Under Construction

I Resolve to Read the Calendar Better

2010-01-02T14:08:00.003-06:00

I'm staying at my parents' house for a couple of weeks. They are off having sun and warmth in Mexico, but Jimmy's mom who is 90 and lives with them had a difficult time recovering from pneumonia recently, so I'm here to call 911 if I need to, to try to force her to accept my help with her breakfast and lunch, and to cook dinner for her and Ann (the other elderly housemate). I'm not used to having such regular meals, and if this weren't the lap of luxury, I'd be feeling all crowded and introverted. Since it's an enormous house, I'm on the third floor alone right now, typing away, while Ann naps and Dorothy knits in the sun room. We each have our own floor.

This morning, I got up early (to train myself for the inevitability of going back to school on Monday), walked the dog in the freezing, freezing cold, and headed off to Uptown to cross off my first New Year's resolution. I was going to my first belly dancing lesson in the dance studio above Birch's Pharmacy. Classes begin at the beginning of January and they are offered almost every day of the week, but I decided that Saturday was best for me. Otherwise it becomes a day of too much thinking, moping, and procrastinating.

Well, I got there only to discover that classes actually begin on Monday, so Saturday's first class isn't until next week. This was all very clearly spelled out on their website, which I checked three times before I headed off to a strange land, but despite my enormous brain, I have all kinds of trouble reading calendars, and so I misread the date.

Anyway, I made the best of it. An outing is never bad when you are younger than your housemates by over 50 years. I bought myself some Yak Tracks so I can walk Buddy through ice and snow. Then I got home, and crossed off another resolution by buying my train ticket to Portland.

Now, I'm at least 90 percent certain that my Portland ticket really does involve travel during the actual dates of my Spring Break, but it was all on a calendar so I can never be 100 percent certain until the date actually comes around.

Love,
Al

Lists

2010-01-01T11:44:00.004-06:00

In case you didn't receive this in the mail, here is my resolution list for 2010. Hope you're enjoying the day. Here in MN it's sunny and even colder than the thermometer says.

Dear Friends and Family,

I’ve never written the holiday letter or Christmas card before because I don’t have any cute kids to share with you. Buddy doesn’t like having his picture taken, and although I am pretty vain, I draw the line at sending everyone I know of photo of myself for Christmas. However, I am the number one fan of your holiday cards and photos, and so, to encourage you not to drop me from your list, here is my first annual New Years Resolution letter.

Whereas, I have room to improve and grow in 2010, be it resolved that this year I vow to do the following.

Smile more, especially in November and February.
Say goodbye to everyone when I leave a party
Go to graduate school (finally) starting in March
Go to the gym twelve times a month, until such time as it is warm enough to allow my membership to lapse
Be less cheap
Take the train to Portland, OR for Spring Break
Go to my 15-year reunion, and be proud of what I’ve done in the last 15-years, even though I’ve never yet been ambassador to the U.N. Nor have I cured cancer. At least I didn’t join a cult.
Run another half marathon and beat my time from last year
Have more dinner parties
Take myself out to dinner more
Finish painting the basement
Go to the Dominican Republic in the summer
Join a running club and go more than twice before I quit
Visit the Black Hills
Learn to dance or at least take lessons.
Go to a weekly exercise class at least four weeks in a row
Say yes more
Say no more
Stop procrastinating
Ask for help when I need it
Write more
Read more books
Join a book club that reads books
Design knitting patterns and write them down

Furthermore, the following resolutions will happen in 2010, although they will most likely not result in much growth or improvement.

Watch the rest of West Wing, even though the walk-and-talk is starting to annoy me
Forget to wash the dishes sometimes before I go to bed
Hope that Buddy can survive the night without a third walk
Laugh with my nephews and nieces and my pseudo nieces and nephews
Eat many dinners at Jimmy and Judy’s house
Knit in front of the TV
Play Wii at Perley and Jill’s
Watch So You Think You Can Dance with Sarah
Eat at least one Jucy Lucy
Eat too many croissants at A Baker’s Wife

Finally, the following resolutions will continue from last year (and the year before).

Volunteer every other week at the library
Donate blood sporadically
Give everything I can to teaching, because it’s a job I love and do well
Pay my mortgage close to on time
Care deeply for my friends and family and the children of my friends and family.

I am grateful to have you in my life. Have a happy new year. Don’t forget to send any hot single guys you meet my way for a once over.

Love and kisses from Alex and Buddy

The Permanent Collection

2009-12-23T07:57:00.003-06:00

The fourth floor of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is a busy place this time of year. The period rooms are all done up for the holidays, and families and school groups wander through to see the glitter. Anyone who has ever had a doll house knows the fascination of the period rooms. We long to rearrange the furniture, we imagine dramatic domestic scenes around the fireplace, and we picture the people readying themselves for the night in that tiny colonial bed. I have a special fascination for the period rooms, because all the years I was a child I didn't even know they existed (did they exist then?), and it wasn't until one Christmas that my step-mother took me to see them in their full splendor that I discovered a whole wing of the MIA my usual tour guides (Jimmy, Claire, my dad) must have avoided on purpose. Still, as I've gotten older I've realized that the period rooms never change. Even the holiday dazzle is the same year after year. The sameness of the rooms makes them uninteresting. I've seen them. Done that.

Meanwhile, the rest of the art on the fourth floor is the same as it always was, but it just gets better every time I go. There's the stunning one of woman lying in the grass eating an apple with her baby (Cassatt, I think. I'm not very good at remembering to read the tags). There's a nude painted by a man who has never seen a naked woman. There's a baby painted by a man who has never seen a baby. And then stop! Here's that breathtaking scene of Lucretia with the knife. Rooms of angels and religious paintings lull me back into my museum stupor, and then she catches my eye again, the woman with the candle, the flame of it covered by some man's arm, but the glow of it perfectly reflected on each of the faces huddled urgently around her. There's the couple in the moonlight. I'm not sure I love Gauguin, with his bold swatches of color, but used to have a puzzle of one of his paintings, and so I spend some time reuniting with it in the museum. And of course, I have to pause each time at the bust of the Algerian, stark contrast of bronze and stone.

Around me, on the fourth floor of the museum, the ones who make it past the period rooms to look at the permanent collection gasp along with me. I think they must gasp each time at the same place in the room. I know I do. The best paintings are old friends that still catch me by the shirtsleeves each time I see them.

"Look!" says a man to his son, "If you stand close, it's just dots. If you back up you can see the picture. He did it all with dots. Can you believe it? Just dots."

"Oh no!" shouts a woman to her out-of-town companion. "They moved it. Where is it? Oh! Oh! Here it is. Isn't it breathtaking? Isn't it wonderful?"

"It's perfect," says the man of the elderly couple to his wife. She agrees, and they stand silently in front of the Carpet Vendor for a minute, just looking.

I wonder if the way we enjoy art is Minnesotan. If we lived in Manhattan, we'd have so many more paintings to see that it would take longer to make friends with our favorites. We'd have traveling shows come and visit us, and we'd be able to make new acquaintances so easily that we might not cling so steadfastly to what we know and like. We might not notice if they move one of our favorites to a different wall. We might go to the museum not to see the dozen paintings we already love, but to meet new ones and allow them to impress us. We might not spend our entire play-going budget each year on the same old "Christmas Carol" at the Guthrie.

I don't know, but I do know that I can't wait to go back again so I can see Lucretia without the tour of catholic school tenth graders blocking my view.

Those Crazy Japanese

2009-12-13T17:45:00.002-06:00

I wasn't blogging, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been any action on this site.

I have mixed feelings about people reading this blog lately. Part of me wants to be famous with legions of fans. I want to use my blog fame to make friends and influence people. I want to flash my fame when I enter a restaurant so I can get a better table. But another, equally real, part of me, feels a little bit naked on the Internet, and I think about closing this site down so that I can get dressed and stop over-sharing with the whole wide world. That part of me kind of hopes that no one is reading these words, and figures that long periods of silence are a good thing because they drive down my readership.

So, I haven't written anything or checked this blog for comments for about a month. But that doesn't mean that there hasn't been any action on this site.

When I logged in recently, I noticed that one of my posts had eighty-four comments! Oh, the mixed feelings began to crowd out all other thoughts when I saw that number. Eighty-four people care what I have to say! I'm famous! Oh, crap. That means that eighty-four people read my post. Damn it. Did my students find me? What did I write? Crap. Crap. Crap.

So, I was filled with eagerness and dread when I clicked on this post to discover that in my absence, it has become some sort of Japanese sex chat room. At least, I assume it's Japanese. I use Firefox, and I've noticed before that Japanese characters display as a block of four numbers for Firefox users who don't bother to get the Japanese plug-in. I assume it's about sex because every once in while, embedded between the non-English characters, are words that hint at sex. Words like "sex", for example.

I deleted a ton of the comments, but there isn't an easy way to delete mass amounts of comments on Blogger, so I got lazy and decided to be content with zapping all of the ones that had English-character email addresses in them. I've also disallowed anonymous comments on this blog.

Anyway, I guess I got exactly what I wanted. I got legions of people to come to my blog. Fans, if you will. Chances are, they don't really read English, though, so I got the other thing I wanted: None of them is reading what I wrote. Perfect.

The One Without a Title

2009-12-11T19:11:00.003-06:00

You know what, you guys? I cried. Pretty much all of November, I cried. You wouldn't know it to look at me, but I can make a lot of tears when I get going.

When you start crying like that, you don't really need a reason to keep crying. It just does itself. Tears upon tears. Thinking about all the people who saw you cry, or suspect you cried, or might just think you are crying without having seen you in years can be enough to bring more tears. Writing the words "I cried" was enough to bring some more, even though today's tears are stoppable, which is the difference.

All through November, it was a torrent of heart-crushing grief. There were phone messages from my mother I couldn't play, because they were going to make it start again. There was incredible guilt whenever I did talk to her, because every conversation ended with me unable to speak past the lump in my throat and the ache in my heart, and I know that she worries and it's not fair to still do that to her after thirty-six years. There were car rides to and from the Suburb throughout which I was so wracked by sobs, I could barely see the road.

Some of it was logical. I got dumped in November, twice, including once by a guy so unworthy of me, he ignored me for a week, and then finally (and only after I asked him to explain himself) wrote me an email explaining that he wasn't ready for a relationship. I gave him three months of precious teacher-weekends, and he couldn't take the time to dial the phone to say "no thank you" in person or at least in voice.

You know it's a bad month when you end it by thanking a guy for taking the time to dump you in person. I thought I met someone really, really good in November. His emails said all of the right things. He was charming and cute in person. Our one and only date went so well I felt something I haven't felt in a long time (something like lust. Desire maybe.). Maybe if I weren't so very ready to find someone charming and cute, and if he weren't so very not, this story would have ended happily. It didn't. It ended familiarly, at least. One good date, followed by silence. And then that final conversation.

The problem is that logical or not, crying over break-ups does you no good. No one wants to hear about it when you're 36 anyway. They would have been more sympathetic when you were seventeen (not that you dated, then, because of the whole thing where you never talked in high school). Nowadays, the world likes to tell you that you can be happy by yourself. The world likes to tell you that you'll find your match when you're least looking for it (Is this the advice you give to your unemployed friends? You'll find your job when you stop wanting a job?), and you should get busy living your life alone. I do live alone. Every day. I've lived alone for more years than most of the world ever does.

So, you have a choice, ultimately. You can choose to think about how much you hurt or you can choose to not. It ends when you find the strength to choose the latter. Then the tears stop. You find your humor again. You can talk to your mother and neither of you has to end up in tears. You can go to school and you can even come home and grade homework. It doesn't hurt so very much because you decided not to let it hurt so much.

Thank you, you say, with real grace. Thank you, for taking the time to meet with me in person, to have this real conversation with me. Thank you for saying what you think will help me. Thank you for being my sweet mother who doesn't deserve to have to worry. Thank you for being my friend with an extra N who will feed me soup and listen to me cry. I live alone. Thank you for taking the time to meet with me in person. I'm worth it.

Deciding

2009-11-07T16:51:00.002-06:00

When I have a ton of work to do, often I'll get overwhelmed. I'll stew on it, worrying about it. I'll put off friends who want to have fun, because I have all this work to do, and then I'll feel sad about missing the fun that I'll procrastinate for so long that I might as well have just gone out and had the fun.

So, today, I finally just decided. "Crap," I decided. "I have a lot of work to do. I'm going to have to pull an all-dayer." So I got in my car, and I drove to the suburb, and I sat myself down and I graded paper after paper. I didn't let myself relax until I had graded every last test - all 80 of them, two pages, double-sided, crammed with tiny little numbers, written in haste and not-tidily by 80 stressed-out high-school students. "I don't understand how to do any of this," they said on Friday, the first hint of a whine I've had all year (it's been a good year). They had five tests yesterday. I'm thinking they'd know if they hadn't had to study for four different tests (and what are they doing putting other subjects ahead of Calculus, anyway?). Test results do not back up their claims. They know how to do some of it. One of them even knows how to do all of it, plus the bonus.

I still have work to do, but after my all-dayer I know that I can do it in the 24-hours before I have to be back at school. Enough with the whining. Just do it.

Something Small

2009-11-06T21:27:00.002-06:00

The reason you haven't heard from me: I was thinking about me and dating, and I decided that I'm not going to let myself think that it's my fault that I'm single, anymore. It's just plain, dumb luck, and while there are lots of ways you make your own luck, there are also lots of ways in which your plain, dumb luck is Not Your Fault.

Like, for example this: You meet a guy. He's attractive and he seems to be into you. You're into him. Then, bam, he stops calling. What happened?

Correct answer: God only knows. Do yourself a favor. Stop thinking about it.

Or this: You meet a guy. You like him. He likes you. Then, bam, everything he does annoys the crap out of you. You can't even stand to be in the same room with him. What happened?

Correct answer: Who cares? Stop thinking about it. Just get out of the room as fast as you can.

Advice by Al. Free. And worth every penny.

Dog Days

2009-08-27T10:05:00.017-05:00

Summer is winding down here in Minnesota. We have a law which prevents school from starting before Labor Day, and it means that we're at the end of the longest summer ever. I am not complaining.

I spent a big chunk of the summer making my home more homey. I'm not with-it enough to have before pictures, but here are the after pictures.

I got a new bathroom faucet. This is the kind of thing you use before pictures for, I think, but it makes a big difference to me, and so it makes the photo gallery.

I tried to take a picture that looked daunting, because that's what it felt like to think about the task of replacing the bathtub rubber hose with an actual diverting faucet. I did the plumbing myself, with just a little bit of last minute rescue help from a good friend. This change may have improved my lifestyle the most. I can now bathe, not just shower. I love baths.
The second biggest lifestyle change is hidden in this picture. Can you find it? It's not the beaded unicorn or the spice rack. It's the remote control light switch for my kitchen ceiling fan. Now, instead of groping around in the dark for the pull-chain I get to flip a switch, just like a civilized human being.

The kitchen received the most attention. You can't see them, but I refinished the floors (hired someone to refinish the floors). I sold the World's Heaviest Butcher's Block (good-bye. Don't let the door hit you on the way out) which made room for my great-grandparents' kitchen table.

And I bought the Best Thing Ever on Craigslist. It's called a Hoosier cabinet, and now I finally have more counter space and more storage, and I didn't have to buy crappy Ikea cabinets to do it. Also pictured is a broom that is so attractive I don't have to hide it in a closet. It's called "Sweep Dreams". Are you cracking up?
The Hoosier cabinet gives me room to store my food, and it also helps me answer one of life's most persistent mysteries: "Where are my keys?" I try to hang them on the hook in the cabinet as soon as I come home. I'm not perfect, but I can see perfect from here.
There actually is a before picture for my two-tone cabinet paint job. Painting is a lot of work, but it makes the kitchen feel lighter and airier now that it has mellow green trim. Besides, who am I to complain? I am legally required to stay on vacation for three more days. Oh, and just so you know, I do have dish towels to match my trim. I'm so Martha Stewart. They're just dirty. I think Martha has people to do the wash for her, now that she's out of the Big House.

Here's the dining room, getting all decked out for Tuesday's dinner party for eight people. I can throw dinner parties now that my house doesn't suck anymore.
The book I was following ("The Eight Step Home Cure"), said to put the bed where the king would sleep. I know a certain older brother of mine who would freak out that it's not centered on that window, but I'm willing to trade symmetry for being able to navigate past my dresser. The king has never slept in such tight quarters. It's good for him. It builds character.
My yarn stash gets its own cabinet. The artwork in my bedroom is courtesy of my three-year-old nephew. Nothing like a cheery scribble to greet you first thing in the morning.
Here's my writing corner. Even though I don't use it religiously, it's good to know that it's there for whenever I'm ready to start my novel. And it's labeled with my name, just in case I get confused and think it belongs to someone else who lives here.
New couch, chair, and footstool courtesy of Craigslist. I rented a moving truck and conned my brother into helping me carry it, and then I got it all home and realized that it stunk like someone else's house in such a way that I couldn't even stand to sit in my living room. I spent an entire day throwing as much of it as I could into the washing machine, and then airing it out in the yard. It now smells like me. Thank goodness. I might not always smell great, but at least I always smell familiar.
Yes, that's Buddy sleeping next to his bed.
With my new system, everything has a place. The place for random papers waiting for me to eventually sort them, is here in my sun room/office. Well, at least they aren't all over the house.
The daybed isn't new, but doesn't it look nice? The drawers under it are newly sorted. If you were a small child who visits me, you would know that the one of the far left contains all of my stocking-stuffers from recent years, and it's the one place where Auntie Al has anything fun.

So, that's it, then. My house. I now know what I want my house to look like. I just have to manage to keep it looking good while concurrently working full-time. We'll just see about that.

Just Plain Mean

2009-08-23T16:43:00.002-05:00

I just read an article about a survey about sarcasm, and I'm not sure it would have spoken so directly to me, except that I've been reading a few Internet dating profiles recently, and I've noticed that a lot of men describe their sense of humor as sarcastic.

According to the article 55% of respondents to a sarcasm survey, when asked to report a sarcastic comment that they had made, wrote down a comment that contained no sarcasm.

It’s no wonder why sarcasm is so often misused or misunderstood — half of us can’t recognize sarcasm in the first place. Something we may mean in a sarcastic manner may be seen as being just plain mean because it was never actually sarcasm in the first place.

I've stopped scouring the profiles of self-proclaimed sarcastic men for sarcasm. I'm starting to think that most of these "sarcastic" men are really just mean, because well over half of them display not only no sarcasm, but no humor at all in the 1000 words they are allowed to use to describe themselves. Turns out my time would be better spent reading psychology articles than dating profiles.

Tonight, I'm not doing either. I'm biking to the discount theater to watch "Up". I'm hoping for it to be amusing without being mean.

