perfume remained. We talked about what had happened, and I explained that the room was now totally lily-free, even though the scent was still there a little.

"Don't we get to take our flowers home?" they cried.

Uh...no.

Heavy Metal Food Fight

Oh my god! Mike Hentch told us at TV Nigh about doing this heavy metal food fight voiceover for the Del Taco website, with Danny Muggs playing backup on guitar. He had kind of demonstrated, so I knew he had some skillz, but wow. I am so proud to say I know him. If you click on each item at the bottom of the screen (for some reason they are hard to click just right, but be persistent), you can hear their interpretations.

Doomy, gloomy mornings

I have been springing out of bed so easily these days, because when my radio goes off early, I don't want to loll in bed and listen to NPR like I usually do. I want to propel myself away from the radio, source of all the terrible news and doom and gloom that seems to be so relentless lately. Luckily, my radio is on the side of my bed near the wall, so propelling myself away from it gets me to the bedroom door, not against the wall.

I always thought it would be cool to have some effective way of giving myself reality-check messages in the morning. I used to leave notes: YOU HAVE TO GET UP NOW BECAUSE YOU NEED TO STOP FOR GAS ON THE WAY TO WORK!!! or, YOU DIDN'T MAKE YOUR LUNCH LAST NIGHT AND IT TAKES FOREVER! But when the alarm went off, I never looked at the notes. Even if I had looked at them, I would have thought I was above the person who wrote them. That's how I am in the morning.

Maybe this is one of those pragmatic reasons for cohabitation, like free rides to the airport: someone to make you get up.

With all this American doom/gloom blasting into my ears in the morning, though, I'm able to handle it on my own just fine.

House Schooled

I had a pile of the Mindless Cutting Tasks that come with being a teacher, and as is my habit, I turned on the TV for distraction. House was on. I watched this show when it first came on a few years ago, then I stopped because every episode was so much the same. It still really annoys me, I found out. Like, they really tolerate this assholery day in, day out? I started to imagine the elementary education version of the show. I am the star, and i am just impossible. However, my genius in the education of children, and solving complex educational problems through out-of-the-box thinking, is unparalleled at my school. Almost every day, or at least on Tuesdays, I get sulky when something doesn't go my way, and I take off, just when a third grader most desperately needs my expertise. My colleagues bumble around ineffectively, trying out different, ill-conceived instructional techniques and losing valuable time. Finally, a male colleague is sent to my house to beg me to come back to work. I make some sexually degrading comments towards him, and he rolls his eyes a bit, but he just refuses to give up on me. He knows that deep down inside, my heart is crying out in pain. They all know it. Finally, I agree to go back, but I twist it to make it seem like it's all on my terms. I sit down with the suffering student, say the rudest things I can think of to make him or her feel like shit, and then a random, over-heard snippet sparks an idea. Just like that, the solution comes to me in a flash of certainty. I know now how to solve this educational problem, and I do so, swiftly and skillfully, in the harrowing last ten minutes of the school day. The student tries to thank me, but I just gnash my teeth and criticize his or her body.

Wouldn't that be an awesome show? I'm going to start thinking about who should play my male colleague, the one who refuses to give up on my frozen heart.

Poor DFW

Ugh. So sad to hear about David Foster Wallace. I really liked his stuff (although I don't think I finished Infinite Jest, despite a friend urging me on). I still remember picking up Girl With Curious Hair, not really knowing anything about him. There was a story about an actor going on David Letterman that was hilarious and brilliant - at least, I remember it that way. He was also the guest editor of the 2007 Best American Essays, and at first I was not pleased with his choices. They seemed like too much work. I wanted easy, clever essays. These were on a different level, requiring my full attention. His introduction was, of course, extensively footnoted, and he questioned the whole point of choosing the "best" essays. In the end, I enjoyed most of his choices, and appreciated that he didn't just pick the most popular kids of the essay world, as I would surely have done. Now I'm remembering that I had been meaning to check out his collection Consider the Lobster, since I liked the title essay when it appeared in, I think, Gourmet. I guess I still can, right?

