Tids and Bits

I have no story for a formal post right now, but I thought I'd pass on some things I found funny recently. First, a sign we passed on the way to a baseball game several weeks ago:


Second, we went out to eat last weekend and ordered an appetizer dish called the "assorted platter." Imagine my glee at getting the check and seeing the "ass plater" on it:


Finally, some notes on funny things my students have said. I make them keep a writing journal in my class. Every day, they have to respond to a prompt I write on the board. These are some of my favorites from the last three weeks:

Question--If you woke up tomorrow with one new quality or ability, what would it be?

Answer: When I wake up tomorrow, I wish to be ridiculously good looking. I chose this for several reasons. A few of my reasons include girls, charisma, and stellar poses. Any female would drool at the sight of my eyes, which would be similar to a waterfall shimmering in a blazing sun. Charisma would allow me to easily raise any grade from a D to an A. Being charismatic is a trait that simply hovers over any man with extremely good looks. Last, stellar poses would give me a chance to further show off my ridiculously-good-lookingness

Question--If you could give one piece of advice to any person in history, what would it be?

Answer 1: I would tell Einstein to fix his hair. It's hard for people to take him seriously when he doesn't look professional.

Answer 2: I would tell the guy who invented cake that he should never mix vegetables with cake. Carrot cake? I honestly want to hit that guy.

Answer 3: I would tell a pirate, "Eat oranges, and tell your friends." (I think this is a reference to preventing scurvy, but the wording made me laugh so hard.)

Answer 4: I would tell the Beatles to donate 85% of their sales to me so I could increase their popularity among mothers and nuns.

Consider them your quotes of the day.

Sometimes I Have No Title

Am I the only person who thinks Tom Brokaw's voice has become a caricature of itself? It's gotten so weird! Throatier than it has ever been. It's like he's doing an impression of himself. You must listen to it sometime. I'd find a clip of him speaking to illustrate my point, but you know the routine; I can't be bothered.

We're up to the third week of school, and so far things are going ok. The kids are still pretty good, and they're starting to assert their unique personalities. Funny stories (a select few to be chronicled here) will appear soon.

Quote of the day:

I have a student who is an incredible "helper." He always has resources at the ready to help people, whether it be handouts (odd) or computer guides. (Today he offered another student--whose zipper on his shorts broke--a spare pair of PANTS. I couldn't help myself; I had to stop class to inquire about the circumstances that led to him always keeping an extra change of clothes with him, just in case someone needed to borrow them.) Anyway, he was in the computer lab, and another student raised his hand asking for help with a printing problem. As I began to scoot off my seat to go over to to help, "Helper Kid" (this will not be his official nickname) commenced an enthusiastic skip-run across the entire length of the computer lab. "Sit down, I've got it!" he said to me mid-jaunt. "I'm a NERRRRRRDDDD!"

I've Been Doing This Like Three Days Now and I'm Pretty Good at It

Well, kids. I've successfully finished my first week of teaching and I still have my sanity. All in all, it's been a good week. The kids are great for the most part, and the staff has been really helpful. I am a pretty happy camper right now in regards to the job. Exhausted, of course, and still nervous about doing a good job, but so far so good.

In other news, my birthday was Tuesday, and imagine my joy today to have received my annual $5 birthday check from my grandparents. Now, it's not that I'm ungrateful about the money; it's just that my grandparents have money and they're just cheap. Frankly, it's more of a nuisance to take the check to the bank than anything else. Additionally, ever since I got married they have spelled my new last name wrong on every single birthday check. You'd think they'd get it by now. So anyway, I think I'll be saving this year's $5 birthday check as a souvenir to screw up their checkbook balancing....muhahaha.

Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Chameleon

Have you ever had a painful haircut? Not emotionally painful, like the time when a "stylist" left me with a rat tail as a child because she thought it was cute. Not emotionally painful like the time I agreed to let my husband cut my hair and he proceeded to grab my low ponytail and cut the whole thing off, proclaiming "Done!" when he finished. No, I mean physically painful.