I Ate a Rabbit

2009-08-17T10:21:00.007-05:00

Once upon a time, Sarah and Alex joined the liberals from the city in driving their fuel-efficient cars to a farm near Duluth.The chef, Scott, from the Corner Table in Minneapolis, joined forces with the chef, Scott, from the Scenic Cafe in Duluth to cook us all dinner at a big table under the open sky.
The wind blew over our wine glasses, and it threatened to rain, but we held onto our glasses and zipped up our hoodies, and hoped for the best.
The best turned out to be a platter of sausages dipped in fresh mustard to whet our appetites. It was also bowls full of gazpacho eaten too quickly for photographs. It was carrots grown right on the farm marinated in a little bit of vinegar and cornichons and olives paired with a Mesabi Red from the Lake Superior Brewery just down the way.
Then it was time for a Caprese salad paired with beets of all things. Root vegetables do well in the climate of Duluth. Every course came with a matching wine, which I allowed myself the smallest of tastes, for I had to drive home that night.
The dinner was rabbit. The little furry varmint was cooked in duck fat and wrapped in prosciutto, so every bite was delicious. I've never had so many courses (good thing I ran my half-marathon on Saturday), so I was afraid I wouldn't have room for dessert.
But there's always room for goat-cheese cake with fresh berries on top!

The Scotts did themselves proud, the food was delicious, the company was delightful, and after the salads the clouds even blew away and the sun shone down on the table. It was a miracle as big as eating beets and liking them.

P.S. Happy birthday to me!

I Hate Everything About You

2009-08-14T10:10:00.003-05:00

Even though I'm trying to be positive, I went back to the periodontist today. He's the man who hacked away at my gums, rearranged them, and then sewed them back in new places. I hate him.

It was the kind of trip where you're walking down the street and you meet Angry Spitting Man, and the way you meet him is he hocks one right at your feet while you're waiting for the light to change. In the block or two before Angry Spitting Man storms out of your eyesight, you see him spit three more times, twice at the feet of well-dressed women and once next to a shiny red bicycle.

Then you show up in the dreaded office, the place that made you weep last time because gum surgery is worse than they say it is, and the receptionist is gone, so you sit down, awkwardly, wondering whether anyone will figure out that you're here. You hope they don't. They do.

The dental technician leans you back in your chair and aims the light in your eyes, just like she did the other two times you were there. The light is blinding. Your regular dentist doesn't do this. She knows how to aim the light at your mouth without hitting your eyes.

"Um," you say, "my tongue turned black. Is that normal?"

"Yeah, it's the rinse," she says.

Nobody mentioned that the rinse would make your tongue turn black when they prescribed it.

"It looks better now," she says.

"Yeah, I stopped using the rinse, because I can brush now." You're proud of this, the brushing of your teeth. The novelty of it. How quickly and well you heal.

She gives you a disapproving glare. "You're not supposed to brush! It's too soon to brush. It won't heal properly if you brush. How long have you been brushing?" She has your lip in her hand when she asks you this question. You don't answer. If she wants you to talk to her, she can take her damn hands out of your mouth. And she can move the light out of your eyes.

Nobody told you how long you weren't allowed to brush your teeth when they hacked away at your gums and rearranged them. The light shining in your eyes for an hour and a half. The sound of slicing. One small red dot of blood on the dentist's hands right in front of your eyes. Awareness of exactly what they were doing, even though you couldn't feel a thing. The way they kept going while tears rolled down your temples and into your ears.

She flips off the light and exits the room, leaving you alone leaning back at that awkward turtle-on-its-back position, worrying that you won't heal properly, and they'll have to do it again, not sure that you'd be strong enough, really, to do it all over again. You, who are usually so quiet and mild, swat the light down, away from your eyes, just in case they come back and turn it on again.

The dentist comes in, reaims the light directly in your eyes, and then realizes he's missing the chart. He leaves you again, a blinded turtle trapped in a chair. You hear him ask for your chart. You hear whispering. She's telling on you, about the brushing. Fine.

Nobody told you when you could brush again.

He says your gums look good. They healed quickly. Then he stops. "Candace tells me that you've been brushing. Just the teeth though? Not the gums?"

"Yes," you say, meekness returning, damn it.

"How long have you been brushing?"

"Just a couple of days," you lie. How long? You don't remember. As soon as it didn't hurt. As soon as you could, because of the black tongue and the grossness of not brushing. And because no one told you how long you couldn't brush.

When he's done giving you more specific brushing instructions, he says, "OK, I'll tell your dentist that you healed nicely," and he walks out of the room.

No one tells you that you can leave. No one guides you through the maze and back to the lobby. You just pick up your bag and go. You are in the elevator before anyone can stop you. You keep thinking about the $800 you will pay these people, and you swear as the elevator takes you back to the street that you will never, ever allow anyone to rearrange your gums again as long as you both shall live.

Oh! And Nieces and Nephews.

2009-08-13T08:29:00.002-05:00

I forgot to mention how grateful I am for the nieces and nephews in my life.

Right now, five of them are staying with my parents. I've been over to visit a couple of times this week. If I don't bring Buddy, he is the first topic of conversation.

"Where's Buddy?"
"I left him at home, because I just went running."
"Why?"
"Because I ran ten miles and he can't do that."
"Why?"
"Because he's old."
"Can you go get him?"

So last night, I brought Buddy to a family pizza party, where the two local nephews joined the five out-of-towners to create the annual cacophony of familial joy. Buddy's arrival was heralded by the shouts of seven (well, maybe six, since the baby doesn't care) nieces and nephews. He was, once again, the first topic of conversation.

"Buddy! Buddy's here. And Alex!"
"Buddy! Buddy! Buddy!"
"Did Buddy have a bath?"
"Sit! Buddy! Sit! Sit!"
"Did you bring any treats for Buddy?"
"Buddy! Sit!"
"Can Buddy fly on the airplane?"
"Buddy! Lie down! Play dead! Buddy!"
"Buddy licked me! Why did Buddy lick my leg?"
"Buddy! Shake!"
"Buddy! Stand up! Stand up!"

Did I mention that I'm grateful that Buddy is such a good dog? He doesn't know what all of these children are yelling about (and he only obeys their insistent commands to sit when I'm in the background with a stern look), but he accepts their eager attention with a calm submissive demeanor which endears him to them (and to their parents), even though he obviously doesn't know any tricks.

Gratitude (this one's kind of sappy)

2009-08-12T10:02:00.003-05:00

Some things for which I am grateful. In no particular order.

I am grateful that Buddy is a good dog who doesn't bark too much. I am grateful that he needs me to walk him three times a day, and that he forces me out of the house, even when it's cold or rainy.

I am grateful that my family is full of good, loving people. I am grateful that my parents believed in my education enough to pay a lot for it. I am grateful that I never had student loans, even though I don't usually like to admit such a terribly unfair thing out loud.

I am grateful I went to Carleton where I learned to be myself among peers who finally understood my sense of humor. I am grateful for the friends I still have from there, and especially grateful that I've been able to be part of their lives as they've grown and changed since then.

I am grateful for the friends I have who weren't from Carleton, because they remind me how to be myself without the crutch of a shared life in Northfield.

I am grateful that I have known romantic love. I am grateful to the men who loved me even when I didn't love them enough back, and I am grateful to the ones who were gentle when I loved them too much.

I am grateful that I learned how to teach - and grateful that my education was, once again, debt-free, thanks this time to the government and the Minneapolis Public Schools. I am grateful that I've never worked in a school where I had to buy my own paper and that my students each get their own textbooks for the year. I am especially grateful that I found a career that allows me to be creative and active while still doing good in the world. I am grateful for summers off and long days that allow me to create my own projects.

I am grateful for good food, eaten with people I love. I am grateful that I have the kind of body that doesn't put the good food in unsightly places, and I am grateful that I finally learned how to run when I was in my late twenties, and I am most grateful for an injury free running life.

I am grateful to MPR and NPR and podcasts and the sound of Terry Gross's voice when I'm stressed out, and the way the Slate Political Gabfest team bickers, and the stilted way Josh and Chuck from "Stuff You Should Know" speak.

I am grateful for my health and my health insurance, and I wish I lived in a world where no one had to think about whether they could afford an annual exam.

I am grateful to live in a space that is my own and grateful that it is comfortable and fits me so well. I am lucky to be able to afford solitude, and (with apologies to Bev who lives next door and might, possibly be able to see from her living room) every day I am grateful that I don't have to shut the door when I pee.

Off the Grid

2009-08-10T12:27:00.003-05:00

When I was a kid, we used to go to the North Shore every summer for my birthday. To celebrate the day, Margot made some kind of a cake in a bundt pan (When I got older, because she hates to bake and I love it, I baked my own cake). My dad made Dutch Babies with lemon juice and powdered sugar for breakfast. I got to bring a friend, who for many years, was Emma, my red-headed friend who lived in Finnlayson, MN. We reconnected every year, city mouse and country mouse, sharing a bed in a cabin, and exploring the rocky shores of Lake Superior together. We even "swam" in the lake, although this activity was reserved for extremely hot days, because the water of Lake Superior never rises above 50 degrees. You lose feeling in your feet before you gain the courage to dunk your head. Once you've gone under, you dash back to shore. If there isn't a warm rock baking in the sun for you to sprawl upon when you get out, it could be days before the blood starts circulating again.

This year, my friend was Buddy, the dog. Emma and I have lost touch, and besides, he needs a dog sitter when I'm gone if he doesn't get to come along. And so we drove up in my dad's car, just like Emma and I used to do. Buddy rode in the back, quietly. Buddy curls up in the car, and only sits up to look around when we slow down. Otherwise, he relaxes and enjoys the ride.

I realized, midway through the trip, as Margot and my dad adopted Buddy into our small family cabin lifestyle, that, really, I have a bit too much love for the beast. I'm a little too worried that he will endear himself to our companions when we travel together. I sleep with one eye open for the dog. Is he sleeping? Is he getting into trouble? Is he worried? Does he need me?

So, then, this is what happens when a single woman gets a dog. He becomes a lover and a child all wrapped up in too much fur. Oh, well, at least he's not a cat. At least (small blessing counted) I haven't become a Cat Lady. No. I've just spent the weekend excusing my dog's farts to two people who were kind enough to allow their love for me to help them decide to let him sleep in their cabin, but at least I haven't become a Cat Lady.

The Perfect Distance

2009-08-06T12:02:00.003-05:00

So I'm training for a half-marathon, which will be next Saturday. I use the word "training" lightly. I just run more often, and have increased how far I run. I thought I needed a goal, so on a bit of a whim a month ago, I signed up to run more than twice as far as I had ever run before. It turns out that if you run slowly, as I do, then there is no reason why you can't run twice as far as you normally do. Or, at least, that's what I found out, when I started running farther.

I used to run three miles two or three times a week. Now I run five or six times a week, and I run longer distances. My longest distance to date was about nine and a half miles around the chain of lakes in Minneapolis (and did I feel lucky to be a Minneapolitan when I ran that most beautiful nearly-ten miles in the country? Yes, in fact, I did.).

Still, the chain of lakes run took all morning, and it wiped me out all day. The perfect distance is the one I ran this morning. Six miles. There's a loop along the Mississippi that crosses the river into St. Paul and then crosses back over into Minneapolis. Six miles gives you time to listen to an entire episode of Fresh Air (and, let's be honest, if you run at my pace a little bit of Planet Money, too). It gives you time to be in a rhythm of running that allows all of that other stuff that you always think to get pushed all the way to the back of your brain so that you really hardly hear it any more. It also gives you a pretty good reason to stop by the Baker's Wife for a pastry afterward, and it forces you to leave the aged dog at home. I love six miles.

Now, if only I had signed up for a 10K. That would be perfect.

P.S. If you missed Terry Gross talking to Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno, whose daughter was murdered, and you kind of like a good cry, then here's a link to it. I don't even like poetry and every one of her poems hit me right in the gut.
Note: This link is not here for my mother, so if you carried me in your womb for nine months, do yourself a favor and don't listen to this podcast. And if you know my mother, don't teach her how to listen to this podcast. Give her something fun, instead. Maybe she'd like a little Stuff You Should Know. Josh and Chuck can lighten any mood.

People Think I Exaggerate

2009-08-05T11:37:00.002-05:00

Recently, I decided to get more active on the dating frontier. I pulled up some profiles, and emailed a couple of dudes. One of them emailed me back, and it wasn't witty banter that made my brain tingle, but it was all right, and so we corresponded for a while until I suggested that we meet in person, because what's the point of sending emails to strangers, when they might turn out to be the opposite of attractive in real life?

And he said, "I'm too busy right now to meet in person. I'm just here for conversation."

Conversation? It's email, hoser. It's email with a stranger, and as far as I'm concerned email is the tool to get you to the real life. It's not the Thing. It's not the Reason We're Here.

Oh, and lest you think that this was all an elaborate brush-off, because I'm a repulsive email conversationalist, let me tell you that he promptly changed his profile to say that he was too busy to date and was just here to chat. Yep. On a dating site.

What I Wanted and What Really Happened

2009-08-04T09:24:00.004-05:00

What I wanted was to go to an open mike night on my own. I wanted to enter a bar where a crowd of people were engrossed in what was going on on stage, where artists shared their talents in the dimly lit room, and everyone drank good beer out of pint glasses. I imagined drinking a couple of pints and then standing up to read my short piece. The crowd of people would be curious about this woman. They would be mildly disappointed that she wasn't here to sing. They would be worried when she began to read. Aren't we always worried by sincere people who try to share their writing on stage? What if it sucks? Then, I would start reading, and my reading would be good, and the silence would grow as would this imaginary crowd's interest me. How could so fascinating a character be here on her own and not surrounded by admiring friends? (Hey. It's my fantasy. Get your own if you want to be admired.) Maybe one of them would buy me a beer.

I couldn't do it.

I parked blocks away from the bar, hoping that the walk would give me courage. I walked up to the bar, feeling the crinkling paper in my back pocket. I opened the door, and through the dark screen of sad, lonely people drinking at the counter I saw a musician with lots of tattoos setting up his equipment in front of the microphone, and I saw no admiring crowd. And I realized that sitting at the bar drinking with the sad, lonely people was the last thing I wanted to do on a Monday, and the thing I was going to read would have been the last thing they would have wanted to hear, and it would have been terrible and dark and depressing. I pretended that I was checking my cell phone, turned on my heel and left before I even sat down.

So, I went home, and tried to watch "Six Feet Under", but it was terrible and dark and depressing, so I stopped the episode and went to bed.

My Bed's Broken

2009-08-03T11:14:00.000-05:00

All of those things you just thought. Not true. Damn thing is just an antique.

Tastes a Little Like Car

2009-08-02T18:03:00.003-05:00

I found an old transcript of a road trip I took with a friend. It was actually the move back to Minneapolis from Portland. I had a microphone and a mini-disk recorder (in one of my dream jobs, I was a reporter for NPR), and I spent the boring parts of the trip recording our interactions. Mostly we chatted about nothing. My evil cat was ill, so she made the first part of our journey memorably stinky. We had a gift for bringing out the humor in each other, and so we drove across Washington swapping the role of straight-man more times than I can count.

Partway through the journey, we decided to cook a meal by wrapping it in tinfoil, strapping it to some hot part of the moving van's exhaust system, and driving until it was done. My friend had been experimenting with this technique, made famous by the cookbook "Manifold Destiny". Here's what he said about his attempts to cook on his own small car:

I've tried cooking [garlic cloves] on the engine block which was the best deal for me, and that ended up getting it just a little bit warm, but not really cooked at all, and then the other two or three cloves that I've tried have ... either fallen off my car or they've been totally raw, and so I've eaten some raw garlic - really kind of bummed my coworkers out.

So, understandably, we were worried about raw food as a result of this experiment. We started with just one potato, figuring that if a potato came out raw, at least it wouldn't give us Salmonella. It was also a cold, windy day in early May, which brought some complaints from my friend as he crawled under the truck and wired a tinfoil packet of oil, garlic, and potatoes onto the exhaust pipe. Not wanting to eat carbon monoxide, I insisted on four layers of foil.

Here's what happened when we pulled the truck off the highway forty minutes later, and tried to talk into the microphone while struggling with wind and four layers of hot foil while crouched under a moving van in a post office parking lot in the middle of Podunk, Montana.

A: We have dinner. Well, we have something that resembles hot. J is unwrapping our dinner.
J: I still think it's bold to call it dinner.
A: Well, it was definitely just one potato. Whether it's cooked or not, it was still only one potato.
J: We're through the first layer. Looking pretty good. Oh, yeah. This looks good.
A: Smells better and better. It seems to be cooked in just that one spot.
J: Yeah. I wonder why that is. Maybe that's where the oil leaked out. But yeah, you're kind of right. Huh, that's interesting. All right. Here's the first food. It kind of looks cooked. Hey, want some potato? (chews) That's done.
A: We're geniuses!
J: I mean it tastes a little bit like ... car
A: ...carbon
J: Oh, my God, it is burnt. Look at this. It's totally burnt to a crisp. I mean some of these art OK, but most of it is just cooked. Wow. It was like it was on fire in there.

After burning our potato, we did make a second attempt. We wound up successfully cooking a complete chicken, broccoli, and potato meal, and eating it while crouched on my old furniture in the back of the van while the evil cat had the smelly cab to herself. The lengths I'll go to to avoid McDonald's...

Half-way Done

2009-07-10T18:08:00.002-05:00

Jobs that are halfway done

1. Bathtub Plumbing
2. Kitchen Door
3. Rearranging Living Room
4. Toilet Plumbing
5. Cleaning

Notice how I didn't say halfway not-done. This is not just because this is a grammatically unnatural construction. It is also because I am an incurable optimist. Yep. That's me. Pollyanna all the time.

Day of Death Part 2

2009-07-09T13:03:00.005-05:00

This story is so totally not worth the month-long wait. Not sure what happened to me. Not sure I'm back, but I can at least finish the narrative. I'm giving new meaning to the phrase "unreliable narrator".

Recall that we were on the train on the way to Kutna Hora's creepy bone museum, and the introvert (me) was for once in charge of our plans, while the extrovert (Byn) was not excited about them. Predictably, when we arrived in the small town, I chose not to ask for directions. (Talk to strangers who might not speak English? No, let's just wander around. I'm sure we'll find it.) We came to a cemetery, and I said something like, "Well, this must be the consecrated ground. Look how crowded the headstones are."

What you might not realize, if you've never been in Europe, is that even in death, Americans claim a whole lot more real estate than our European counterparts. We have all this space, see, so why not make a cemetery with rolling hills and spreading lawns and winding roads past trees and ponds? Why not choose a family plot that is approximately the size of your living room? Why not make a death room to match? We have space, and we can always head west if we need more.

So, yeah, the headstones were crowded together to our eyes, but it still might not have been the right cemetery. I don't know that it wasn't, because, of course, I didn't ask for directions, but it seems like maybe it wasn't, because we could find no evidence of the ossuary. What we did find, in the middle of the crowded, small town cemetery was a shed. Being tourists, we did what tourists do, and we snooped. We stood on tiptoes and peeked in the windows, and we found dusty stacks of femurs carefully piled up against the walls of the shed. We saw a rusty rolling cart full of old banana boxes, each one packed with skulls. We saw sunlight filtered through dust reflect off the grimy bones.

"Is this the ossuary? How old is that guidebook?" I asked Byn.

"Do you think these are spare parts for the bone museum?" he asked.

"It's creepy."

"Let's get out of here."