Just sad, though. Not like he didn't come across as the depressed type, but it is still shocking when someone who seems to have reached so many of his goals makes the choice to kill himself. Like I know what his goals were, or anything about him, or that it's even a choice! Ha. Silly. Anyway, I obviously put writers on some kind of pedestal, or at least I put The Writing Life on that pedestal. I imagine that if you are able to not only make your living that way, but also be widely lauded for your talent, that would be everything. It's like I missed the Literature 101 class about tortured, depressed, yet successful artists.

It rained all weekend. I stayed home and nursed my cold, except for the hours when I hunched over in the rain, bailing water that was about to stream into my parents' basement.

Autumnal Breakfast, plus My Little Conservative Charges

I went to bed really early last night (after watching a grainy post of the last Project Runway episode on Youtube), hoping to sleep off this cold that has suddenly sprung up on me. When I woke up today to rainy gloom, I had that fall feeling, even though it's supposed to be in the 70s today. I felt like eschewing my summer breakfast and making something more autumnal. So I made this polenta and tomato concoction. I just sliced some polenta off the tube, sprinkled some pepper and nutritional yeast on it, added a layer of tomato slices, then more pepper, parsley, and a little salt. I baked it for fifteen minutes and it was just exactly what I wanted it to be.

Some recent political comments from my classroom as we have been reading articles about both major candidates and the conventions:

"A Democrat is a person who want to raise taxes and make gas more expensive." (in answer to the question "What does the word "Democrat" mean?")

"John McCain is COOL!" (EEEEEEwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!!)

"Sarah Palin is sooo pretty!" (Uuuuuuuuuuuugggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!)

"Democrats are tiny little losers!" (from the same kid: "My sister's friend thinks that global warming is real. Isn't that hilarious?")

"Barack Obama kills babies" (OK, that was actually from the classroom next door. Still....I had to hear about it).

Sigh. Ugh. Ouch. Yuck. Gross.

All I can do is keep saying, "Well, that's an OPINION. Let's talk about facts."

The wilting flower of my no-so-secret disinterest in anything

It's true that, for teachers, August is one long Sunday night, and the first few weeks of September are somehow traumatic. Not that I wasn't in need of some routine and intellectual challenge (teaching actually is an intellectual activity, despite what many think. It is not just about picking out adorable theme outfits, making dittos, and thinking up new ways to torture children). Still, I feel like dropping out of everything. All the commitments I ambitiously made for the school year seem like too much. I want to put in a hard day of work, then lie on the floor all evening and listen to music. That's as far as my ambition stretches right now. I don't even feel like cooking, reading, or watching movies. But Instead of indulging this unmotivated mood, I have signed up for a bunch of classes at the gym to pile on top of my after-school activities. So I guess I'm in all the way now.

On the up side, my lovely art teaching co-worker brought me kale and spinach today, sauteed. She brought me rice pasta with goat cheese and avocado and pesto. She considers me when she puts away her leftovers. To boot, she brought me big fancy gold earrings that dangle way down almost to my shoulders. Tomorrow I am taking her an Indian classical CD that I like for yoga. If I had a desire to cook, and the corresponding leftovers, I would totally take her some.

The last movie I watched from Netflix was an Almodovar one, while I was illin' with food poisoning. It was The Flower of My Secret. I really liked that the main character was, for one thing, an older woman, without it being a movie about "an older woman." I also liked that she couldn't get her boots off and had to pay a panhandler on the street to try to tug them off, unsuccessfully. That was fantastic.

I have decided that these Miz Mooz boots are the ones I would like to get stuck on my feet this fall.

A super grouchy version of "Vegan's 100"

I'm jumping on this internet food blog list craze, even though I'm not really sure what the point of noting foods I have eaten or would never eat really is, or why anyone should care. I also don't know what it is all supposed to say about me. It's pretty damn privileged to fetishize food in this way. I'm going to provide notes, which isn't in the instructions, because I guess then it becomes about prompting stories rather than just obsessing about food.

