Peapods, martial arts camps, and strange cargo

In the infamous words of Ben Folds, we're still rockin the suburbs (just like Michael Jackson did). And life is pretty happy, although I am waiting for something spectacular to happen. Like a marriage proposal, maybe.

Anyhow, school (and by that, I mean TEACHING! KIDS! LOTS OF THEM!) is beginning faster than I can say holybejeezus. I'm not as prepared as I'd like to be, but I did manage to invest in one all-important teaching item today at the local Target: my personal hall pass. After looking for a long time in the toy section for something washable and preferably coated in rubber, I finally sojourned to the dog toy area, where, lo and behold, I found THE BEST FREAKING HALLPASS IMAGINEABLE: a big green rubber peapod. I kid you not. It is truly a work of rubberized wonder, and I am going to refer to it shamelessly as "The Pea Pass" and make sure to look all of those quarterbacks in the eye good and solid-like when I hand it over to them. I might even take a Sharpie and tattoo it with "Miller Class Pea Pass" or something, although I fear this might ruin it.
I just hope someone doesn't drop it down the john. But I've already taken this possibility into account and concluded that, as it is rubber, I could just require them to dunk it in an bucket of bleach.


In other news, I went to a big all-women's martial arts camp this weekend (a decidedly weird experience for me, as I am both a) straight and b) antisocial). Anyway, I was assigned by my karate instructors to pick up two strangers from the Amtrak station on my way to the camp--Pete told me I'd be picking up a Herculean lesbian of a staggering size (a "Dyke to Beware Of," as Pete phrased it), as well as a Little Person less than 3 feet tall, all in one fell swoop. None of us knew each other, so I had to hold up a sign that said "PAWMA" (the name of the camp)--but the truth is that I pretty much knew what to look for, and was just hoping to God, the whole time, that I wouldn't crack up inappropriately when I saw the two of them together. Becuase what are the odds, people? The situation was like something from an episode of Seinfeld. Adding to the relative hilarity of the whole thing was the fact that both of them had very bizarre Russian names, but were totally unrelated to each other.
I am going to write a short story about the whole thing, although it ultimately turned out to be less eventful than I had hoped. They were both pretty cool people.

That's the update of late.
Ciao.

A lack of cohesion.

This is the best Craigslist ad I have seen yet. ("And I shall make more . . ." Hmm. Is that a threat or a promise?)
Anthropomorphism, you're my favoritest.

In other news:
Andy'n'I found a Duplex in the midst of the vast northwestern Eugenian suburbia, and it is a major fixer-upper, but it's cheap and it has a small fenced yard and sane, stable, trombone-less neighbors of its own, so we're happy. We've spent the last week transporting all of our accumulated shizznit via various family trucks--because one of the true perks of being an Oregon native (and admittedly one of the most common causes of traumatizing adolescent embarrassment among Oregonian children) is that your family is guaranteed to have at least one (and probably more) dilapidated, hideous farm truck(s) available at any given time. Whether a muffler or brakepads are present in this/these vehicle(s) is another issue entirely. The point is, Bud (Big Ugly Dodge) somehow got the job done, and after a week of hefting around literally tons of secondhand antique furniture, my biceps could rival Andy Kaufman's during the very pinnacle of his female-wrestling extravaganza.
I mean, probably.

What Bud (my parents' aforementioned farm truck) lacks in gas mileage, he apparently attempts to make up for in a baffling kind of rustic, rugged magnetism. Every time Andy and I him drove through the countryside to haul a new load of crud from my parents' house to the suburbs, several old-timers driving tractors or combines would make a gargantuan effort to wave to us. We spent three days puzzling over this ongoing phenomenon, which never happens when I drive my Golf. Probably the missing paint and mismatched goldtone spray-paint job (my father's lovely artistry) gave farmers the impression that we were locals or something. Or maybe they were waving because I was taking full advantage of the truck's bench seat and sitting in the middle right next to the strapping young driver (something the usual bucket seats of course don't allow). Anyway, people waved so much that I started to feel like Queen of the Hayseeds in some kind of a Podunk rural parade. It was awesome. Norman Rockwell was a-rollin' in his grave to paint the whole durned scene.

Yep, anyway... abruptly returning to my other tangent...
The one most major problem with the duplex is that it has an obvious history of heavy mouse traffic in the kitchen (freeways, tunnels, boardwalks, and toll booths), which has left the cabinets really [really] gnarly and chewed up. The likelihood that the owner will actually tear out the cabinets and replace them (as he should) is slim to none, so I think instead we're going to patch as many holes as we can, repaint the cabinets, and keep all of our food sealed in plastic containers. It's a pain in the ass but may deter them until the dead of winter, when plastic will probably begin to look like a subtle (if slightly waxy) appetizer to our myriad mouseling friends. It appears that my bid for a dog might soon be replaced with a bid for a cat, despite the fact that I have developed a general hatred for all things feline. So hmm. Foiled again in the dog scheme?
Or maybe Suzanne would know whether [smallish] dog scent acts as a similar deterrent for mice...?