And so we left into the sunshine, past the Marlboro factory, over to Byn's cathedral where we hung out on the lawn smelling the tobacco in the air and awaiting the arrival of the next train back to Prague. Our willpower to see creepy bone art sapped by the stark reality of Dole banana boxes filled with ancient human heads. Perhaps, looking back on it, a trip to a cigarette-producing town with a bone shrine was not the best way to spend the afternoon with someone so recently grieving the deaths of two parents from cancer. Sometimes, I'm not as sensitive as you think I am.

The bone place does exist, and we even rode back to Prague next to two perky tour-guides-in-training who showed us pictures and post-cards of it. But the two of us never found it. We'd had quite enough death for one day.

Day of Death Part 1

2009-06-16T19:28:00.004-05:00

One of the things that is floating around the Internet is a way to find your NPR name. Why should Kai Ryssdal and Mara Liasson have all the fun of having odd-sounding names? Anyway, the way you get your NPR name is you take your first name and insert your middle initial anywhere it sounds good. Then your last name is the name of the smallest foreign city you have ever visited. I'm a little bit in love with my NPR name. It's pretty good. Ready? It's Alexnis Kutna Hora. I know, right? And you thought Mrike Montreal was exotic.

Kutna Hora comes with its very own story. So, sit down, make yourself comfortable and prepare to hear about The Day of Death, starring Alexnis and her good friend Byn (not his real name, but it's close).

Byn and I met at the small liberal arts school many, many years ago, but we didn't become good friends until I moved to Portland. He had just moved there from California, having spent the years shortly after graduation nursing his parents who died, one after the other, of cancer.

Byn and I bonded over cards. He was hyper-competitive. I was raised to win at cards, and I can respect a good competitor. He used to have parties at his house for the "Quiets", during which he'd invite two other introverts and me over for cards and he'd watch us interact. We were Byn's own personal social science experiment. He also counseled me after my break-up, and he talked me through a year of hating my job.

He had a wisdom I couldn't match, because I hadn't experienced as much life as he had, but I like to think that I'm a good observer, so I nudged him when I thought there was something he had been too busy talking to notice. He encouraged me to write. I encouraged him to pursue his dream of becoming the next Ira Glass. In short, we were good buddies and we were good for each other at the time.

And so, when he set off to spend his inheritance in a way he wished his parents had spent it when they were alive by traveling around the world, I knew that I'd miss one of my best friends in all of Portland. Weeks later, after I'd finally quit the hated job, he invited me to join him on his travels, and it didn't take much arm-twisting to get me to pack up a backpack, send the cat off to board with some friends, and join him for two months in Prague.

And now, finally, here we are at the story. We were in Prague. We'd found a wonderful hostel there called Sir Toby's run by a young German guy, but we'd gotten a little too comfortable around the streets of Prague and the kitchen of Sir Toby's, and we were looking for an adventure for the day. Byn had, thus far, acted as tour guide, because he was the one with the guide book, but the weather outside was February, which means I was irritable, and finally, he handed the book off to me.

"You decide," he said. "Pick something for us to do. Let's take a train, and get out of the city, but you pick where we go."

He'd been focusing on bath towns. I didn't much feel like being naked in a room full of Eastern Europeans, so I turned the page and found a grisly description of Kutna Hora. It fit my February mood exactly. In Kutna Hora, there was a bit of consecrated ground where people liked to travel to be buried. No problem. The death rate was pretty steady, so burying some non-locals in the town wasn't a very big deal, until the Plague came thundering through Europe. Suddenly that bit of consecrated ground in poor little Kutna Hora was overflowing with bodies. What do you do with stacks and stacks of extra dead people? Well, if you're some priest in Kutna Hora, apparently you make art out of them.

He made a coat of arms out of every bone in the human body. He made a chandelier of bones. He built a bone throne. I can't remember what else he made, but he was a very industrious priest, and he had a lot of raw materials, and so his little ossuary has become quite the creepy tourist attraction. Who wouldn't want to take a train to go see it on a grim February day? How much better was a bone throne than sitting in a steam room with sweaty Europeans?

Byn seemed to regret slightly his decision to hand over decision making authority to me, but he yielded to my wishes, and we figured out the train to Kutna Hora. We were off.

I reread the brief guide-book blurb about the town while we sat on the train. "Hey, Byn-Baby," I said. "Did you know that there is also a giant Marlboro factory in town?"

"There's also a cathedral," he said.

I scoffed. Really. How many cathedrals can one person see? And why would you see a cathedral when there were coats of arms made of bones? We were most certainly not traveling all the way to Kutna Hora just to see another boring cathedral.

...To be continued...

Old Notebook Uncovered During Cleaning

2009-06-15T08:37:00.003-05:00

I, who am so practical and mathy, sometimes paint pictures with words. If you wanted to, I suppose you could call it poetry. I'm not so sure about that.

Silence Doesn't Bother You

The fridge kicks on and we both look up from our plates.
I catch your eye before your gaze returns to you food and
your fork makes another round trip flight from
potatoes to
mouth
to potatoes to
mouth.
The silence which is killing me doesn't bother you.

I wonder if I am losing my mind.
I wonder if the fridge is broken again and stuck in the on phase of its cycle --
and then it stops --
leaving me cold,
but the silence doesn't bother you.

I repeat the word "wonder" in my mind and
I wonder if it's the only word in English that doesn't lose its meaning upon repetition.
I try another
another
another another another
Meaningless.
And still the silence doesn't bother you.

You chew each bite five times.
Two heavy chews, and then three fast ones.
Slow, slow, quick quick quick
Slow, slow, quick quick quick
Turn.
Look at me.
Down at my plate.
Back at me.
"You gonna eat that?"
I shrug.
The silence doesn't bother you.

The Kitchen Project

2009-06-11T11:20:00.004-05:00

So I was doing this book called the "Eight Step Apartment Cure", and I was supposed to thoroughly clean my kitchen, and the thing about my kitchen is that I only have three cupboards, unless you count the one under the sink, in which case I have four. I have a dishes cupboard, a pots and pans cupboard, a food cupboard, and a nasty under-the-sink cupboard. Oh, and not to brag or anything, but I also have a drawer. One drawer. It squeals like a pig on slaughtering day when you open it.

You might be able to guess that in my thorough cleaning, which involved throwing away a ton of stuff, I still ran out of space in my three cupboards. Where do you put your dishtowels, for example, when this is the entirety of your storage space?

There's room in the kitchen, too. It's actually a big room. So, I'm thinking I need another set of cabinets. Unfortunately, thoughts of new cabinets caused all kitchen cleaning to stop (as careful observers of the photograph may have already deduced). Obviously, if I am getting new cabinets, I need to spend less time tidying these ones up. And if I'm getting new cabinets, something needs to be done about the floor. And the floor guy can't come until late July, so maybe I should do it myself. But I'm not sure I know how to do it myself, and then there are the cabinets. Can I use Ikea ones, even though I usually hate everything from Ikea? And how do I install cabinets by myself, anyway? Oh, and I really need new electrical throughout the house. How much is that going to cost? And would it be easier for an electrician to do that before I do the floors and the cabinets?

As you can see, I'm paralyzed. This is why my kitchen is always so messy, isn't it?

Graduation

2009-06-09T22:12:00.003-05:00

So, I survived my first year. Tonight I led a line of ten graduates in green gowns to their seats, and I sat in my full regalia (such as it is, at BA plus nothing), while they walked carefully across the stage, not tripping, waving to their friends, and collecting the empty frame that will someday hold their diploma.

It's over. I did a year.

Here is what I learned:

To the average person on the street, "I teach Calculus" sounds more impressive than "I teach algebra to kids who hate math." Since I was teaching academic kids for the first time, I thought they would be better behaved than they were. On the other hand, I thought the math would be harder than it was. So, in the end, it was a wash. Doing either one well is hard. If you do either one and do it well, then I am impressed with you.
Some kids have an easier time doing a u-substitution if they treat dx as just another variable when they substitute it out for du. I'm just saying.
School spirit can be oppressive. To the kid who didn't stand while the rest of his classmates chanted a cheer during the graduation ceremony, what else do you call it? He's alienated and alone while surrounded by a concrete example of group-think in green gowns. I remember how turned off I was every time my own high school principal ended her daily announcements in her thick Iowa accent with the words "Rocket pride." It's worse when everyone drinks the cool aid. Or eats the cake, as the case may be.
Even for a tech-y teacher like me, technology won't get used in a school-setting unless someone outside of the classroom supports you. And by "supports you" I mean "gives you a phone number to call if the technology fails" and "prods you to see new ways of using the tools to reach more kids" and "catches hold of your enthusiasm for creative uses of technology in your classroom".
Leaving your room is important. Next year, I'm going to have to leave my room to team teach two periods a day. I can't wait to form new relationships and get to know new parts of my building. I spent one year on the Island of Alex. Year two is all about building a boat.

Congratulations to the class of 2009.

A Trend Such as it is

2009-06-08T20:04:00.002-05:00

A pattern develops. You are the type to find patterns anyway. It's what makes you so good at math. You try to explain this to the children. Math, you say, it's not memorizing formulas and multiplying big numbers in your head. It's finding the pattern, the way things fit. When you know the patterns the formulas practically memorize themselves. Actually, come to think of it, you don't say it nearly enough. What you find yourself saying instead is, "Yes, you have to memorize it. Suck it up." Oh, well. No body's perfect.

Anyway, rambling aside. The pattern.

You go on a first date. You've reached an age of skepticism. You don't like it, but you can't change it. You're not inclined to like people right away. You are even less likely to like dates. Perhaps it's wisdom. More likely, it's bigotry.

So, the fact that he's charming on the first date creeps up on you. It takes twenty - maybe thirty minutes - before you begin to realize that your cheeks hurt from smiling so hard. It takes longer before you remember to hope that he feels charmed by you. You forget sometimes that you are as much on trial as he is. You have a big head, after all, so you usually figure that you are the more attractive, intelligent, and witty of the two of you at the table in the coffee shop.

Let's face it. Usually you are.

Your conversation meanders in a pleasant way. You are interesting. He is, too. You both leave stuff out, but put enough stuff in, that the conversational stew you create together tastes lively and rich. It's an appetizer for later conversations that you start to realize you are getting excited to have.

You part ways after spending more time together than you expected to spend. You might hug. You might even kiss, chastely, because it's a first date. You might mention later meetings. You might leave them hanging silently in the air between you.

And then. It's over. That's it. There's a call or an email, sometimes prompted by you, sometimes by him. He's not ready to date. He's met someone else. He's not sure what happened, why his last girlfriend dumped him. He's not over it. You are smart and funny and interesting, he says, and he wishes you all the best.

All the best.

Blah blah blah.

Not you.

Me.

Blah blah blah.

You've wasted all of your best ingredients on a conversational stew that you'll never get to taste again. If it happened just once, you'd sigh, and curse your luck. But it happens more than once, and so you feel that it must be a pattern. If only you could figure it out. It seemed easy and fun. And then it was not.

Ken Ken (or How I Spent My Morning)

2009-06-07T08:42:00.002-05:00

Unfortunately, the online New York Times has six Ken Ken puzzles available for free. This means that while I've been awake since six, I am only just tearing myself away from my laptop to get started with my day. Furthermore, the Minneapolis paper is sitting on my doorstep as I write this, and I can hear the siren call of the puzzle from here. It could be noon before I shower.

It's not a big deal to waste one morning, right? It's gray outside, anyway, and all I have on my list of things to do today is a complete overhaul of my kitchen. I have time, right?

An Actual Conversation

2009-06-06T08:50:00.002-05:00

At the Farmer's Market this morning.

Sales Guy (in a non-Minnesota accent): Boiled peanuts! Try some boiled peanuts!
Guy on Cell Phone: Bull penis?
Sales Guy: Boil-ed peanuts.
Cell Phone Guy: Boiled penis?
Sales Guy (excitedly): That's right. Boiled peanuts. Try some.
Cell Phone Guy (looking down at his crotch): Well, as long as it's not mine.
Sales Guy: Why? Do you like yours roasted?
Cell Phone Guy: ???
Sales Guy (after a delay): Oh, never mind. I gotcha.

The cell phone guy gamely tried the boiled peanuts, as did I. Miscommunication aside, I'm not so sure boiled peanuts are going to become the next great snack food of the farmer's market. Boiling salt water dribbles down your chin as you try to crack the shell. The reward of soggy peanut pulp isn't enough to get me to come back for more.

The Elephant in the Room

2009-06-05T16:48:00.003-05:00

Well, you have to write something about the last day of school, don't you?

You have to at least acknowledge that the next three months or so are going to be relaxing, with some fun, a little productivity, and just a tinge of wallowing sadness, because that's what happens when I have too much free time. Oh, but don't worry. I don't plan to wallow the whole time. I'll also be going to Carleton and Macalester for some training. Maybe I only became a teacher in order to spend more time on Minnesota's most beautiful private liberal arts campuses. Campi?

My Big Ol' Melon

2009-05-24T13:39:00.003-05:00

When I was a baby, for some reason the doctors measured my head circumference, and concluded that I either had water on the brain or an enormous head. This prompted my entire extended family to wrap tape measures around their noggins, and conclude that my enormous head was completely within the range of normal for our family.

Of course, big-headedness has another meaning, and if you didn't know me very well you might assume that while it's undeniable that I literally have a big head, in the figurative sense, perhaps my head is not so very large. I'm shy, so you might think I'm modest. This is not true. Underneath my quiet exterior (and occasional bouts of crippling self-doubt), I have a pretty high opinion of myself.

Take Poland, for example. I was confident that I'd get that job, and all I had to do was apply for it and then decide whether I wanted it. Or take the blind date I went on this weekend. I just assumed he'd like me, because I'm wonderful, so I spent the whole date trying to decide whether I liked him, which is why it was such a surprise when he didn't try to arrange another meeting with me. Is is possible? Am I not as desirable a job candidate as I think I am? Could a nerdy man really meet me and not adore me? What is happening to this world?

I know. I'm as flabbergasted as you are. Whatever. I'll just go admire myself in the mirror until the world comes to its senses.

Poland?

2009-05-17T07:57:00.006-05:00

So, anyway, I'm on this listserve for AP Calculus teachers, and someone on the listserve announced a job opening at an International school in Krakow, Poland. They are looking for a teacher who can teach all of high school math (from Algebra I to Geometry to Algebra II to Precalc to Calculus) to classes ranging in size from 2 to 9.

And of course it's crazy.

I mean, I live in a house I own and I'm committed to it. I have a dog and I love him. I have a job, and in this economy that's really saying something. I live within ten miles of all of my immediate family members (or I will in ten days when Amadeus leaves his mountain paradise for our land of 10,000 lakes). The spring and summer here make me so happy I feel like I'm on drugs. Or what I imagine it must be like to be on really good drugs with no side-effects (unless you count winter). In short, Minneapolis has always been the place for me.

Besides teaching all of high school math is a pretty big chunk to chew especially if you want to do it well.

But.

Well, Minneapolis sucks for the elderly single women out here. Our friends are busy with their families. We can barely even find anyone to share a bottle of prosecco with us on a Saturday night. We've tried dating these shy, lonely Minneapolis men, and frankly it's bringing us down.

And so, I've been fantasizing. Thinking about my little class of two calculus students, my eight eighth graders in Algebra I. Dreaming about living in Krakow, walking the streets, ditching my car. I've been imagining the friends I'd make among the teachers at my small school. I've been wondering about the apartment I'd share with Buddy (he gets to move to Krakow in my fantasy), and dreaming about traveling Europe during my vacations.

Also, I could write a book about moving to Krakow to teach the math, and be famous and do book tours and sign autographs and answer nervous questions from young aspiring writers, while wearing a black dress and a flowered scarf and leather boots and maybe even glasses (which I don't need) and looking bookish and sexy at the same time.

I won't do it. Probably. But I'm giving myself a little more time to fantasize about it before I tell myself that.

Proof

2009-05-15T21:06:00.004-05:00

To show you how busy my fingers have been, and, because if you're my mom, you'll want to see how your new shirt is coming along and if you're not my mom, you probably aren't even reading this thing on a Saturday, so you won't be too bored.

Hard to tell size in a photo, but it's about four inches tall. Not bad for two evenings of work.

Oh, and for the knitters out there: I was happily knitting away and I didn't have a marker handy. So I grabbed a plastic bag (dog owners always have plastic bags), and tore off a corner, tied it in a knot and looped it over my needle. More obvious than a bit of yarn, which is my usual go-to stitch marker. Less likely to become knitted into the project.

Knitting Binge (and Purge)

2009-05-14T22:42:00.003-05:00

There has been a project on my knitting needles for several months. I had torn it out and restarted once before, because my stoopid pattern was translated from the Norwegian, and I kept missing vital pieces of information in it, and I kept not-noticing that I was missing vital pieces of information until I was several inches into the sweater. My New Rule For Knitting Patterns: Avoid patterns that say "AT THE SAME TIME". If it's not clear enough without the all-caps, then it's not clear enough.

Anyway, last night I made a grand gesture and tore the whole thing out again. Streamers of used, crinkled yarn fell into my lap. I left the offensive pattern at my parents' house, and stomped off to find a new one.

"You're crabby tonight," said my mom.

Hours of toil had been reduced to nothing more than string in ten minutes. Perhaps it affected my mood.

We found a pattern written in English for a short-sleeved lacy top. And tonight, after one false start (too small for any life-sized human), I finally filled my needles up again with tidy rows of loops. I hunched over my yarn, and allowed the television to drone on in the background while I counted "purl two, knit one through the back loop, purl two", and created new fabric out of what had just been string the night before.

I barely noticed, as I passed slipped stitches over, that in the year since I've seen it "Bones" has become a piece of total crap. I almost didn't get misty when Jim and Pam found out what they found out tonight on the "Office". I didn't spend nearly as much energy as I usually do wanting to like "30 Rock". And while my needles slipped through silken skeins of yarn, I found British television on channel 2, which seems to make the same amount of sense whether you knit while you watch it or not. And so time passed. The dog whined for his walk. The doorbell rang, and a strung-out canvasser tried to convince me to trust her with my money. Someone called for Fabian Floyd (who doesn't live here) for the thousandth time. Bedtime came and went. And two rows became four rows, and my hands filled up with lace, and over an inch of fabric hung from my needles.

Look out. After months of dormancy, I'm on a full-fledged knitting binge.

The Time I Shaved My Head That Time

2009-05-12T18:56:00.005-05:00

I moved to Portland with my first true love, and we proceeded to move into a grim apartment. It was the kind of place with a kitchen with all interior walls. It was the kind of place where we smelled it for days whenever our neighbor cooked bacon (and we called him Bacon Man, so it happened a lot). It had unattractive light blue carpeting throughout, which was newish, and which our landlady wanted to make sure would be compatible with our "lifestyle". I think she wanted to make sure we wouldn't throw any keggers on her unattractive light blue carpeting. Not surprisingly, given our surroundings, instead of throwing keggers, we immediately embarked on six months of communal misery.