Yeah, I don't know what the point is, but I can never sleep and it's something to do.

Here are the instructions for the "Vegan's 100" challenge. It comes from the "Omnivore's 100," which is pointless for me to try. Also, the word "challenge" can't be right, can it? I must have made it up to make myself seem more Olympian in taking on the task, or something.

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VEGAN'S 100

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

1) Copy this list into your own blog, including these instructions. (google it to find a clean list w/o my dumb notes)
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating. (don't know how to cross out on this blog template so am putting a bold x next to those)
4) Post a comment here once you’ve finished and link your post back to this one.
5) Pass it on!

1. Natto Determined to like it back in the day; mostly succeeded. Pictured above.
2. Green Smoothie frozen mango, frozen pineapple, water, and spinach is how I like it
3. Tofu Scramble Like it best when others prepare it for me
4. Haggis X I'm flummoxed about why this is on the vegan list.
5. Mangosteen
6. Creme brulee not a big dessert person but I like the way the burned sugar makes the crust for your spoon to break through
7. Fondue childhood New Year's Eve food (family tradition)
8. Marmite/Vegemite Tried during a student's Australia presentation
9. Borscht I love beets but I'm underwhelmed/grossed out by borscht.
10. Baba ghanoush A fine use of eggplant
11. Nachos Loved to eat them with giant margaritas at the Del Rio in Ann Arbor. Del Rio is gone, as is my desire for nachos.
12. Authentic soba noodles Taught how to make them from scratch by a sweatband-wearing grandpa in Toyota City
13. PB&J sandwich Who hasn't?
14. Aloo gobi When is the last time I ate Indian food, anyway?
15. Taco from a street cart
16. Boba Tea I had to google it to find out that it's bubble tea. I've tried it but didn't quite get what the big thing was.
17. Black truffle This may or may not be what Carrie's neighbor handed over the fence to us after a lucrative mushroom gathering day.
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes Cherry wine and plum wine. They are way too sweet, but some version of me once liked them.
19. Gyoza I like the frozen vegetable gyoza from Trader Joe's.
20. Vanilla ice cream Suffered teasing over my preference for it above all other exotic flavors
21. Heirloom tomatoes accidentally spent a crazy amount of money on them last summer (learned valuable lesson about noticing prices)
22. Fresh wild berries Wistful about berry patches of my youth.
23. Ceviche X
24. Rice and beans I was a Vegetarian College Student
25. Knish
26. Raw scotch bonnet pepper X
27. Dulce de leche Went through a weird phase in Japan where I would buy tiny one- or two-serving containers of dulce de leche or rum raisin ice cream, two flavors that I had never wanted before and haven't since.
28. Caviar Awkward "fancy restaurant after treating me to VIP sumo tournament experience" situation with student and her mom
29. Baklava A bad choice for the cavity-prone (me)
30. Pate X
31. Wasabi peas I like them, but can't eat them now that I'm gluten free. Yeah, I've recently become that much more annoying to feed. My stomach isn't killing me all the time, though.
32. Chowder in a sourdough bowl X
33. Mango lassiMango tastes like sunshine and rainbows. I'll take it in any form.
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float Sometimes we blended it to make a cooler.
36. Mulled ciderThe cider mill I pass on my way to and from school just opened for the season, which is sort of tragic, summer-wise. I get excited about mulled cider, but usually end up drinking my cider cold, instead.
37. Scones with buttery spread and jam The Swan tea room, London
38. Vodka jelly
39. Gumbo Howe's Bayou has vegetarian gumbo now
40. Fast food french fries I'm sure I ate enough fries in my 0-16 years to even out the last twenty, in which I haven't eaten any.
41. Raw Brownies
42. Fresh Garbanzo Beans Or maybe I haven't. What is a "fresh" garbanzo bean? I will say that I have never met a garbanzo bean I didn't like, so if I had the chance to eat a fresh one, I definitely did.
43. Dahl I used to cook this a lot.