I didn't think it was possible to experience a physically agonizing haircut...until today. The haircut I received today is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that karma is real and it's a bitch. Every bad thing I've ever done in my life came back to me today. For starters, I should've realized something was askew when I walked into this national chain salon and immediately noticed that the median age of all of the customers was somewhere in the neighborhood of 60. When I finally settled into the chair to have my hair cut, the stylist's eyes lit up with glee at the thought of being able to cut my hair with a razor instead of scissors. (The old people, she said, are wary of the razor.)

She wet down my hair and started hacking away with the razor. About a minute in, she informed me (I swear) that the woman who had her hair cut before me had been exposed to lice over the weekend and had been complaining about her head itching. Oh, lovely. Thanks, master jukemeister!

She pressed on. My hair began to dry, but she did not re-wet it. No, no. She just went on with her razor, systematically pulling every hair in my scalp one-by-one as we lost lubrication and buffering from the water. For minutes I winced and groaned with each pass she made, and she, of course, was oblivious to my agony. Why didn't I speak up? She was in the zone with her razor, overzealously lopping off more and more hair, and I stupidly thought each pass had--just HAD--to be the last one. Why didn't she react to my groans and facial expressions? Because she's obviously a dolt. Regardless, my scalp still feels like someone lit my head on fire.

When she finished, I paid and left hurriedly, lest she find a way to torture me more. I came home and straightened my hair, only to discover she gave me the exact haircut my mom had for two years, which I made fun of ceaselessly for its general poofiness and helmet nature. Think "classic mom hair." Ugh. I should've known better! Median age of 60 up in that place, after all! If that's not bad enough, she didn't even leave it long enough for me to put it into a ponytail for it to grow out for a while. Curses!

On a final, unrelated note, our local meteorologist just referred to the weather as "sultry" six times during the forecast. I don't know about you, but that's both an excessive number of references and a totally inappropriate word choice...unless of course the weather plans to be making bedroom eyes at us in the next few days.

Freak-a-leek

We went to Walmart tonight. Don't ask why. You know I'm anti-Walmart, but sometimes there's just no other place open to buy tires and wine at the same time. Our local Walmart is especially vile because 1. it's always disgustingly busy regardless of the time of day or day of the week, and 2. it seems to draw the most interesting specimens out of the woodwork.

Tonight we saw a middle-aged man with an impressive ponytail that would've made Walker, Texas Ranger weep with joy. He also wore camouflage pants and a sizeable pocket knife. He smiled at me as he browsed through $5 DVDs.

The best one today, though, was a drunk with (I swear) a tattoo of a smiley face on the end of his nose. Ok, I can't prove it was a tattoo. God almighty, I hope it was only pen or something, but this little part of me just knows it was a tattoo...the kind of thing done hastily on a dare for $10 and a case of Busch Light.

It's people like that that make me feel obligated to have children of my own one day. Someone has to step up to help keep the delicate balance in the epic humanitarian battle against stupidity.

Freaks and Fireworks

I know, I know. I'm an ass. I've been horrible about updating, despite promising to update more often. We all know by now that I can't be trusted on such matters.

Things that have occurred in the last couple of weeks:

I went to a teaching conference. It was, well, as I expected it to be, only it was actually slightly more useful than I expected. I got a lot of good materials to use in my classroom and a ton of free books, so I'm happy about that. On the downside, I did have to spend four solid days in the exclusive company of other teachers, which, for me, is like Hell on earth. You see, teachers have a tendency to be egregious storytellers, manipulating any situation to get in a story about 1. how great of a teacher they are, 2. the worst/best/most horrifying/etc. of any given situation they've ever experienced (all in an effort to trump someone else's rant), or 3. how dumb their students are. It's not my game, you see, and so my tolerance for such events is limited. One teacher told a very strange story completely out of nowhere about how her school was "famous, but not in a good way" because one of their students murdered his entire family on his graduation day. First off, what the f? Secondly, it's called INFAMOUS, ass. "Famous, but not in a good way." God. This is me rolling my eyes.