First, my cat got sick. She ran back and forth between our bathroom and study, crapping in her box and vomiting all over our "lifestyle". I had a love-hate relationship with that cat, so it shocked me how devastated I was at the thought of losing her right after I moved to a new city. She had been with me since I was thirteen, so I couldn't imagine my adult life without her. Anyway, eventually (after some expensive vet bills) she recovered. I think she may have eaten roach poison in our new cheerless apartment. You could say her recovery was the second bad thing that happened to us. After all, she was an evil cat.

(Speaking of that cat, we moved a lot when I was kid, but one of my porn star names (name of your pet plus the name of the street you grew up on) could have been Stevie Stevens, which beats the pants off of Stevie First Avenue or Stevie Rural Route 6.)

Anyway, the next bad thing involved a job search. By today's standards, it was a short and painless search. By my standards, it was endless and resulted in one of the most painful things I have ever had to do - I couldn't pay my credit card bill in full at the end of the month. Josh came home and saw me weeping. Being a man of some debt, he failed to properly sympathize. Rocky times were ahead for us.

Meanwhile, there were nights when our sleep was interrupted by fire alarms. It seems that Bacon Man's wife sometimes fell asleep with the stove on. Evacuating your hideous new apartment at 3:00 in the morning because your neighbor might accidentally kill you in the pursuit of bacon can cause you reevaluate your life decisions.

There were more bad things. Josh got jealous of my relationship with a friend of mine. I didn't properly sympathize. Josh left me in the ugly apartment while he went home alone to Seattle for Thanksgiving. We both hated the jobs we got as a result of the long and painful search. We both questioned our life decisions.

And, so at the end of six months, despite being totally crazy about Josh, I dumped him. Sure, I should have dumped the god-awful apartment, or the bad job, or maybe the evil cat, but I was in my early twenties, and somehow he was the most obvious thing to eliminate and so I did.

Now the thing about Josh is that the whole time we were dating (and even now most likely) he had that shaved head look. I thought his shaved head was attractive, and he was also always attracted to bald women. And so, while my relationship with him was falling apart all around me, I asked him if I could borrow his clippers, and we wrapped my shoulders in a towel in the bathroom (where we didn't have to worry about protecting the lifestyle), and he helped me shave my head to the one inch setting. He said it looked sexy. He said it was too bad I had waited until our relationship was over to do it.

No one else particularly liked it, but then again I wasn't really trying to be sexy for anyone else.

Your Turn

2009-05-11T17:03:00.002-05:00

OK, in an effort to convince myself that I'm not crazy, here's a question for you, gentle reader:

If you're in a committed relationship, how did you know he/she was right for you? How long did it take? How can you tell that it will work? More importantly, since I like things that are all about me: Would I be able to tell or would I be too crazy to decide?

That is all. Now write your essays. See you in the comments.

Wise and Otherwise

2009-05-07T16:54:00.002-05:00

"Is it true," asked a student in sixth hour, "that you once shaved your head because you broke up with some guy?" I don't remember telling this story. For a moment I don't even remember that it happened. But it is true, and so I cannot lie, and must admit as much. "Oh," he says, "I gotta admire you for your nerve."

This is the post-AP nostalgia. They say things to me that are kind and sweet, and personal. We're playing games this week. In first hour, the small class, they got bored with Apples to Apples and asked for stories. "You tell the best stories," they say, buttering me up. And so I sit at my computer, pull up google, and read to them from "Mathematical Aphrodisiac," and they say "Aww..." when I tell them that it's a true story.

Then I show them photos of the famous potholder, and they ask for more photos, and pretty soon we're looking at all of my travel pictures from Kyrgyzstan. It's a love fest. I don't have to make them listen. They don't have to take notes. We just relax and breathe, and enjoy each other.

In sixth hour, we play Wise and Otherwise, a game in which you write a plausible ending to the first half of a not-so-famous saying. I sit down with a group of students, and laugh when one of them writes the wonderful ending "Endless chatter...never breaks the bed." And then the endings get raunchier, and I briefly wonder if I will have to excuse myself, when someone writes "A hoe in the shed is better than ... a stick in the bush." But despite its near triple entendre it turns out to be the actual Nigerian saying written on the card, and so I relax and laugh with the students.

We are post-AP, we can laugh, now, and play games and enjoy popcorn and Fig Newton's and Leibniz cookies. We have earned our rest and relaxation.

Sometimes I Disgust Myself

2009-05-06T19:41:00.002-05:00

I'm sitting in my bed in a pile of sand that fell off of Buddy's fur during the day while he slept in my bed. I was running late this morning so I didn't make the bed, which meant that he got to do his favorite thing which is sleep directly on the bottom sheet on my side of the bed. The really disgusting part of this story is the thought that ran through my head as soon as I sat down this afternoon and noticed that my not-too-clean sheets were also infiltrated with dog sand. Unbidden my own voice entered my head, "God. I hope I remember to shake these sheets out before I climb into bed tonight." Apparently, it's not enough that my sheets are not-so-very-clean. It's not even enough that they are filled with sand transported by dog butt from bottom of the Mississippi river. Nope, until I caught myself thinking dirty thoughts about shaking them out and letting them go another night, I was STILL not going to wash them. Nasty.

No one really gets a 5

2009-05-05T17:35:00.003-05:00

My students have a test tomorrow. It's kind of a big deal. They're taking the AP test to determine whether they get college credit for the work they did in my class.

Today I heard one of them say, "I'm just shooting for a 3. I know I won't get a 4, and no one really gets a 5." She caught me staring at her. "Well, except for geniuses and really big nerds."

She knows that millions of years ago (or at least before she was born), I got a 5. I'm pretty sure the latter description was meant for me. In the nicest possible way, of course.

The Last Five Letters of "Stable"

2009-04-09T19:30:00.003-05:00

When my grandmother, June, grew too forgetful to live alone any longer, we packed up her Kenwood mansion. Most of it went into a dumpster. Some of it went to Goodwill. The real treasures were scattered among members of the family.

My cousin, Perley, gave a home to June's dining room table where we had all eaten countless dinners, including the first turkey dinner after the advent of microwaves, that, yes, had been cooked in the microwave. It came out looking like a dead baby. This is not the kind of centerpiece that puts you in the mood for Thanksgiving. Picture that Norman Rockwell painting. Now replace that delicious golden, brown turkey with a pinkish, grey corpse. That, my friends, is microwave turkey. It is also an example of one of my grandfather's famous experiments.

My grandfather, Eddie, was actually a successful scientist. And June was actually a successful cook, left to her own devices, but Eddie insisted when he bought that microwave that she try cooking the turkey in it. Scientific method, you see. You can hypothesize that a nuked turkey might be bad, but you can't prove it until you actually try it. The dead-baby-turkey was a gastronomic failure, but a scientific success. It proved the hypothesis, you see, and that was all that mattered to my grandfather. June, on the other hand, wanted the Norman Rockwell painting of a turkey and a family eager to share it. Therefore, her table is the kind of table suitable for a big family and a vast spread of delicious food.

Meanwhile, there was another table that we moved out of that Kenwood mansion. This was Eddie's wackadoodle table, which came to live with me in my duplex, and which has been the source of endless frustration - and some amusement - since it arrived.

You see, Eddie always had shy graduate students in physics working with him on the science. At some point, he came up with a brilliant idea. His students weren't sharing their results. They could all be sitting at the same table, working on the same problem, and none of them would be working together on the problem at all.

OK, let's step into Eddie's brain for a second.

Problem: Shy physics nerds don't share their data with the guy next to them.
Solution: The table will share it for them.

He took a round solid oak table, and he sawed off the top of the table. He installed a spindle and some ball bearings, and voila! The entire table top became a lazy Susan. Now, if that guy on the other side of the table had a break-through all you had to do was clutch the edge of the table, give it a yank, and his work would come orbiting around to you. It seems brilliant at first. Of course, everyone else also loses his work to the guy sitting across the table, but this was not a concern of my grandfather's. After all, those guys probably needed to collaborate more anyway.

I'm not sure how well the shy-science-guy-table worked with the shy science guys, but I can tell you that it was crap as a dining room table. First of all, somehow, in the sawing off of the table, my grandfather lost about half a foot. Half a foot really matters when you're sitting on a chair at a table.

Second, imagine happily eating your dinner when your friend decides that she would like the butter which is sitting at your left elbow. It seems tempting for her to spin the lazy Susan a retrieve the butter, right? Yeah. Except then your plates all spin away with the table, and you wind up with someone else's half-eaten meal in front of you. And the butter is way over there, instead of right at your elbow where you left it.

And, so, now let's step into Alex's brain for a minute.

Problem: Table is too short and the lazy Susan technology is actually a Bad Idea
Solution: Prop up the table top on blocks, so it can't spin and it sits a little higher.

It kind of worked. It worked well enough that I got to live with a handsome oak table for a couple of years, and it didn't spin. It was always precarious, though. My friend, Anders, pushed himself up from the table more than once, tilting the entire mess off of its blocks, before he caught himself and righted the table. Little kids do this almost every time they eat over, unless their parents happen to remind them gently, "So, remember kids, you're at Alex's house, so DON'T TOUCH THE TABLE."

Anyway, I tell you all of this, because Perley called me on Monday to offer me June's table. I gleefully accepted, thinking that my days of catching food before it falls off of my unstable table might be over. And now here I sit at the Norman Rockwell table. And off in the other corner of my dining room sits the other, odder table, staring at me in its too short and nerdy way. How will I ever convince anyone else to take it from me?

What I Love About Minneapolis

2009-03-28T10:49:00.005-05:00

Well, one of the things I love anyway: The dog park.

Today, Buddy and I walked for almost two hours, taking the high ground over our flooded paradise. Below us, a boat of fisherpeople floated past the point where we usually walk.

I clutched a rope to drag myself up a muddy hill to the bluff trail, and instead of trying to make our way down to the mucky bottom land where the waterfall falls, we walked above the falls and past them to a part of the park we rarely visit.

I caught proof of the approaching spring on film (or pixels anyway), and despite knowing that Minnesota expects snow on Monday, my soul lifted to see blue, blue skies between branches covered with small buds. Soon, soon, friends, we will be able to say that we have triumphed over another winter here in the great white north. And this year was the first one in a long time whose winter really earned us our spring.

Oh, we also did not molest any government property. Even though that government property was totally asking for it.

Anguish

2009-03-06T23:17:00.002-06:00

If you've ever thought, "You know what I would enjoy watching for two hours? People who are miserable, living out a slow, hateful suburban life."...

If you've ever wished there more movies about being irreconcilably unhappy in love...

If you've ever wondered what to see on a first date with someone you just know you'd wind up hating in the end...

Well, have I got the movie for you: It's Revolutionary Road.

It's full of really pretty people, but they drink and smoke so much (to dull the pain caused by their miserable lives) that you won't even want to sleep with them by the end of the film.

As for me, I'm just hoping the sequel is about root canal or old people undergoing mortgage foreclosure, because anything less would be a deescalation of the anguish of the original.

They Love Their Hockey

2009-03-05T22:26:00.002-06:00

Student, clutching a wad of bills in one hand, having just completed a conversation with his buddy about how to buy tickets for the hockey game: Can I go to the bathroom?

Me: No, because you're not going to the bathroom. You're going to buy hockey tickets.

Student: Damn! How do you know that?

Later...
Student: Just let me go. I'll be quiet for the rest of the hour if you let me go.

Me: Why should I have to make that kind of a deal with you?

Later still...
Student: Come on, I really have to go to the bathroom. For real this time.

Me: Don't worry. They'll still be selling hockey tickets when we're done with the notes.

Doin' My Duty

2009-03-03T17:19:00.003-06:00

I'm going to my precinct caucus tonight. I know. You didn't even know tonight was the night for precinct caucuses, did you? Well, I wouldn't go either, except that I was guilted into it by Gary Schiff. He not only had his minions call me, he also called me in person to invite me. God, I hope news of how easy I am to convince to do something sort of unpleasant at Gary Schiff's request doesn't get out. Otherwise, Sarah's going to get him to call me to tell me to shovel out the garbage cans. My students will call him to tell me to grade the tests faster (and more gently). Buddy will call him to tell me to step away from the laptop and walk the dog. It's already 5:30. Why am I still typing?

You Would Cry, Too, If It Happened to You

2009-03-02T18:31:00.002-06:00

No, no, don't worry. I'm not going to cry. Or make you cry. Or say anything sad.

I just so rarely get songs stuck in my head because of my disability with music that I was thinking recently about things that do get stuck in my head. Some of them are bits of "music"- although I hear them in my head the way that I would sing them, so they are unrecognizable to people who aren't me as music.

Strangely I don't ever get "Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee," stuck in my head, even though it was the one song I have ever really, really tried to sing on key, because when I was a senior in high school I tried out for Grease, with disasterous results both in the singing and dancing segments of the audition. I think maybe Jimmy, if he read those words, just got the song stuck in his head. He's the one who sat with me patiently at the piano while I murdered the tune of that song 5000 times.

I do get that line from "It's My Party" stuck in my head: "You would cry, too, if it happened to you. Doo doo do do." In my head it comes complete with an uncertain trailing off of do's, because I'm not sure how many there are. I even had to think for a while to remember the name of the song, because that line is the entirety of what gets stuck in my head, not the chorus, not the title lyric, just that one line.

I know all of the words to "When I'm 64", but the only part that gets stuck in my head is "We shall scrimp and save." Now that I've written it down, well, of course that's what gets stuck in my head. Have you met me? I'm a miser. It's the miser lyric.

Sometimes I can't seem to shake sentences or bits of sentences. For a while, it was "Alex's head." Just the phrase, in the third person. When my mind was at rest or when I was walking the dog, I'd hear it. "Alex's head." And I'd wonder. Does it mean anything? Should I get a brain scan because maybe my brain is telling me that there is something wrong with my head? Is it a different Alex? Should I duck?

OK, carry on. I'll try to pay more attention to the voices in my head and report back tomorrow. Doo doo do do do.

Thank God That's Over

2009-03-01T12:25:00.002-06:00

Now, let's see if March can snap me out of the funk that February has wrought.

I will begin the month with some thorns and roses, something that I just heard that the Obama family does every night. Thorns are bad things that happened to you during the day. Roses are good. This of course smacks of bigotry, since thorns are only bad if you're not the rose, but who am I to judge?

A thorn for me today has been a stack of tests. I put them off until the last possible moment, and they are taking a long time, because my progress is hampered by feeling like a bad teacher (and by wasting time on the Internet). We had a bad February, my class and I. I spent too little time on solids. They spent too little time on their homework. And the result is a pile of tests on which I have to stretch to hand out partial credit (and I feel as though I should be stretching because I'm the one who spent so little time on the topic.) Also, why oh why do I always procrastinate?

A rose today came in the form of leaving Buddy home when I ran. Free from the leash, I ran all the way to Nokomis. My plan was to run only around the small part of the lake, but the unshoveled walk forced me to take the whole loop around the lake. Also, since no one else was running in my direction, I felt fleet of foot, faster than the walkers I passed. The six miles cleared my head, which has felt muddled and cloudy all weekend.

And now I'm sitting down to grade. I appologize for the boring post. I'm trying that Nanoblopo thing again. If I'm going to write every day, maybe I should mark the ones that are worth reading with a giant star or a slab of bacon...

Fear of Flocks

2009-02-28T18:43:00.004-06:00

I used to work in an old grain silo building in Portland. It had been converted to office space, and so behind my cubicle was a hallway to nowhere with rounded walls where the grain used to be stored. It was a place of great echoes, but no useful purpose. This is the kind of office space that technology companies pay extra to rent, and it's the kind of office space that makes working for a technology company slightly more palatable. Yeah, I'm a cubicle drone, and no one talks in my office, ever, but I work in that pretty old grain elevator off of the Broadway bridge. You know the old Albers Mill building.

Part of my commute every day, because I didn't have a car in Portland, involved walking up a giant red staircase to the pedestrian level of the bridge. I tell people that I'm afraid of birds. It's slightly inaccurate. I recognize that a single, nondescript LBJ (little brown job) isn't going to hurt me. If I see a first robin of spring bobbing along in the park, I don't detour around it or anything. Even a lonely pigeon isn't all that frightening to me, despite its unnecessarily large size. The thing about my daily commute up that giant red staircase, was that the Broadway Bridge was just covered in flocks and flocks of birds.

What was terrifying to me was the sheer number of those birds, perched on the bridge, covering it in their crap, and looking at me with their cocked heads as I climbed my endless red staircase to work. What made my heart skip a beat was when something (and it wasn't me, because they were far too jaded to be frightened by a lone human) set those birds off, and then, as one, the flock would rise from their perches on the bridge and swarm, as if instead of being a multitude of birds with separate hearts, brains, and bodies, they were a single organism stretching out to the edge of the flock, moving as one, out away from the bridge and then back again, before darting off again in some direction all together.

They never did anything to me, those birds. They just frightened me with their single-mindedness and their group-think and the sheer number of them. I was reminded of this near daily experience in Portland today on my evening run, because just as I arrived at Lake Nokomis at dusk, something set off the murder of crows that had hidden themselves in the branches of the trees, and as I ran, each tree came alive with caws and flapping of wings and a lifting of big, black bodies moving together towards nothing and away from something, with what must have been crow-logic, but which looked to me like a chaos of wings and claws and beaks and shrieks. Beautiful in a way, but only in the way that dark, frightening paintings can be beautiful.

It's like snakes. I can tolerate just one of just about any kind of snake. But when I see a whole mess of them slithering together, I just can't talk myself out of the shivers running down my back.

Hate Mail

2009-02-26T21:22:00.004-06:00

Dear February,

These are the days that try men's souls. I blame you, entirely, February, with your grinding cold, your soul-sucking dark, and your cruel joke of a snowstorm.

There are good times of day to snow, February. Midnight is a great time for snow, when we're tucked in our little beds. The alarm clock goes off in the morning and we wake up to a world transformed. It feels like Christmas when it snows at Midnight. What did Santa bring us in the night? A whole new world.

Midnight snow just isn't your style, though, is it February? Oh, no. Not you.

I'm not complaining that it snowed. We all knew it would snow again, and it will probably snow again and again all through next month. (All together now, Minnesotans. We know the drill. "March is the snowiest month.") So, yes, it would be nice to see green stuff and growth. It would nice to be able to run. But, it's not the snow that gets to me, it's the lousy, crappy timing. For crying out loud, February, you are just the kind of month who would dump that kind of pile on us when we're all trying to scramble home to our dogs and families. Rush hour snow. Thanks a lot, February.

This is why we don't give you any more days. You'd just use them to make us even more miserable. You're lucky we even let you have 28 days. It's more than you deserve.

Love,
Alex

I Can't Figure Out How to Make This About Bacon

2009-02-22T11:16:00.002-06:00

I have a friend, "Mimi" who has a knack for making me feel bad. She doesn't mean to, and it only happens every couple of years or so, which is why I continue to put up with her. Actually, to be honest, she loves me very much and really, genuinely wants to help. She just doesn't know how. For example, once when I was telling her about feeling lousy about being single and in my thirties and how there are so few men for every single woman and how maybe I should move away from Minneapolis because maybe the shyness of Minneapolis men is the problem, Mimi honed into a different problem: Me. She suggested that maybe I should get a sexy new haircut and wear more stylish clothes. Men, she said, are more driven by looks than women are. This is what she did, she said, before she met her husband.