44. Homemade Soymilk
45. Wine from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Stroopwafle
47. Samosas Saturdays, street vendor in flea market district of Nagoya
48. Vegetable Sushi My top takeout (clarification: My only takeout)
49. Glazed doughnut Possibly never actually enjoyed it.
50. Seaweed Love to eat nori by the crispy sheet.
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi Near-daily lunch in Japan consisted of a seaweed-wrapped rice triangle (onigiri) with umeboshi at the center, from convenience store. Wish our 7-11 sold that.
53. Tofurkey Expensive, depressing, gross.
54. Sheese
55. Cotton candy Carnival, Warren, OH
56. Gnocchi My free-association brain says, "mommy."
57. Piña colada X
58. Birch beer
59. Scrapple X
60. Carob chips I was a Hippie Day Care Employee
61. S’mores Preferably slightly charred.
62. Soy curls
63. Chickpea cutlets
64. Curry Indian style, Japanese style
65. Durian Just dried, not fresh.
66. Homemade Sausages Why is this on the vegan list??? Or...I guess there is a recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance that I would try for white bean and tempeh sausage
67. Churros, elephant ears, or funnel cake My sister was the real elephant ear aficionado.
68. Smoked tofui used to eat this kind of thing a lot. what do i eat now? this list is full of things i used to eat.
69. Fried plantain
70. Mochi Every year in Japan, several old and young people choke on it and die while celebrating the arrival of a new year.
71. Gazpacho I only made it once this summer, which seems incredibly sad right now
72. Warm chocolate chip cookies The Saturn dealership never had the fresh, warm cc cookies the ad campaigns promised. They were boxed and heated, I believe.
73. Absinthe
74. Corn on the cob Weird to think some people haven't tried it. I'm all midwestern America-centric like that.
75. Whipped cream, straight from the can
76. Pomegranate Tastes good but dries out my teeth.
77. Fauxstess Cupcake X
78. Mashed potatoes with gravy Like the potatoes, hate everything about gravy
79. Jerky X
80. Croissants I'm not sure I have every had one that is the correct consistency/flakiness. It's usually a plastic-wrapped feature of some begrudging, last-ditch attempt to feed myself when there is nothing else for the vegetarian/sugarphobe at the breakfast meeting.
81. French onion soup I made a labor-intensive vegetarian version for a date once. Something happened - a culinary disaster of some type. I have blocked it out, but it reverberates in my inability to date and my disinterest in french onion soup.
82. Savory crepes Eaten in Paris, at a creperie near our hotel on our "spoiled suburban high school student art history trip" (thanks, mom and dad)
83. Tings
84. A meal at Candle 79
85. Moussaka A way to ruin eggplant
86. Sprouted grains or seeds I've eaten many a health food restaurant salad in my day.
87. Macaroni and “cheese”
88. Flowers I once put them on top of a stir-fry, back before I was bitter and hopeless.
89. Matzoh ball soup
90. White chocolate Easter basket bunnies. Always gave them to my mom (coincidence?)
91. Seitan I can't eat it without thinking of the Mol Triffid song, "Satin Rules," about people trying to be all bad-ass and spelling Satan wrong in their grafitti.
92. Kimchi Question: Why don't I ever go out for Korean food anymore?
93. Butterscotch chips Was thinking about butterscotch today, possibly because of my fake caged classroom pet by the same name.
94. Yellow watermelon
95. Chili with chocolate After disliking chocolate my whole life, I have come to understand that I like very, very dark chocolate with something spicy in it.
96. Bagel and Tofutti
97. Potato milk
98. Polenta Mollie can prepare it best.
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Raw cookie dough annual stomachache after xmas cookie making

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There. Fascinating, I'm sure. I killed an hour. I took my mind off some stuff. My eyes are a little tired. I hope a will sleep. Of all these foods, I would like to dream about butterscotch, which seems like a warm, safe, childhood kind of food. Please, no dreams about potato milk. That seems upsetting even to me. I imagine the potatoes hooked up to a milking machine, producing super starchy milk. Ugh.