Additionally, teachers tend to have really strange quirks. For example, one woman said "right, right, right, riiiiight, oh yeah, riiiiiight" to everything (EVERYTHING) the teacher said, almost as if it was "amen" time in church. To keep myself from going insane, I rooted her on with a tally. On her worst day, she said "riiiight, yeahhh, uh huh, riiiiight" 533 times. 533 times in six hours of tallying. You'd want to kill yourself too. Serenity now, God. If that wasn't bad enough, on the other side of me sat "The Repeater," a woman so enthusiastic about the topic that she attempted to finish everyone's sentences or repeat words or whole phrases to show they were on the same page. I made it my mission to throw her off, peppering in comments like, "I wouldn't be more surprised if I woke up with my head sewn to the carpet."

So anyway, you can see that I'm pretty well set for a year in the company of people like this after ohhhh, three hours. But no...this was thirty hours. One teacher even had the nerve to show up hocking a book she had just written, forcing everyone to pass the book around and accept promotional postcards directing us to go to amazon.com to buy the book. Quiz time: Guess whose postcard went straight into the trash! That's right, mine. Someone asked her how long it took her to write the book, a biography of an Indianapolis Colts player. "Ten years" was her response. TEN YEARS! The book, friends, was 156 pages. You could write a single page a DAY and be done in less than 6 months. Hell, throw in research and I'll maaaaaybe give it a year, but come ONNNNNN. Ten years?! Sometimes I have no words.

Following the teaching conference I went to visit my parents and some friends. It was nice. Got to see my parents and my quasi-brother Michael (don't ask...let the mystery propel your insanity), as well as Julie, Michelle, Laney, and Drew (whose wee daughter I met for the first time too). All around, a productive adventure. Salute to me!

Upon returning home, I resumed my marathon reading and course-planning schedule. (In case you're wondering, it does, in fact, include two hours of The People's Court every day. That Judge Marilyn Milian is one sassy lady, and I like her!)

On Friday we resolved to go see our city's fireworks display. We went out to eat and then hit up our lovely neighborhood casino boat, where we played the slot machines for 5 minutes and managed to win $10.50 between us. You ask, "Did you put that money right back into the machines because you're an idiot?" To that I say, haHA! Yes, yes we did. You know me so well. Although by the end we were still $3 on top. Could be worse. Don't judge me!

So afterward, we moseyed on over to the river and laid down our personal territory. From our spot, we had a perfect view of this guy:

Interesting things about this specimen:
1. He almost exclusively entered the car through the driver's side window, despite the fact that the doors clearly worked (as he did actually open them once or twice)
2. He spent the bulk of his time before the show cleaning his windows and rooting around in the hatchback. I can only imagine he was trying to get his homemade subwoofer workin, or something else those cool Camaro kids do with their Subway salaries.
3. When not performing car maintenance in front of thousands of people, he was sitting on the roof of his vehicle....just like this photo illustrates...looking around (sometimes forlornly), waiting for the ladies to flock to him and his cherry red love machine. (Psssst...it did not end well for him.)

Final verdict: delightful.

Then the fireworks came, which, well, were quite nice. We had prime real estate. Here are some photos (taken from my cell phone, because I am an ass and couldn't be bothered with my real camera) to prove we actually stayed amid the crowd for the big show:
So, that's about it for now.

Right now Y and I are planning a road trip for a week or so from now. More on all of that later, as well as musings on my parents' recent proclivities for collecting vagrant children.

Royal Crotch

Updates are coming soon (the goal is by tomorrow), I swear. In the meantime, I present today's quote of the day. It's from my husband. I was telling him about the recent pictures that have come out of Prince Harry going commando in some low-slung combat pants in Afghanistan. His response:

"I bet he did it on purpose so people would see it, that hunky bastard."