Now, my friends in The Illiterati have said the same thing, but somehow when it came from them it felt more like an excuse to get together and go shopping and be the center of their attention for an afternoon. When it came from Mimi, it made me feel like a big awkward dolt.

Anyway, I should have run the other way when Mimi suggested that she set me up with a friend of hers. She's older than I am, and she said she couldn't tell whether this guy was too old for me or not. Did I have an upper age limit?

Well, you know, you want to be open. You want to accept love wherever it comes, but don't we all have an upper age limit? I have two. One is the one that I will say to people to prove how open I am. That one is 50. It's a total lie. My true upper age limit is 45. This is the upper age limit that I hold onto because I believe that I am hot. If I stop believing I'm hot, then before I accept that I should be with some old, crotchety geezer, I'll probably just decide to stop trying. Note that if you're over 50. I don't really think that over 50 is old. I just think that my age plus 15 will be old when I'm over 50.

And, so when I join dating sites, I tend to tell men over 45 that we are not a good match, without really bothering to find out more. Unless they are totally hot (which they haven't been), I even get a little bit offended that they think that they have a shot with me. Did I mention that I am hot? What would a hot woman in her 30s want with an old man who isn't hot? Especially if that's all I know about him?

You can only call me ageist if your partner is not hot and more than fifteen years older than you are.

I joined a dating site recently. My profile has generated no activity, except for one note from an old man telling me that he liked my profile, one note from a barely literate man who uses the user name "Shyman123" or something equally pathetic, and one note from a man in Malaysia who is in love with me. This is grim, grim, grim. It makes me feel a little bit lousy, but I try not dwell on it, because what's the point in dwelling? They don't know me. If they did know me, they'd know how hot and funny and sexy I am, and the number 35 would not be so frightening to them.

If they knew me, like Mimi does, they would know how great I am.

Mimi called me mid-week. The set-up wasn't going to work. He was bringing a date. Oh, well. Easy come, easy go. Still, I was invited to dinner. The dinner guests included Mimi, her husband, a well-established gay couple, my potential set-up and his date, and me.

The problem? The guy, even though we were no longer being set-up, was at least fifty-five. Easily. Complete with gray hair and a bald spot. I can choose not to take it personally when the Internet considers me over the hill as a woman, but how can I decide that it doesn't mean something when Mimi does it?

I sat at dinner, where I was easily twenty years younger than anyone else at the table, and until I recovered my composure and found my charm, I wanted to cry. I love the gay couple (or half of them anyway) and I love Mimi and her husband, but doesn't anyone else see how terrible it is to have to decide that men my own age are now considered, even by people who love me dearly, out of my league?

Fuuuuck.

Saving your Bacon

2009-02-19T22:03:00.002-06:00

One of the things I do for you every day, because I'm a little bit of a hero, is I check to see if this light is on. I'm really a one-woman (and one-dog) safety patrol. If that light is ever on when I walk by, and if I remember to have my cell phone with me on my walk, don't worry: I will call that number. I am poised and ready to dial.

Don't you feel better about the safety of your city already?

Want Some Bacon?

2009-02-15T07:49:00.000-06:00

Click here. Presto! Bacon!

The Saddest Valentine

2009-02-14T08:11:00.003-06:00

Don't worry. I am so rarely dating anyone on Valentine's Day that it's not really a holiday I dwell upon. I think there may have been a total of five V-Days upon which I was hooked up. I'm pretty sure at least two of them didn't believe in the holiday. At the time, I pretended not care about it either, but, here's a tip, men, women would have to be pretty impervious to the insidious nature of our culture not to care at all about Valentine's Day. If you're lucky enough to have a woman in your life today, be nice to her, even if she says she doesn't care about the Hallmark Holiday.

Anyway.

On one particular Valentine's Day, I was hooked up. I was dating a guy who was completely out of character for me. Some of you remember this time in my life. He was categorically good-looking, not cute-in-an-unconventional-way, like most of my dates. He also had muscles, which was weird for me, because they reminded me of nothing so much breasts. Curvy breasts, growing out of his arms. Breasts on his chest. Funny how the manliest man I ever dated always made me think of breasts when he took off his shirt.

The One With All the N's just got excited because she will use this as proof that I am a lesbian.

"Manly" and I met through the print-media personals ads. I was ahead of my time. Internet dating before we used the Internet to do it. He charmed me first with his voice on the telephone, deep and soft, like a plush carpet. He had a self-depreciating sense of humor, and a charming smile. Some things about him when we first met struck me as unusual especially since I'm such a pinko Commie liberal. He described himself as politically indifferent. He didn't even vote in every election. (What? They let you vote and you didn't line up to exercise your power? I don't understand.) He also served in the Army Reserves. Not a big deal, he said. Every month he would have one weekend when he would be unavailable for dates. That part actually sounded OK. I like my space. I just thought he would disapprove of my pacifist upbringing. And, let's be honest, I sort of wanted to convert him to the Way of Peace. I definitely wanted to make sure he voted in every election (even though it was likely that we wouldn't be voting for the same candidates).

Despite these differences we got along unusually well. Manly was very into nature, and he taught me the difference between white oaks and red ones. On one of our first dates, we sat on a blanket and watched a meteor shower overhead. He lived in a cabin on Medicine Lake and he would get up early in the morning to start my car when I had to drive back to Minneapolis for work. I secretly enjoyed being taken care of. Some feminist I turned out to be.

It all changed when, in January of 2003, after we'd been together for three months, he got word that his reserve unit was activated and called to serve in Iraq. The seriousness of the situation added some seriousness to our relationship that we wouldn't have given it otherwise. What was I going to do? Dump him because he was going to war? Unthinkable. Marry him before he left? Equally so. Instead, I just held onto him a little bit tighter, trying to enjoy the time before he left as much as I could. He told me that he put my name on a list. It was the list of people to call if something happened to him. It was at once flattering and horrifying. Of course, I belonged on the list, but there was no way I belonged on such a list. We only knew each other for three months, and my name was on the same list as the names of other men's wives and mothers. It was spelled wrong (Alia), but it was on the list.

The day he left was February 14, 2003. We got up early, in his little cabin, which was packed up and ready for him to leave. He put on his uniform, and I drove him to his base. We stopped to get gas, and he cursed that the guy behind the counter didn't volunteer to give him a discount for being in uniform, for leaving me for war. I didn't cry when he left my car. I didn't cry when I returned home. I composed a letter, in my little apartment, telling him that I loved him and telling him that I would wait for him. Such things probably shouldn't come up for the first time in a letter, but we had too little time in person to say them out loud.

That afternoon, I drove to Fort Snelling, where I was allowed to drive past the guards because my name was on that dreadful list. I boarded a coach bus full of wives and mothers and children and American flag t-shirts and red, white, and blue earrings. We drove to the hangar where our friends and boyfriends and husbands and fathers and wives and mothers waited for us in uniform. I was afraid. Afraid that I would be spotted as a fraud ("Where is your flag?"). Afraid that I wouldn't recognize him in his uniform when he was surrounded by other men in uniform. Afraid that he would not want me to hand him a letter that said "I love you", right before he went to war. Afraid that he wouldn't want to say it back.

The army gave me a red carnation. The army gave me a flower. I clutched it tightly as if it could help me recognize Manly in the sea of uniformity.

I did recognize him. Even though I had seen him hours before, I already missed him. I already felt like he was a stranger. He had to prompt me to hold his warm, dry hand in my clammy one, as we listened to speeches sending our lovers off to war. "Are we glad to be here?" said the chaplain. I half-expected a patriotic yes from the crowd. "No," whispered the pacifist. "No," came the thunderous response of the crowd of flag-waving family members.

I gave him the flower and the letter. We kissed, even though we both felt awkward doing it in public. He held the letter up, and then he was gone, and I was back on the bus full of quiet, grieving strangers.

I got home to a giant bouquet of flowers and a note, with the kind of things that it's better to say for the first time in person, but we never had time.

That day was sad. The next day I marched to protest the war with hundreds of thousands of people around the world, and I felt all alone, because I had been in a much different crowd the day before. The following day was my first day of student teaching. Those three days were almost the hardest of my life. So was every day after his unit left training and actually went to war, and I had to hear about dead soldiers on the news. The day the phone rang and it was for "Alia" was the most terrible day of all, even though the news that prompted the call was not tragic. I hear they come in person for the truly tragic news.

We survived the six months he was gone. We did not survive his return. In the end, we were too different, and the "I love you's" felt more real on paper.

In the context of all of that, it's so much easier to be alone on Valentine's Day. Don't you think?

RIP Book Club...Welcome Something Else

2009-02-08T10:46:00.002-06:00

About two years ago, I responded to a Craig's List post about a new book club. At the time, I was recovering from the hermit lifestyle I had led with an ex-boyfriend, and I was trying to meet men in organic ways by doing things that I enjoyed doing. I was only just discovering that the things I enjoy doing are mostly things that other women enjoy doing. And the poster on Craig's List neglected to mention in her post that she wanted to create an all-women's book club. She was a bit crazy, but that's a story for another day. At any rate, she turned away the two men who showed interest in the club, and instead we had a lively group of ten women attend the first meeting.

I enjoyed the first meeting enough to commit to attending the second one. By the third meeting our lively group of ten women had dwindled to five, and the original crazy Craig's List poster was gone. The five of us carried on meeting though, through several books, some of which we read, most of which we didn't. At one meeting, Jessica announced that now that the five of us had been meeting monthly for so many months, she had decided that we had become friends, and so she collected our birthdays, and now she organizes birthday outings for the group.

We began to do other things, but we continued to not-read the books we were assigned. We had conversations about boys. They took me shopping for sexy new clothes. We went to movies about books we hadn't read. We baked Christmas cookies. Through Kate, I joined a cooking club, and for a couple of months, we cooked giant potluck dinners together. We even advertized for more members on Craig's List, making sure to warn the new people that we didn't always complete our homework for book club.

The men in our lives have always mocked book club. Emily has a friend who calls us SBC, which is short for Shitty Book Club, because we don't discuss books very often or say very deep things about them when we do. Rachel's friends made fun of us for having a movie date for "Three Christmases", which wasn't even based on a book. Or was it four Christmases? It was a shitty movie, at any rate.

Yesterday, Jess called and asked if I minded if we stopped calling our book club a book club. It will be just the same, she assured me. We'll still get together and talk and do fun things. We can even talk about whatever books we're reading. But instead of not-reading a book that we were suppposed to read together, we wouldn't even plan to read a book together. It sounded perfect. It's all of the fun of getting together with five smart women, and none of the guilt of not having read the book.

And so our new club needs a name. I have suggested "The Illiterati" or "NBC (Non-Book Club)". If you have a good name for our group, let me know. I'll pass it along.

Oh, and I'm still reading "Cold Sassy Tree", in honor of the days when our group, whatever-it-is, used to read books.

Wanna Play a Game, Scarecrow?

2009-02-03T17:46:00.003-06:00

Lisa from Lemon Gloria recently asked me a few questions as part of an interview game. If you want to be interviewed, too, all you have to do is comment on this post with the words "Interview me", and I'll email you five questions tailor-made for you. It's easy. You'll love it. I'll put more detailed rules at the end.

Here, then, are her questions and my answers.

1. If you had 48 hours free and unlimited cash, how would you spend the time?

Boy, oh, boy, did thinking about this question reveal my inner miser. My first thought was “Did she say ‘unlimited cash’? I’m calling a plumber to fix my leaky toilet.” Then I realized that with unlimited cash, as long as the plumber was there, he could also install the faucet I bought for the bathroom sink ages ago, and then I could ask him to put a real shower-to-bath faucet in my old cast iron tub, so I could sometimes take baths instead of showers. And only then did I stop myself and realize how petty my wishes were. Seriously, you hand me 48 hours and unlimited cash, and I call a plumber? I’m pathetic.

At that point, I decided that I was going to use my unlimited cash to buy a whole new house. Fuck it. I’ve had enough of pull-chain light fixtures and leaky toilets. I deserve a dishwasher. I can have central air. I can have insulation and new windows, so I can be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. And, oh, wait! I could have my new house in a warm and lovely place. I can relocate to the beach, and I can have a new beach house where I can take a bath sometimes and not just a shower.

At about this time, I realized that you asked me how I would spend the time, not the money. And so I scrapped the house plan and decided to go hot-air ballooning instead on some early summer morning. My grandmother went ballooning for her eightieth birthday, and I was invited to join her, but I missed it because I was working at a summer camp that year and it was an hour further away than I thought it was, so I was late to the launch, and ever since then, I’ve had an empty place in the part of my heart that would be full if I ever got to go up in a hot-air balloon.

And then, after my hot-air balloon landed, I’ll spend the other 40 hours picking out and closing on my new beach house with a non-leaky toilet and solar panels and super-insulated walls.

2. Do you feel like working with math all the time and having a math mind colors your world in a particular way? I ask this as someone with no mathematical ability, who consistently struggled in math once it got beyond the basics, really. But I feel like being so focused on words, and having studied linguistics, I am constantly listening for how people phrase things, or appreciating alliteration, or whatever. Does this happen with numbers (or numerical patterns, or geometric planes, etc), if one's brain has that ability?

OK, so I don’t listen to music, ever. My friends who do listen to it sometimes give me CDs or tell me to listen to things, and I try, but after the CD or the song has been playing for a while, I forget it’s on and I go back to not-listening to it. I dated a musician once. He gave me copies of his own songs sometimes. I would listen, and at first I would feel enormously proud and slightly embarrassed that my boyfriend was singing and playing a song, and then even he would fade into the background, and I couldn’t even tell him what I thought of his music when he asked.

I think maybe that working a good math problem tickles the part of my brain that other people can tickle with music. I can get totally absorbed, in that time-stretching way, so that all of the rest of the world fades behind me, and all I can see is whatever problem I’m working on. I can fall asleep with a good problem on my brain and I can dream the solution, so that in the morning I see the problem with new clarity. I think of that line from a song actually (the Beatles being the one, notable exception to my inability to hear music) “There will be an answer. Let it be.”

Also, you should know that I suck at computation. I can’t add or subtract (especially subtract) without paper and a pencil. Higher math has very little to do with computational skill. We turn a lot of kids off to mathematics by making it so computationally focused in the early years.

Still, I don’t feel that I apply math to the real world all that often. I love it for its own sake. I’m not a physicist. I just like playing with symbols and manipulating algebra and seeing geometric connections on the page. I think of a math team t-shirt that I once saw. It had a famously beautiful equation on the front. On the back it said, “Yes, but when do you ever really use the Mona Lisa?” It’s more like art to me than it is like science.

I think I’d be a better teacher if I did use math in the real world. I was once seduced by a guy who used math. If seducing nerdy women counts as a real-world application of number theory, then I’m living proof that it works.

3. You are on an endless breakfast quest. How would you describe a perfect breakfast?

My family would be there. We’d all be alert and not hung-over. When my family is on, we are some of the wittiest people around. The laughter alone makes the food taste better. I’d definitely get something savory, because I’m not a big sweet breakfast person. There might be some goat cheese in my dish. I’d want some potatoes that were crispy on the outside and light and fluffy on the inside. I’d want a cup of really good coffee with lots of cream and sugar. I’d want the restaurant to have a clean and airy feel with sunlight streaming through the windows. I’d want the waiter or waitress to flirt with my family a little bit as we placed our order. Everything would have enough fat and salt in it to taste good and get properly brown, but nothing would be bogged down by grease. Finally, as we left the table none of us would feel so heavy and weighted down that we’d never want to eat again. We’d all just be comfortably full, with happy aftertastes of breakfast in our mouths to get us through to lunch.

4. If you were given the choice of being able to fly or breathe underwater, which superpower would you choose and why?

I’d fly. Flying is much more practical. How often is there even water around to breathe under?

5. If you had to choose a flavor of ice cream that most fits your personality, what kind do you think you would be? Feel free to make one up if necessary.

It’d be something dark and brooding, but with some bites that are so good they would make the occasional bitter overtones worth it. Double, dark chocolate with a hint of salty caramel, perhaps.

OK, now you know you want to play, here's how:
1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions. Be sure you link back to the original post.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

The Thirty Degree Solution

2009-01-31T11:33:00.003-06:00

And so it came to pass that the sun beat down upon the land, warming it to nearly the temperature of water. The people all smiled, and drove their cars to the dog park, filling the parking lots to overflowing. Even the dogs smiled. They ran free in the woods, greeting one another with fierce wags of tails. The people took off their hats and looked skinny in the absence of layers of long underwear under their thick, puffy coats. And a miracle occurred in the form of a bird, living and breathing in the Minnesota winter. It was only a woodpecker, but in the presence of the second miracle - clear blue skies and sunshine - it looked like a messenger carrying good news from on high. The sun will warm us up, as it warms the Earth. There will come a time when we will allow our skin to touch the elements again, and we will feel the naked joy of spring someday.

Three Things About My Parking Spot

2009-01-27T19:08:00.004-06:00

According to yesterday's New York Times, teaching math at an affluent suburban high school is the most recession-proof job in America. It's at the bottom of the article, in case you don't believe me.
According to a news story on MPR which I heard on my drive home, our governor is trying to make my recession-proof job even more safe by instituting a pay freeze, which will guarantee that no one will ever want to take my very safe job from me. You'd have to be nuts to do it for less than what I make. Or the same as what I make, really.
Finally, according to gossip at the lunch table, the other day an angry parent called an administrator in my building to see why students have to pay so much to park, while staff members get to park for free. That's right. It's one of the perks no one talks about. I get to park my '96 Mazda in front of that affluent suburban high school every day so I can teach The Math, and the best part is I don't even have to take out a loan in order to do it.

Sometimes I Lie

2009-01-25T08:17:00.002-06:00

Like yesterday, for example, when I wrote that I don't trust Buddy any more. And then just this morning, I was frantically cleaning and I wasn't even dressed, and I felt like he needed to pee, and so, just for a second, I let him out in the yard, but somehow the back fence was ajar. Now, he's on the loose, and I'm wearing clothes over my pajamas, but I couldn't even see him when I walked the 'hood and froze my ass off. Stupid stupid dog. Stupid stupid Al. Why did I trust the Gingerbread Dog?

The Things I do for Love

2009-01-24T19:47:00.003-06:00

My dog is a lovely soul with a talent for getting loose. When I first put him in my yard, he pulled at the back gate until he managed to separate the chain link from the fencepost, and then he squeezed his lean black lab body through the gap and ran wildly through the streets of the neighborhood. I'd get calls from the nursing home two blocks away, "Hello, I'm calling about your dog, Buddy, he's here - oh - now he's running. He's headed east on 38th street, if you want to catch him." I want to catch him. Desire is never the problem. The problem is that he has four predator legs, and I only have two. He has the lean muscular body of a hunter, and I have only the short bursts of speed of an urban animal. Perfect for catching buses. Not so good for chasing after determined runaway dogs.

When I replaced the gates, he tunneled, like a canine version of Tim Robbins's Shawshank Redemption character. He found a weak spot below the fence which led him to Bev's yard next door, where a conveniently placed rise in the ground gave him just enough lift to clear her fence with a single leap. He was free, long lean body stretched out against the ground. Meanwhile, I stumbled after him, lamely offering treats to his departing figure. What good my biscuits compared to the sweet, sweet taste of liberty?

I tried to get inside his head. I became a dog whisperer of sorts. Perhaps, I thought, he needed more exercise, and so I took him to the dog park to tire him out, and then I watched him flee from the back yard less than an hour after he had run himself weary in the woods.

Perhaps, I surmised, his abandonment issues forced him to run from me. He had to leave me before I could leave him. Hadn't I, myself, practiced this very philosophy on more than one unsuspecting man? And so I lavished him with affection. I tried to gain his trust through pats behind the ears and scratches of the belly. He took the love in the same calm way he takes all forms of affection. "I deserve this," he seems to say. "I'm a good dog." Instead of me gaining his trust, he gained mine. I got lax in the pulling closed of gates and doors, and he pushed past me, mischievous glint in his eyes, "Catch me if you can," he said, "I'm the gingerbread dog."

And so we have reached the age of Loving Distrust. Buddy does all of his business on the end of a tightly held leash. Two to three times a day, I hold that leash, and walk the streets of my neighborhood, and, much as I grumble, it's good for me. However, we have had some dark and cold days here in Minnesota this winter, and so, with Buddy lifting his paws gingerly off of the frozen pavement, I wrap myself in layer after layer of cashmere and down, soft and fluffy garments, covering my rock hard core, clenched like a fist against the goddamn cold. He stops to smell some other dog's pee, and I yank his leash a little too roughly. "Let's go, Buddy," I say, "it's too cold for this." He's waiting, as am I, for the days when we can stroll again through the neighborhood, with something more than irritability and cashmere to keep us warm.

PS There was a photo to illustrate. I can't get it from camera to computer. So imagine a picture of me in the dark, up to my eyeballs in cold-weather gear, in one of those photos you take of yourself from an arm's length away.
I give up. I'm buying a new digital camera tomorrow.

Trippy Derivatives

2009-01-17T14:29:00.004-06:00

The solid boy in the football jersey startles me whenever he sees the calculus in poetic clarity. His voice, full of questions, can cut across the room. Despite his doubtful tone, he reveals the truth about what I'm saying in a way that I can't, because I learned it all for the first time too many years ago.

"Why did you give us the surface area formula?" he says. "Don't we just need volume for this problem?"

"Yes," I say, and I start to walk away. It was a trick, a decoy, a distractor. Something makes me stop. "But look at your derivative for volume. Isn't it just the surface area formula?"

"Whoa," he says, in words that could easily be construed as sarcastic, but which don't come off that way. "Trippy."

"Yes, but doesn't that make sense? Doesn't the derivative just take you down one dimension?"

I walk away to answer another question. The students are so stressed out about their final. I feel like I'm performing triage these days. Even as I go, I hear his awestruck voice, to his football buddy. "I mean, what if someone took the derivative of the world?"

I stop long enough to absorb the beauty of his awe. What, indeed? What if someone had the power to take that kind of derivative and leave us all flat?

The Library Again

2009-01-10T17:21:00.003-06:00

I went back to the library. The creepy guy was there. He did try to follow me out, but I thwarted him by forgetting my hat. It'd be easy to change my hours so that he couldn't find me again, but I'd be afraid of losing my regulars.

Anyway, here's a video about tutoring at the library, starring me, and made by one of the other tutors. Enjoy.

New Stories for the New Year

2009-01-04T12:40:00.003-06:00

Sometimes I look around this Earth and I think it's funny that all of those other people think that they are the main character in the story when, clearly, I am. I like to let them hold onto their delusions, because they make more interesting minor characters when they think they have to hold up the main plot of the story.

For example, I recently ran into an ex-boyfriend. Now, according to my story, we didn't work out because we were too young, and we didn't try hard enough. His story is that we weren't even a good fit. In fact, according to his story, we were such a not-good-fit, he rarely even thinks about me any more. I'm not sure how I can let the memory of this failed relationship continue to eat away at me and make me worry that I didn't try hard enough if he's not even going to think about me with any sort of regret. It's ridiculous. Luckily, I'm the main character, and all of the rules of story-telling demand that I show growth and change by the end of the story, so perhaps this will be the year of letting go and finally finding happiness.

My other new story this year will be that instead of the being the Woman Who Drinks Coffee Alone, I am now the Woman Who Joins Groups. And so this morning, The Woman Who Joins Groups got up to walk the dog in her running clothes, and then drove her ice-covered car to Uptown, where she joined a group of runners in the -1 degree weather to run around the lakes. Then The Woman Who Joins Groups went to a coffee shop where the cute boy behind the counter made her some coffee, and she pretended that he did it because he wanted to, and not just because she gave him a 50% tip on her order.

On Friday, I'm going to eat dinner with a bunch of strangers at a restaurant. I've done this once before with a group of strangers that eats dinner in restaurants, and, frankly, I've found it somewhat stressful, but that was last year, before I took on this new role. Now, I will take it in stride, because I'm used to Joining Groups. It's What I Do.

You'll see. 2009 will be a year of happy stories, full of new people and new adventures. It will be the year I let old pain die, and I force myself out of the rut of thinking that I'm the tragic heroine of a tragic story of what might have been.

Or, maybe it's just the last day of winter break, and I'd rather make up stories than figure out what the heck I'm teaching tomorrow.

The Slowest Mile

2008-12-28T14:57:00.002-06:00

I looked out the window at 1:00, and the sun was out. I peeked at the thermometer. It was over 20 degrees outside. OK, no excuses, I had to run. I figured that the sidewalks would be icy, but maybe the park board had cleared the lake trails, and so I drove myself to Nokomis, where I began my run on the north side of the lake. North side, as in sunless side. The trails were coated with ice. I barely moved my feet as I "ran", struggling to making my upper body look like that of a runner, while my feet moved barely faster than a walker's.

Whenever I found a patch of dry pavement, I flew because I was finally able to let go of a little bit of my steam. Then the dry part would end, and I would throttle back so that I wouldn't find myself sprawling on the ground.

To avert the almost certain disaster of a spill, I almost turned around, but there was another runner up ahead. If he could do it, so could I. We met up at the stoplight. "At least we're still standing," he said. "Well, it's the slowest run of my life," said I (exaggerating, since surely the slowest run of my life was the Mother's Day run I lost to my mother).

His daughter goes to Carleton, and so we ran together around the slightly less icy south side of the lake, chatting about education and money and Jonathan Kozol, and allowing each other to use the dry patches on the sidewalk for traction.

And then, Christmas miracle, neither of us wiped out. We finished our runs and we didn't add to our injuries, and now I get to have that clear-headed just-exercised feeling for the rest of the day. I'm going to use it to buy some paint for the basement floor.

Lib-a-rary

2008-12-27T22:10:00.002-06:00

Saturdays are my day to volunteer at the library. I get myself downtown to the big public library. Usually I plan to take the bus, but I wind up being late and driving and having to pay to park. Today, I drove and found a spot that was far from the library but free on Saturday. Today was a good day.

I settle myself down at the table on the fourth floor, get out my computer, or whatever papers I have to grade, and then I wait until the students come. I have some regulars.

"Betty" is an elderly black lady who is teaching herself algebra. She travels from library to library in search of math help. I've seen her at least once a month for over a year at two different libraries. We've sat down together for hours at a time, and I've walked her through problem after problem. After a year, her math skills are about where they were when I first met her. I think she has a little memory loss to overcome while she learns. Betty always has her "homework" and she comes prepared with questions. Secretly, though I think that Betty is using algebra as a prop to get tutors to sit down with her for an hour, interrupting her math problems with tidbits about our real lives. "What kind of math do you have today, Betty?" doesn't take long to detour to "How was your Christmas, Betty?".

Don't get me wrong. I'm sure Betty loves doing the math. I'm sure she gets off on it, in a truly nerdy way, and perhaps if she had been born in a different generation or if she had been born white or male, she might have found her way to a continued study of mathematics. She says that she wakes up in the morning sometimes, having dreamed about math, and then she has to get up to finish a problem before she even gets dressed. She once said to me that a system of equations reminded her of a marriage, and that solving for x and then using it to solve for y was like peeling away the layers of your relationship to discover who you each are as individuals. Only true math nerds can make relationship analogies to algebra.

"Leroy" is a middle-aged black man who fears math but knows that he needs to go back to school in order to work his way out of a dead-end job. The first time I met Leroy, he brought a blond husky-voiced woman with him. She also had math homework, but she refused to ask any questions, and I soon realized that she was the crutch he needed to get through the door to ask for help. Once he found out how the whole tutoring thing worked, she never returned, but the amazing thing is that Leroy does return, again and again, even though after an hour or two of math, he looks like someone who needs a cigarette - at which point he excuses himself for a smoke break.

Leroy has been coming to the library on and off for at least nine months. He even took the test he needed to get into school, failed it, and battled his way back to the library to get over that defeat. He says he has a calendar at home to keep track of the days I work at the library. Now that I'm only at the library every other week, it stresses me out on days like today, when Leroy doesn't make it. He might not learn enough math before his next test if he only works on it once a month. I'm a little worried that he only has one more test in him, and if he doesn't pass the next time, he won't be back. Unlike Betty, Leroy has improved a lot on his math. Mostly, he has gotten over the deer-in-the-headlights fear he feels when he first looks at a problem, which allows him to relax enough to remember what we've done for the past nine months.

And then today there was a dirty white guy at our table, and I had a bad feeling. I have never had a bad feeling at tutoring before. I didn't want to tutor him, because I felt leered at when he looked at me. I also felt like a dick for not wanting to be friendly. So, when he asked me when I'm available for tutoring, I told him my actual real hours, because I didn't want to be a dick. When he said he'd come in two weeks and bring some calculus homework, I said OK, but, I said it unenthusiastically, because I had a Bad Feeling, and I was pretty sure the calculus was a ruse to get me to talk to him. Then I started to wonder whether I was having a real honest-to-goodness Bad Feeling or whether I had some sort of homelessness prejudice that was keeping me from being helpful. The good news is that all of my homelessness stereotypes indicate that he will not be able to keep the appointment and I will probably never see him again, so I might not have to play the game of pretending to tutor him in math, when all he really wants is to sit next to a friendly woman for an hour.

Besides, isn't that all Betty wants, too?

Baby Whispers

2008-12-24T20:35:00.003-06:00

One of the things I believe is that as long as parents are not harming their children, then the way that they choose to raise them is the way it should be done. I don't offer advice or criticism, mostly because what the hell do I know? But also because the world already gives new parents more advice than they need.

"Oh," says the world, "your baby doesn't sleep? Have you tried letting her cry herself to sleep?"
"Have you tried the family bed?"
"Maybe it's something you're eating."
"He needs to be kept on a strict schedule."
"She needs more stimulation. Take her outside."

These things might all be good advice, but when you're sleep deprived, and your own individual baby, the one you know best in the world isn't sleeping, what business is it of the world to intrude with its sage advice? No. I figure I am a better friend by believing with all of my heart that the parents know best.

And, so, when I worked as a nanny/research assistant in Portland, OR, for a woman who followed a book called "The Baby Whisperer" to the letter, I did as she instructed. I didn't rock her son to sleep, and allow his drowsy baby head to droop against my shoulder. I didn't hold his sleeping body against mine and smell his head while he dreamed. No, I followed her routine. He woke up. He had some food (breast milk with her), he got a clean diaper, he played on his stomach as long as he was happy, and then he played alone on his back. When he got tired of alone time, I picked him up and talked to him and sang with him. And, then, as soon as he started to rub his eyes or droop, we played three songs on the stereo while I danced with him in my arms. When he zoned out and his eyes glazed over, I carried him to his crib, and placed him gently on his back. He was still awake, but he was as limp as an overdone noodle. Before long, he fell asleep on his own. I walked away, and helped Liz with her research until he woke up again, at which point we would start the routine from the beginning.

She was strict about following the routine (which she never called a schedule, because it was shaped by the baby and never by the time on the clock). Once she returned from vacation, nearly in tears. Her son wasn't sleeping well. Her husband had walked him to sleep the whole time they were on vacation. He had ruined her carefully constructed patterns. How was the boy ever going to learn the rhythm again?

Sometimes, I thought maybe she should lighten up. I was pretty sure she was missing the greatest joy of feeling her small baby sleep against her chest. It definitely seemed like bad policy to over-monitor how her husband parented. However, I have to admit that the job was one of the easiest I ever had. Her son took to the routine. He ate well and played happily alone and then he enjoyed singing and talking until it was time to dance and to sleep. It was her kid, and she seemed to know how to parent him. I did as I was told.

I didn't realize that the Baby Whisperer's patterns had become so ingrained in me, until last week when I babysat for an infant about the same age as that boy had been when we met. I thought they were just Liz's thing that I did because she told me to. But then there I was with a small infant, and I had forgotten how boring they are. For a while, alone with this blob of an (albeit very cute and cuddly) baby, I felt at a loss for what to do. I was in someone else's house, holding someone else's baby, and there was nothing to do.

And so I fell back on the routine. I put the baby down, arranged some toys to be swatted by her undirected hand flailing, so she could learn some cause and effect. When she got bored I picked her up and sang with her and talked to her. When she started to yawn and looked glazed over, I set her down, and watched her fall asleep. She woke up. I gave her the bottle. We changed diapers. She played a little more Cause-and-Effect. I sang "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" and asked her how big the baby was. She stared the yawning again, and I put her down, and just as I was getting bored again, she fell asleep. And, so I knitted, baby-whispering complete for the afternoon. She slept straight through until her mom arrived.

It's a pretty good trick, actually, especially for that little monkey-baby stage. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work on my own kid, though. I'd be too busy smelling hair, and trying to get some cuddles in.

Well, You Missed It

2008-12-22T08:40:00.002-06:00

I saw a great show yesterday afternoon, called "Fool For Love", by Sam Shepard. The story is grim (and dumb when you think about it), but the performances by four actors were all outstanding. One guy played an awkward moment without speaking so well that it made me squirm. The leads were both coiled like springs for the entire show. There were times during the show when I couldn't take my eyes off of each of the four of them, not even to see what the other three were doing.

I hate to tell you how engrossing the play was, since yesterday's show was the last performance, but I will tell you that after this I'd see anything at the Gremlin Theater. It's small and intimate like the Penumbra, too, which makes you feel like you're right there in the room with the actors (who came out to the lobby in street clothes after the show and chatted with the audience). So, I'm sorry you missed this one, but check out their next show if you get the chance. OK, carry on.

Paradox

2008-12-21T09:14:00.002-06:00

So, I was thinking about my blind date today, and I was thinking that I didn't have high hopes for it. He seems introverted and numerically inclined, which is fine, but I'm starting to think that two such people in a relationship is one too many. Still, he contacted me, and I didn't say no, because I'm trying to be open and yes-y.

And then I was thinking about all of these people who keep telling me that I shouldn't try so hard, that I will meet my someone when I least expect it. And for a brief moment I thought maybe this was when I would least expect it, which, of course, ruined the moment, and brought me back to where I started.

Three Little Words

2008-12-17T21:39:00.002-06:00

You can describe the state of my apartment at the moment in just three words. Sarah did so just this evening. She walked in the door, wrinkled her nose, and said, "What's that smell?" Yep, it's time to clean. For once, the rankness of the air was not caused by Buddy's intestinal problems. It's just the stale smell of girl and not-too-clean dog living together in squalor.

I'm counting the minutes until break, and then I'm cleaning it from top to bottom. It's going to be squeak by Sunday. The smell of this place by Sunday will be the smell of clean.

Over It

2008-12-15T19:22:00.002-06:00

Jimmy invited me to dinner. This is the perfect response to the kind of mood I was in when I wrote yesterday's post. I was probably hungry and tired. Hungry and tired equals vague existential weariness for me, and I can never seem to remember at the time that the reason I find myself questioning the meaning of life and my place in it, is mostly because I'm hungry.

I mean, sure, sometimes I feel like the Loneliest Girl in the World who has to eat dinner alone in restaurants, but it could be a lot worse. I could be too poor to afford dinner. I could actually, for real, not have friends, and I could actually be lonely, not just temporarily without company. I could have no family to pick me up when I stagger, no Jimmy to offer to cook me dinner. I could have no Buddy to curl up beside me when I crawl into bed. I could have no sister-in-law who saves me crossword puzzles when I visit. I could have no book club friends to meet me for bad movies downtown.

I could have no courage to date and no confidence that the Right One is out there for me. I could be married to the Wrong One or trying to figure out custody of my children. I could be mourning the loss of the Right One, or forcing myself into a closet so that I'd guarantee myself years of dating Wrong Ones.

None of these things is true. I'm just single. I'm just hungry after long days of work, and I have to figure out how to feed myself after working a full day. I'm just working too hard because I'm a new teacher and I'm learning as I go. I'm just a procrastinator who would be happier if she did her damn work instead of playing computer games and wishing she didn't have to do all of that work. I'm just light-sensitive and I work without windows, so I need to get light some other way. I'm just ready for winter break, and I just have four more days to go until I'm free.

Fear

2008-12-14T11:34:00.003-06:00

We've reached December, everyone, which for those of us who are seasonal, is never a particularly good thing. This year, the effect of lack of daylight on me seems to be an increase in fear. Don't worry. I'm not panicky. I'm just angsty. Lovely.

I'm afraid I'll spend the day playing Eight Letters in Search of a Word, and I won't get my work done, and I'll have to go to school with ungraded tests no plan. I'm afraid my dog is mad at me for not wanting to walk him these days. I'm afraid I'll never run again. I'm afraid I'm out of food. I'm afraid that my heart is frozen. I'm afraid my mom will read this, convince herself that I'm depressed and worry about me. I'm afraid I can't make new friends. I'm afraid I'll have to look for a new job this summer. I'm afraid that Facebook is stealing all of my personal information in order to target ads at me and it still shows me diet ads. I'm afraid that I'll never get my master's degree. I'm afraid that my married friends will outgrow me. I'm afraid that I missed the deadline to invest in my 403(b). I'm afraid that my students are cheating. I'm afraid that I'm too easy a grader. I'm afraid that the rain will freeze to my car and I'll have to spend the morning hacking it out of the ice. I'm afraid that once I get my car out of the ice, the roads will be so slippery I'll go in the ditch. I'm afraid of the economy and the war and the crazy white supremicists who want to kill the president.

See? You don't want to be in this head. I'm telling you. It's loud in here.

Fifth Hour

2008-12-05T07:55:00.004-06:00

"I have a question, but it's not math related."

Uh oh.

"Have you seen that guy from the hockey game lately?"

"Was that your mom who just knocked on the door?"

"Well, will you bring your mom to school one day so we can meet her?"

"Can she bring your dog?"

"What kind of dog do you have?"

"What's his name?"

"What does your mom do?"

"What does perinatalogy mean?"

"Does she deliver twins? I'm a twin. Did she deliver me? What's her name?"

"Like the Science Guy?"

"Mrs. B says you and her go way back? Are you friends with Mrs. B?"

"You were in AmeriCorps? What's AmeriCorps?"

"Um, can I ask you a math question?"

Yes!

Day of Rest

2008-12-01T18:11:00.002-06:00

The best thing about the half-marathon training program that I'm running, even though I'm not running in a half-marathon? The off-days.

Don't get me wrong. I always go a lot of days without running. In fact, I've been down to running once a week recently, but my days off from running have never been off-days. They have always been days when I didn't get to it. They were days when I couldn't make myself get up before school or saddle up after school for a run. On those days, I still thought about running, thought that I should run, thought that maybe, even though I didn't get to it before school, I still might run after school.

There seems to be a secret to life in there somewhere. I take days off from grading homework, for example, but I never take days off from homework. It's always there, hanging over my head, making me feel guilty. Maybe I should do a six mile run of homework tonight, be done with it, and then allow myself a day off to heal and rest for the next burst of homework energy another day.

Fever Cured

2008-11-30T20:42:00.002-06:00

I gave the sweater away today, and then, mere hours later, I drew my dad's name in the gift draw. If only I could have waited it could have passed as a Christmas present.

In case you were worried, it fit. The sleeves were long enough. The neck was only a little bit weird, and I only had to reknit it three times to make it work. I learned a new cast-off.

In other news, I ran for about six miles today to Lake Nokomis, around it, and back home. I'm starting a new thing where I'm following a half-marathon training program. Not, mind you, that I plan on running in a half-marathon. You'd have to be half-nuts to run in one of those.

That is all. Oh, yeah. I don't want to go to work tomorrow, mostly because I didn't grade homework this weekend. Blech.

Obsession for Knitters

2008-11-28T09:58:00.003-06:00

I go through these phases with my knitting. I've been working on a sweater for my dad for at least a year, and most of that time "working on" has looked a lot like "ignoring that thing shoved in my drawer," but yesterday I pulled it out of the drawer, read the stitches left on my needle like some secret coded message from my past, and managed to resurrect the sweater from that place where well-intentioned knitting projects go to die.

I began slowly enough, before Thanksgiving dinner, knitting a couple of rows, while chatting with my family in the kitchen as they made stuffing and dressing and mashed potatoes. I even allowed myself to be interrupted so I could set the table.

Had I stopped there, I would be able to say that I still have a healthy relationship with my knitting, but I didn't stop there.

No, I got home from Thanksgiving, plopped myself down on the couch, and didn't even remove my coat. While TV droned on in the background, I finished the sleeves and then sewed up the seams so that what I had finally looked like a sweater. This process took three hours. Three hours of me hunched over my knitting, barely moving except to change the channel so that I could watch the Office instead of whatever was on after Moonstruck. At some point, I removed my jacket. Buddy gave me that look that means, "This means you aren't going to walk me again tonight, doesn't it?" and then sneaked off to sleep on my pillows (which is not allowed). Still I knit on.

Finally, I could look at the tiny stitches through my sleep-deprived eyes no longer, and so I stood in front of the mirror and tried on the nearly finished garment. It needs a neck. One of the seams is only partially sewn. The end of the knitting and sewing marked the beginning of the worrying stage of my obsessive evening.

It's big on me, but is it big enough? Will the sleeves be long enough. Will it be too tight for my dad's belly? Will the neck be weird? Will I be able to figure out how to attach the neck? How will it look after it's washed and blocked?

No wonder I didn't fall immediately into a deep sleep when I finally moved the dog's smelly body off of my pillows, swept aside the sand, and pulled the covers over my head. I have knitting fever now, and the only cure is a completed project.

The One in the Style of Facebook

2008-11-27T07:55:00.002-06:00

So, now that I belong to that social networking thing, a new writing style has crept into my head, somewhat against my will. In this style everything is in the present tense, and you always refer to yourself in the third person. Sentences are short in Facebook world. Here, then, is my yesterday, told Facebook style.

Alex is making herself go back to sleep. It's too early.

Alex is finally getting up.

Alex is glad she's running with Buddy in the dog park this morning.

Alex is peeling apples and sprinkling them with sugar.

Alex has a secret for apple pie. Rum.

Alex's recipe for pie crust calls for sour cream. Sour cream? She has to go to the store on the day before Thanksgiving. Wish her luck.

Alex is cutting butter into flour.

Alex is cutting butter into flour.

Alex is cutting butter into flour.

Alex is glad that's over.

Alex is rolling out her crust just so. She is already dreading cutting the butter for the next crust.

Alex is sure she had almond extract, but she can't find it. She's on her way to the store again.

Alex is wondering why her family never followed the trend of using the food processor for this.

Alex would marry the next man she met, just so she could register for a food processor and stop cutting the butter into the flour.

Alex is enjoying the smell of apple pie in the apartment.

Alex is trying to break up the monotony of cutting butter into flour with daytime television. It's not working.

Alex is convinced that her butter is now pea sized.

Alex is weaving her cherry pie crust. It looks goooood.

Alex is trying not to think about how messy her kitchen is.

Alex has to make appetizers for tonight's party. Alex will have to clean the kitchen.

Alex is making guacamole. She enjoys mincing garlic into tiny little cubes.

Alex is not at all sure she can wear that sweater with that skirt, but she's doing it anyway.

Alex is laughing at the one-year-old's shenanigans with her shirt. Alex likes the word shenanigans.

Alex is eating water chestnuts wrapped in bacon and dates stuffed with goat cheese and lots of fresh mozzarella basil and tomatoes.

Alex is telling stories again about her cat getting stuck in her face.

Alex enjoys a party this size, and she likes laughing with old friends (and one-year-olds).

Alex is sad that the party is over, but she's ready for bed. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Moms

2008-11-26T10:54:00.002-06:00

I dated a guy with a handlebar mustache. My friends called him Colonel Mustard to distinguish him from all other dates of mine (which at that time weren't many, since we dated for more than a year). Anyway, Colonel Mustard's mom traditionally cooked a Christmas goose. It was one of the best things I have ever eaten. She and I are both blessed with skinny-genes and healthy body images, and so we sat at the table together after everyone else had finished eating and picked at the carcass. We both liked the crispy bits of skin, which on a goose, are even more intensely fatty than turkey skin.

She also used to work on jigsaw puzzles with me in the basement. She had a triumphant way of tapping her piece whenever she got one. She liked to be acknowledged. She asked me to teach her how to do Sudoku puzzles, but I suspect she was just trying to make me feel welcome in her family. It worked. I used to be able to imagine myself as part of her family. I couldn't imagine the Colonel in my family, but I could imagine myself in the long run in that basement working on jigsaws and laughing with his mom as we picked at fatty meat together.

Jimmy recently asked me to contact her to get the goose recipe. Never mind that the entire Mustard family is off limits to me since the Colonel and I had our falling out. Jimmy wants to know how to recreate that crispy goose skin experience. Of course, it's impossible, but it made me realize that after almost three years, one of the things I miss most about Colonel Mustard is his mom, the woman who baked Christmas sugar cookies and orchestrated intense cookie-decorating contests among her children and their mates, the woman who bought me the π plate I will use today for a Thanksgiving apple pie. The woman who in addition to having all of these domestic talents also spoke with fierce intelligence about the news of the day.

I love my own mom best of all, but really there are so many good moms out there, I appreciate it when anyone I know is willing to share his with me.

Not Dwelling

2008-11-25T20:50:00.003-06:00

I had a goal. It was arbitrary, but it was a goal, and I didn't make it. Even though it's silly, I am fully capable of making myself miserable over something like this.

I want to run, but I've been so tired that I can't make myself get up early to run, and I'm so tired when I get home that I can't make myself do more than take a short jaunt with Buddy.

I'm happy enough right now, but it could only take a couple more days of not-running, or a couple of more days of dwelling on missing my arbitrary goal that I'll sink down again into not-happy. So it's a good thing that I don't have school tomorrow. It's a good thing I'm going to write this post and then go to bed, so that I can get up and run tomorrow. I'm aware that if I can write about maybe being sad without crying, then that's a good thing, too, because it means I'm not there yet, and I still have time to run it off.

Somehow, I'm getting better at being myself, but the view from this side of the brain always looks dicier than the one from where you're sitting. Trust me.

Scarier than a Stock Market Crash

2008-11-25T20:38:00.003-06:00

They're reporting it as a touchy-feely human-interest story. A farmer decides to open up his fields to the public after he's harvested, so that regular people can pick through for anything left behind by the harvesting machines. He grows potatoes, beets, carrots, onions, pumpkins and leeks. And guess how many people came to pick through his fields for these non-glamorous vegetables? 40,000.

Unless he also served free popcorn and beer, it makes me a little bit worried about the state of our economy that 40,000 people were willing to do farm labor for root vegetables. Free or not, Americans don't even like beets.

Hammer Time

2008-11-20T21:21:00.003-06:00

Also, I had to tell you that I played a little MC Hammer in my calculus class.

I have a disability which allows me to not-hear music. Usually this disability boosts my immunity to ear-worms. However, hearing the song four times in one day was too much even for me. It's in my head now, but good.

Anyway, I was teaching about asymptotes. I played the song, and then I blew their minds with a little bit of this action:

MC Hammer was wrong. You can touch an asymptote. Repeatedly. Cool!

The Internet Made Another Mistake

2008-11-20T20:33:00.004-06:00

There's a website that will tell you what Meyers-Briggs type of person the author of a blog is. Guess what I am. Go ahead. It'll be fun.

If you guessed "The Performer," you're as wrong as the website. ESFP? Never in all my days! An extrovert? Feeling over thinking? Sensing over Intuiting? Come on, Internet, have you met me?

Don't worry. It's in beta. Maybe future releases will implement an algorithm that will be able to cull personality traits like introversion and logical and symbolic thinking from such post titles as "The Introvert at Sea" and "Polynomials".

Or maybe I'm more extroverted than I think I am. But after spending the past 2 hours meeting parents, I'm feeling like a puddle of mush. Shouldn't an extrovert be ready to party right about now?

P.S. As long as I'm pointing you to websites, you might as well go vote on which ballots should go to Franken and which should go to Coleman. Come on. Be honest. Stop saying "Franken" just because you want your veto-proof majority.

and
P.P.S. It's neck and neck between "Hot Dish" and "Under Construction", but I think Rachael logs on to a new computer and over-votes for "Under Construction" every time "Hot Dish" pulls ahead.

And Now for Something Positive

2008-11-16T20:43:00.003-06:00

Here are two games that were mostly invented by a good friend of mine whose name rhymes with Hair-a.

1. The Name Game. You're driving down the street, and you notice something about someone walking on the sidewalk. You point the person out to your friend, and say, "OK. One, two, three," then each of you shouts out what you think the name of the innocent bystander (bywalker) is. Sometimes the names you yell at each other almost sort of match. This is very exciting. Other times the names don't match, but one is clearly much better than the other. The winner earns a small smile of satisfaction at her triumph.

2. The "I can't believe you..." game. For this game you need a straight man. By default I usually play this role. You pull a story from the day's headlines. Page 6 stories are better for this game than leading news stories. Approach your straight man and retell the news story as if your straight man had played the starring role in the story. As in, "Alex, I can't believe you finally decided to support a woman's right to choose, but only when it comes to her light bulb." If you're lucky, the straight-man hasn't read the story and doesn't even realize you're playing a game. Confusion and hilarity ensue.

Saturday

2008-11-15T21:13:00.002-06:00

Woke up to the sound of the phone ringing. 'Twas the mother. She wanted to go to the dog park before work. It was 6:00. Somehow this has become my version of normal. She and I laughed throughout the walk. Words were said that shall not be published here. Actions were taken that shall not be repeated on this page.

After the walk, ran off to the library for tutoring. Met Fred who wants to be a chef and needs some math to get into school. We did fractions. He said he learned something. I said, "Well, that's why you came, right?" He promised to return. I will not hold my breath.

Booked it across town to meet a colleague for lunch before the high school musical. Late because of traffic. Fucking 62. Raced off to the school. Watched high school students enacting racial stereotypes on stage for old folks and children. OK, because they're Asian. The model minority. Is that the logic???

Off again, this time to NE for a birthday party at the Bulldog. Stopped at Target for chocolate and a card. No gas left in the old car, but parking is only 25 cents an hour. Heck, I can afford to stay for three. Appetizers, cupcakes, and a BLT surrounded by beautiful people. I don't fit in. I pay and go. Home again, at last. It's 9:20 and I'm exhausted. Can I go to bed now?

Non-Negotiable

2008-11-14T20:50:00.003-06:00

The last guy I sort-of dated was not kind. I don't mean that he was cruel, because he wasn't, at least not until the end, which is understandable, but, still, "kind" was still not a word that I would use to describe him. Distant, yes. Aloof, sure. Kind, no.

Here I am wandering the vast wasteland of dating, and you can wander here for a long, long time, and sometimes I wonder if maybe I should have just found a spot in the wasteland, and set up shelter, and settled in, and made myself at home. What am I looking for, after all? And would I recognize it if I found it? And have I already missed it? And am I too picky?

So, I decided to make a list of the non-negotiables, the things I need from a guy to have in order to set up my tent. Here it is:

1. Kindness.
2. Brains.
3. Happiness.

Oh, it's not a long list, but it's triple the length of the list I had at the beginning of this journey. I used to think I could be happy with a man who was as smart as I am. Isn't that shallow? All I wanted was a giant walking, talking brain. I wanted him to understand me when I said crap like: "This is the winter of my discontent," so that I wouldn't have to explain myself to him all the time, because funny is so much less funny when you have to use the glossary to get to the punchline.

Somewhere along the rocky path of dating, kindness slipped onto my list ahead of brains. The thing about dating really smart people is that sometimes they come with a little bit of scorn. Sometimes they are too busy intellectualizing to remember to be decent. Sometimes, they think that because they carry the enormous burden of having too much going on in their heads, they are excused from the task of remembering to be good to the people around them.

Finally, after stumbling one too many times over the paralyzing rock of depression, I also added happiness to the list. It's a tall order, being smart enough to know about all of the shit that happens in the world, being kind enough to care about it, and being stubborn enough to maintain a core of happiness anyway. I didn't realize that I wanted so much until I wrote it down. No wonder I wander.

How to Feel Old

2008-11-13T19:56:00.002-06:00

First, go to your college alumni happy hour, even though you graduated thirteen years ago. Second, try not to make eye contact with the waitress, so you don't get any food or drink for at least half an hour. This will leave you with nothing to do with your hands. Third, arrive late, so there is no more space at the table, and you have to stand awkwardly at the elbows of some young perky alums who are complaining about nearing thirty, and who won't turn around and introduce themselves to you. Finally, be so introverted that you can't find a way to interrupt them to introduce yourself to them.

It wouldn't have been worth paying for parking, but I "accidentally" ate one of the youngster's kobe beef sandwiches. Oops. Except for being tender and delicious, it sure looked like my burger...

I Suck at Naming Things

2008-11-12T17:13:00.003-06:00

The first thing I got to name all by myself was the cat my dad gave me for my ninth birthday. Now, when I was nine, I went to a hippie school, where we called our teachers by their first names. A teacher at my hippie school was named Florence, but she always went by Fluffy, and, so in honor of a favorite teacher, I named my cat Fluffy. I still cringe when I write those those words. I named my cat Fluffy. Might as well name a dog Buddy. Which I didn't, by the way. He came with a name.

I did a little better with my second cat, which is a good thing because I had to live with her name for 20 years. I named her Stevie, which I think is a cool name for a girl. Every single vet she ever had used male pronouns with her, but otherwise, it was an OK name. She was named after an obscure British poet however, which wouldn't have been bad, except that even I hadn't read her poems. I always had to explain that she was named after some poet that I didn't know anything about. She was played by Glenda Jackson in the movie. I should have just named the cat Glenda. At least I know who she is.

Anyway, five years ago when I started this blog, I named it "Under Construction" which I thought was clever, because I was writing about going on a Habitat trip where I would be doing construction work. Get it? Yeah. I know. It turns out not to be very clever.

So, here's where you come in. Please, give me a better name to write at the top of this page. I'm getting annoyed with the old one. Thank you for your time.

Character Study

2008-11-11T20:15:00.002-06:00

I'll call him Zack Brown, which is not his name, because every time I think of him, I think of him by first and last name.

Zack Brown's mother had two older kids, nine and thirteen, both boys. She got divorced and she remarried, and her second husband also wanted a biological child and so she agreed to have a kid with him, too. When she told us this story, there was very little doubt that, while she loved Zack Brown he was not Her Idea and if he had been Her Idea, he would have been a girl. By "us", I mean the three of us who worked in the toddler room with 2-year-old Zack Brown, the three people, who despite a relatively humane four-to-one toddler-teacher ratio in Oregon, often lost track of her child in the chaos of the room.

We would find him in the kindergarten room down the hall, playing with the big kids. Or, worse, we wouldn't find him, but one of the kindergarten teachers would walk him back to us before we had even noticed his absence. We would find him hidden behind bookcases, climbing on forbidden structures, or crawling behind barricades to find a favorite toy that we had put off limits. One day, our toddler room floor drain backed up, and water seeped into a puddle on the floor. We corralled the kids away from the water, but caring for toddlers is always a little like herding cats, and I remember hearing a slurping sound while I was changing a diaper. I looked up and there was Zack Brown squatting face-down next to the puddle, helping himself to a refreshing drink of sewage. Hands full of diaper, I couldn't even stop him.

His mother took these lapses in oversight with grace. She knew how quickly he could move. "With my older kids, I always liked that stage when they knew how to sit, but they couldn't crawl yet, and you could put them on the floor with some toys and walk away," she said wistfully. "Zack learned how to crawl before he could sit."

We used to take the kids for a morning walk in one of those big, red multiple-seat strollers. There were six kids in the stroller, which required one teacher, and then the other two teachers would hold the hands of whoever needed to walk. We protected the communal nap like lions protecting our young. Without the communal nap, we wouldn't get our breaks. If a kid started to doze in the stroller, we'd pull her out and make her stumble over her own sleepy feet until she woke up again. Zack Brown never slept in the stroller, but we never let him ride, either. We didn't know what we'd do with ourselves if we didn't tire him out enough for him to nap, so we held his hand. Zack Brown was going to sleep, even if one of us had to run with him for the entire walk.

"Please, don't let him sleep too long," begged his mother. "Wake him up after an hour or an hour and a half. I need him to sleep at home." We always agreed to her demands to her face, and we always let him sleep for at least two hours when she wasn't there. We were too worn out to pass up the chance to know where he was for a full two hours.

Zack didn't have to speak. He used pointing and grunts to let his needs be known, or he'd move towards what he wanted and have it in his hands more quickly than we could get it for him. At two, he had so few words, his mother started to worry. "He's smart," we said. "We can tell. Don't worry."

Still, one day, she came in to school excited. "Zack has a word! Watch!" she said, pulling out a piece of drawing paper and a marker. Most of our markers had no ink, because when we weren't looking Zack Brown would stick the tips in his mouth and suck them ferociously until the tip was ghostly white. She found one that worked and began sketching. She drew two circles.

"Ball," said Zack.

We looked at each other. We knew he knew "ball". It was exactly the kind of monosyllabic utilitarian word he had mastered. "Not that," she said, continuing her drawing, connecting her circles, adding a seat, and a set of handlebars.

"Bicycle," said Zack Brown, as clearly as if he had been speaking all of his life, and then he ran off to join the kindergartners.

A Good Day for a Dog

2008-11-10T19:54:00.002-06:00

Owning a dog has divided my time in a whole new way. I give you the four times of my life:

1. Times when it is a Bad Time to own a dog.

These are the times when, without question, my life would be happier if I didn't own a dog. (Don't worry. It's OK for me to write these words. Buddy can't read.) The number one time when I'd be happier without a dog is when Buddy has what we call "intestinal problems." I know that writing is enhanced with vivid details, but I just rejected about eight such details as too gross for a family blog. Suffice it to say, that most of these times involve me cleaning and trying not to inhale through my nose.

It is also a Bad Time to own a dog when I want to travel or have a sleep-over. So those two weeks in the summer when I try to get away, and that once-in-a-blue-moon time when I have a sleep-over, it sucks to have a dog.

2. Times when it is a Good Time to own a dog.

Most of these times are in the dog park. On a bright crisp morning in the fall, when he is a black streak against the golden leaves, and everyone else in the dog park is smiling, that's a good time to own a dog.

It's a Good Time to own a dog when your feet are cold in bed, and you are able to push him aside so you can stick your feet in the spot he warmed up for you. It's a Good Time to have a dog when you feel lonely, and you wonder if anyone loves you, and then you glance down at the floor two feet away from you, and he notices your head movement and looks up at you to see what you're thinking.

It's Good to have a dog when you're visiting two-year-olds, and they follow him adoringly, saying "Buddy! Hi, Buddy! Hi!" or "Buddy licks you!" It's especially Good to have a gentle, old lab at these times, because he is trustworthy around kids and realizes that they are his boss, even when they are small and try to climb on top of him.

3. Times when it seems Good to have a dog, but it's really Not

So, I'll admit it. I've tried to use Buddy as a litmus test for dates. I thought he would be able to suss out their true character with his doggy sense. The truth is, Buddy is not picky. He likes anyone who pays attention to him. He is indifferent to anyone who doesn't. So, um, my litmus test is really more of a test to see who likes Buddy than it is a test to see who has a good character.

Similarly, you might think that Buddy would make me safer living alone in the city. Sure Buddy seems like he should be a watchdog/protector with his dark good looks and his rapidly swishing tail, but I don't even want to think about what would happen if someone wanted to kill or maim me and thought to bring a nice juicy steak for Buddy. I'm pretty sure I'd be maimed or killed and Buddy would get a nice little treat. Good for Buddy. Bad for me.

4. Times when it seems like a Bad Time to own a dog, but it's really Good.

Today was one of these times. The dark and the weather were conspiring to make me feel a good hibernation coming on. I got home from work and all I wanted to do was curl up in my bed with a book or a video and not get out again until someone else had scraped off my car in the morning. I dread the next five months, because I don't want to be cold all the time. Still, I had to walk the damn dog, so I pulled my parka out of the closet. I found a hat and wrapped a scarf around my head. Yes, I know. It's not that cold, but I was crabby and I shouldn't have to wear a flimsy fall coat or breathe cold air when I'm crabby. I putzed around as long as I could, and then finally, Buddy would let me put it off no longer, so I hooked on the leash and we walked through the crisp, dark neighborhood. My muscles clenched against the cold, and we walked.

We walked.

It's Good for me to walk, especially when I don't want to. By the end of the walk, my hands were warm, I had lowered my shoulders from around my ears, and I had poked my nose out from the safety of my scarf cocoon. It's not that Bad. We will make it through this winter, too.

I Blame the Recession

2008-11-09T15:29:00.002-06:00

Because of tough economic times, NPR did a story about a woman who had drastically reduced her shopping bill by clipping and downloading coupons. I only half-listened, because I'm far too busy and disorganized to remember to use coupons, but at one point I heard her say, "No one should ever pay full price for toothpaste," and as she spoke I remembered that I had once heard that toothpaste brand-loyalty was among the highest of all products. It may have even been second to cigarettes. Anyway, as a consumer, I must be some sort of anomaly because have absolutely no brand-loyalty to toothpaste. I grew up on Tom's all natural chalk-flavored toothpaste, and anyone who can survive Tom's really can use just about anything. If nothing else is around, I'll even use Tom's black licorice-flavored chalk, which is just about the worst thing on Earth.

Or so I thought.

It just so happened that shortly after I heard the story, I ran out of toothpaste. I stood in the aisle at Walgreen's, and as I reached for a box of something (anything) I cursed the fact that I hadn't clipped coupons beforehand, since "no one should ever pay full price for toothpaste," and then I noticed that on the bottom shelf, way below Crest and Colgate and Aquafresh, there was a box of Aim toothpaste for a third of the price of everything else. Aha! I thought. I win! I get cheap toothpaste, and I don't have to carry a coupon to the register. In my excitement at scoring such a good deal, I only briefly wondered why Aim is so much cheaper than any other toothpaste.

I paid my 99 cents, and brought home a shiny new tube of Aim. Remember Aim from your childhood? I didn't, but it turns out that it tastes so bad it makes you want to fill your mouth with the refreshing smell of garlic after brushing. It puckers up the insides of your mouth and dries up your saliva, and leaves you feeling decidedly unclean.

In short, it makes me miss Tom's. And now I have to use it all up, because it doesn't count as saving money if you just toss it in the garbage when you get it home. The final blow was that my 99 cent toothpaste came with a free travel-sized tube of the same crappy stuff. It'll be a year before I can like the taste of my mouth again.

My Pen Pal

2008-11-08T16:53:00.003-06:00

I joined Facebook yesterday. This is an experiment. I'm too old for such things, but many of my equally old friends belong, and so I thought I'd give it a try. So far it's a little bit intimidating, because I don't really know what I'm supposed to do there. Anyway, I was examining pictures of my new Facebook-friends (who are all old friends of mine in real life) at the computer in my parents' kitchen, and my mom, who is about as tech savvy as one of our presidential candidates (and not the one she voted for), saw a picture of Barack Obama on my page standing next to one of my actual friends, and she was finally impressed with my social networking prowess, "Oh! Are you Facebook-friends with Barack Obama?!" I said no, but I pointed out that it probably wasn't all that hard to befriend our president-elect on Facebook. However, since he already drove me away from my old yahoo email address by emailing me every day, and since he already turned me, a die-hard phone answerer, into a dedicated call-screener for a full week before the election, I wasn't about to allow him to become my Facebook buddy.

Still, Sarah pointed me to his new transition website and I read through it, and there was a link to make a comment, and suddenly I found myself writing him a letter.

"Dear Mr. President," I wrote, thrilling at the sound of it, "I am writing to thank you for the press conference you participated in this week. I would like to urge you to continue to be open and available to the press. As an American, I have longed for the old days when the president held regular press conferences, and faced the tough questions from the media as a regular course of events. You will make mistakes," (because I'm experienced in making mistakes and I want Obama to benefit from my wisdom), "but don't hide from them. Stand in front of the press and face their questions, because you owe it to the people who voted for you and worked for you and campaigned for you, to meet honestly and often with the media whose job it is to monitor your work."

Or something like that. Anyway, I await his response. This could be the beginning of a beautiful non-Facebook friendship.

The Mouths of Babes

2008-11-07T17:53:00.002-06:00

When I admitted that I wouldn't grade their tests because I'd be at a hockey game, the kids asked me who I was going with. I don't usually share my intimate details with students, but I'm a bad liar, and so it slipped out that I was going with a guy before I could think of anything else to say.

"Ooooh," they gasped, shocked that a teacher had allowed that tidbit to escape. "What are you going to wear? Where did you meet? What's his name? What's his name?" It was a spontaneous gossip session and it was sweeter than I thought it would be. Sure, I blushed, and I regretted my inability to hide my life, but their earnest interest was touching.

"Why won't you tell us his name? Just tell us. We don't know him. What does he do? Have you been together long? Does he work here?"

I tried to maintain a little bit of privacy, and I attempted to cut off the questions by answering them as briefly as I could, but I'm still not sure they learned any math that day. One of them said, "Oh, we should stop asking, because what if it doesn't work out?" The innocence of the question caught me off guard, and I said, "Well, I'm thirty-five, and it hasn't worked out yet, so it probably won't," and I laughed, because a date to a hockey game means so much more to a 17-year-old than it does to a woman twice her age, but apparently it still brings out all of the same insecurities.

After class, a quiet, hard-working girl who is so much cooler than I ever was in high school, changed her exit path from the room so that she would walk by me and said, low, so no one else would hear, "You know, my mom was thirty-five when she got married for the first time." She smiled at me, encouragingly.

When I was a kid, there was a teacher in my middle school who was famous for crying. Making Mr. Peterson cry was a badge of honor for a certain population of student. And here I was, accidentally flapping my jaw and allowing an entire classroom full of students to see my soft underbelly, and instead of kicking it they tucked me in with care, protecting my fledgling relationship the way they would protect one of a friend.

The hockey date didn't survive, but he still played a role in making my fifth hour a more fun place to be.

Blog Cheater II

2008-11-06T22:00:00.001-06:00

I'm schlipping in this little post. Don't tell anyone.

I got a call from the Red Cross the other day. Note that they called me.

RC: Hello, is this Alex?
AL: Yes, it is.
RC: I was calling to see if you could schedule a time to come in and donate blood.
AL: Well, I'm a teacher, so I'm pretty busy during the week. Do you have any weekend times?
RC: Let me check. What's your phone number?
I paused. Remembered automatic dialing machines. Gave my number.
RC: And what's your zip code?
Hmm? Didn't the phone number allow you to look me up on your computer? Guess not. I gave them the zip code, too.
RC: And what's your name?
You mean the name you called me when you called me on my phone with my number?
RC: And when did you want to donate?
AL: On the weekend?
RC: Oh. We don't have any weekend times.

Solitary

2008-11-05T21:56:00.002-06:00

"Oh, yes," said a woman at the party, when I told her where I work. "I used to know someone who worked at that school. She taught there for one year, and then she quit teaching." She caught my look. "Oh, but I don't think it was the school," she said too quickly. "I think she was just done with teaching."

I nodded. Sure. It probably had nothing to do with the lack of windows or collegiality. She was probably just done teaching. Who makes big decisions like quitting your career just because you're isolated in a concrete box for ten hours a day?

Best Day Ever

2008-11-04T22:12:00.002-06:00

I woke up, and hopped out of bed without pushing snooze, just like I did when I was a kid on mornings when I knew that there would be a stocking hung by the chimney with care. I walked Buddy down to the polling station. Too early to vote, but I wanted to see if there was a line. It was 6:10. Usually, the park is abandoned except for us and a skittish greyhound named Hooch with his owner. Today there was a line beginning to form. It was nearly an hour early, and it was ridiculously early in the morning, but there was a line. Hooch's owner met us on the other side of the park. He said he was on his way to vote. He's an under 40 city-dweller with tattoos who adopts retired greyhounds. I felt pretty good about his vote.

I stopped by the Baker's Wife for a little sustenance on the way to work and was disappointed to see that they were out of my favorite croissants. I was about to settle for a donut when Gary walked out with a tray full of croissants, still warm from the oven. I nearly cried when that first warm, flaky bite melted in my mouth. This was really and truly going to be the Best Day Ever.

My lesson was dull and my students were all keyed up (or absent), but they just weren't part of the Best Day Ever, so I ignored them. I also ignored the fact that my classroom is a windowless, stiffling box. Not part of the Best Day Ever.

I had time to make cookies after voting (which was a breeze at my precinct), and so I loaded them fresh from the oven into Tupperware to be consumed by election partiers. After a slow and tedious process of watching CNN's ridiculous coverage with too many strangers, I finally got too tired, and drove home. In the car, the calm and thorough voices of NPR soothed me through the reporting of California, Oregon and Washington. They were the ones who finally called the election for me, confirming that I was right this morning when I took my first bite of croissant. This really was the Best Day Ever.

Absolute Value: The Shower for Numbers

2008-11-03T19:34:00.005-06:00

If you're clean when you go into the shower, you're clean when you get out:
|6| = 6

If you're dirty when you go into the shower, you're clean when you get out:
|-6| = 6

If you take a shower, and then you get dirty right away, well, then, you're dirty:
-|-6| = -6

Three of my 12 algebra kids failed first quarter. This wretched rate of success brought to you by absenteeism and a history of low expectations and failure. One of the three has decided to change schools. I'm putting on paper (er...pixels) right now that the other two will pass this quarter, if I have to drag their sorry butts to class myself. I mean, seriously, if you can't pass algebra when I hand you the number shower, when are you going to pass?

Oh, and PS, stop calling me. I'm not going to answer. I promise to vote. I would even if I didn't get free ice cream or coffee for it.

(shh...i'm dancing in the streets.)

2008-11-02T18:04:00.003-06:00

A friend wrote to invite me to watch the election returns at her house. She said that when it was over we could dance in the streets. Or something else she didn't want to think about.

I read an article in the New York Times about Democrats who were so worried that the polls keep saying that Obama is ahead, they are afraid to even look at them any more.

On Saturday Night Live, Ben Affleck talked about working for Jimmy Carter's reelection when he was a kid. He said that he worked for Mondale and campaigned for Dukakis. Then he supported Tsongas against Clinton. Of course he endorsed Gore and then Kerry. I'm not one of those Ben Affleck lovers, but he connected with me last night. He and I are about the same age. We've lived through the same painful defeats. We've survived the Clinton age of compromise. We've been afraid to hope because our losses have been so epic.

I keep reading and rereading the polls, and I feel for those angsty New York liberals. I can't take another four years of hell. My heart isn't strong enough for another heartbreak. This one would be the worst of all, too, because my votes for Kerry and Gore were really just votes against Bush. Obama was the one that I wanted from the very beginning. Please, please, just let me dance in the streets this one time.

There Goes my Productivity

2008-11-02T07:19:00.002-06:00

My iPod has games on it.

(Half of you just wondered what I need with an iPod. The correct answer is podcasts. Mine may be the only one in the country with an empty music folder. If you want free podcast recommendations, however, I can help you out. It took me a while to warm up to them, but lately, I've been feeling pretty close to the folks over at the Slate Political Gabfest. Oh, and The Moth makes me laugh and cry and gasp at the sounds coming out of my earbuds. Radio Lab is the best thing on public radio and it's way easier to get it as a podcast than it is to try to figure out how to listen to the radio at 2:00 in the afternoon during the week. Now I just have to wait for the new season to start.

Anyway, podcasts don't interfere with the rest of my life, because I take them with me when I walk Buddy. I do that thing where I meet people on the street and barely nod because I'm all caught up in my iPod. Yes, I do the very thing that always used to make me fear for our civil society.)

Remember having Tetris on your brain? Remember packing your moving van, and feeling like you really could use one of those T-shaped blocks to wedge on the side next to your couch? Remember imagining artwork and books sliding together on your wall, so it would disappear?

Well, Vortex is my new Tetris. Last night my closed eyes covered up imaginary balls dropping into a tunnel and blocks twisting below them. Oh, dear. This does not bode well for accurate end-of-quarter grades for my students tomorrow.

Wordle Never Lies

2008-10-29T18:44:00.004-05:00

You know, it turns out this blog is about the other guy. This whole time I thought it was so obvious that Barack Obama was my candidate that I haven't gone around shouting "Barack Obama" to the rooftops of the world, but it turns out that without even meaning to I mention that other, more spiteful, one a lot. In fact, he comes up nearly as often as my two favorite words: thinking and busy. Here's the proof.

I'm Really a Giant Nerd

2008-10-25T17:50:00.003-05:00

How excited was I that I was finally able to get this to work for my calculus discussion board about homework help questions? Don't ask. It's too embarrassing. It's quite possible that I high-fived myself...but at least it wasn't a high-π, which is just about the nerdiest thing I've ever done in public.

Too Busy to Blog

2008-10-25T10:46:00.003-05:00

So, I've been busy with teaching. Not bad busy, just busy. Too busy for important things like blogging.

I will not, however, be too busy to vote on November 4, despite what you may think after watching this video, which amused me, even though it was yelling at me to vote. Yelling at the woman who even voted for school board members and shoe-ins in the primary. Funny. And is that how you spell "shoe-in"? Probably not.

What Else Not to Do

2008-10-01T23:00:00.000-05:00

If your kid bombs a test, don't call the teacher and complain that the test was too hard. Don't try to sit down with the teacher so she can explain to you why she only does easy examples in class and only puts hard questions on the test. What are you trying to accomplish? Anyway?

Other People

2008-09-27T12:32:00.004-05:00

I was walking through the dog park today and I realized with some surprise that for once in my life, my thoughts were with other people. Don't worry. I'm not giving up my self-absorbtion for good, but today, for one day, I'm thinking about somebody else for a change.

I'm thinking about how I hope the weather is good in Washington DC today, because Lisa is getting married to Nick there today, and I don't know Lisa or Nick, but I've grown to care about them from reading Lemon Gloria regularly, so I hope their ceremony is beautiful because it matters to Lisa, who is so happy to have found Nick she can't stop crying.

On my morning walk with Buddy, my thoughts also turned to T, who accidentally participated in a home-birth this week, successfully delivering a baby girl, despite unsuccessfully making it out of the house and to the hospital. Who knew she'd follow in our hippie-mothers' footsteps and deliver in her own bedroom?

And finally, I've been thinking of John McCain, only not in any sort of a deep way. Thinking of John McCain deeply hurts my feelings. No. I've just been thinking about how he said that he looked into Putin's eyes and he just saw three letters - K, G, and B. Now, if you know me in real life, and you haven't seen the letters under my eyes, then ask me to show them to you some day. This week I've been showing them off to my students because we're all sharing our stupid human tricks lately. So anyway, l've been imagining Putin with veins under his eyes spelling out KGB, and it's been making me giggle a little bit.

That last paragraph was sort of about me, wasn't it? OK, back to me me me. Carry on.

What Not to Do

2008-09-25T19:49:00.002-05:00

If your kid says to you, "The reason I don't get math is because my teacher never goes over our homework, and I don't even know whether my homework is right, because my teacher never corrects it," then you will probably feel a slow burn of outrage. How can any teacher be so lazy?

But, if the same kid has been issued, in addition to a text book, a solution manual to the text book, you might want to ask her (or him) why she isn't correcting her own homework. You might want to stop for a minute, and imagine 120 kids just like yours diligently practicing factoring limit problems (just as yours does). Even if they only have about 25 problems a night, you will soon see that the result is 3000 problems. No one can correct 3000 problems. A day. No one can circle in red pen just where each child went wrong on each of those 3000 problems. Every day. No one can write enough happy faces or stars on the ones that made no mistakes. On 3000 problems. Each of the days of the week.

Still, even if you don't know this basic fact of math teacher-hood, even if the quantity of homework problems doesn't occur to you, and you decide to take your outrage out on the teacher, and you decide to email her (or him) with your anger and your frustration, then, please, for the sake of your child, whatever you do, don't cc the principal.

Don't do it. Really. Your relationship with the teacher will be better. Your relationship with the principal will be better. Your child's relationship with the teacher will be better. The teaching will be better. The world will be a better place. There will be rainbows and flowers where before there was only sewage and toxic waste.

Just believe me, OK? I know what I'm talking about.