Anyhoo, mice or no mice, it is really splendid to have Andy back and to have a place of our own again. I am thoroughly enjoying drinking beer and building manly plant stands with him in the comfort of our circa-1975 flat-roofed carport. I am hoping to somewhat horrify the neighbors by appearing randomly in Daisy Duke shorts and cowgirl boots, just to create a bit of liveliness in the general vicinity. So far they mostly hermit about in their houses, so nothing's come of it yet; we do have one awesome hippie neighbor though, who has a big, ostentatious garden and looks like she may have done some cowgirl boots of her own in the past.

I didn't think we'd end out in the suburbs, but it's alright. We're actually really in the thick of it. We're immersed in suburbia in such a way that today a little old lady about a block away from our house spent ten minutes trying to sell me a $12 Tupperware cakeplate from about 1965. Don't ask me how I got myself into this situation, and don't ask me how I got out of it without dropping twelve bucks on a chunk of turquoise plastic party fabulousness. I was so mesmerized by her liver spots that I could hardly escape, let alone remember how I accomplished doing so.
But for what it's worth, living in suburbia is so much better than living on campus. I am loving it for now.

The Faulkner House

Andy and I drove through "downtown" Harrisburg today--the really old part by the river, down on second street--and we discovered that it's actually just straight up Creepy. One of the creepiest places I've EVER BEEN, actually, without exaggeration of any measure--and that list includes eerie, hair-bristling ghost towns in Montana and Colorado, places where people haven't lived in ages. Good ol' Harrisburg'll give them a run for their money...
There's an ancient, dilapidated, Victorian-style mansion down there by the river that absolutely cannot be without ghosts (or at least an extremely demented resident with a chip on his/her shoulder and an arsenal of leftover Civil War weaponry). It honestly looks like the set from Nothing But Trouble, a well-intended 1991 Dan Aykroyd comedy that will actually give you nightmares for at least a week after viewing. This movie is in no way recommended, except in reference to this post so that you can get some idea of the caliber of creepiness we're dealing with here.

Until today I had only seen the more normal sectors of town--the comfortable suburbias where kids play on teeter-totters and everybody's got a fence, a black lab, a bed of gladiolas, and an American flag motif in the front yard. So I was a little taken aback by the downright weirdness of the downtown. It didn't help that as we drove through, two rather steely-eyed, Cowboy Dan types stared down our car in a vaguely predatory manner.

Ooga booga, kids. I'm not joking either.

Anyway, we've pretty much written off actually living in H-burg, not only for that reason, but because occasionally (yes) we like to get wildly drunk in the comfort of our own home and rock out in the back yard to Slanted and Enchanted. I'm fairly certain that kind of behavior (or that kind of music) would not fly in an establishment such as Harrisburg. It's probably far better that we live either in isolation or around similarly youthful neighbors whose kids I won't teach on a daily basis.

We found a place that we're looking at again tomorrow, out in the middle of nowhere. It has the potential to be pretty cool with some work, but it's got kind of an unkempt yard and a bunch of debris that we'd have to contend with (like chopped wood that was never stacked, dead flowers in overturned flowerpots, carcasses of decaying walnuts in all of the flowerbeds, and shotgun shells on the back porch where someone had been shooting at god-knows-what). But frankly, it is a little bit creepy right now--it has an apocalyptic feeling of abandonment about it, like some family just dropped everything and fled town. The house is big and white and old-school, and there's a lone hog living in a shed to the west of the back yard... we've been puzzling over who's been caring for it and why it is alone.
Anyway, the whole place has kind of a Faulknerish feeling about it, and I'm not so sure that I want to live there. We might rattle around like loose cogs in a house with too much space, alone and young in the middle of nowhere.
Just maybe.

Shit, I don't know.

I complain about Eugene sometimes, but the truth is that I will miss walking down to Prince Pucklers and watching some 55-year-old dude in a Utilikilt order a scoop of Raspberry Truffle on a waffle cone. I kind of love the variety of it all. It keeps you young and openminded.

Addendum RE: words and phrases that make my skin crawl, 2008 edition.

A new (but long-loathed) addition to the list:
When people describe crying as "bawling."
No, people--no.

I cannot seem to find a decent small house in Junction City, Coburg, Santa Clara, or Harrisburg [H-ville] for less than $1100 a month. $1100 a month! When my housemate is a student without a job! That's a small fortune! That's like... half my monthly paycheck as an underpaid and non-tenured teacher. I kid you not. Throw me a freaking bone here, Willamette Valley. I am not going to live in another goddamned apartment now that I have a career. . . am I?

I never want to hear the word 'apartment' again. For full details surrounding the reaons why 'apartment' has become a four-letter word in my life, please see the following colorful character profiles of the enlightening individuals I've lived amongst over the last six years.

1. The Instamatic Chromatic Trombone Man. See previous post for details.

2. The Downstairs Domestic Dispute Family: proving that the best part of waking up is indeed not Folgers' in your cup, but rather, the sound of shattering glass and sobbing downstairs at 8:00 AM on a Sunday. (There's a post in the archives about this lovely couple, which includes Andy and I calling the police and someone being hauled away in a police car in a most dramatic fashion, but I don't want to bother looking up the link.)

3. The Elizabethan Floutist/Space Cadet. This lady lives right next door to me, and although I like her as a human being, she constantly plays some of the most irritating and seasonally-inappropriate music imaginable on a cloyingly cheery instrument that sounds like a cross between a clarinet and a flute. None of the industrial-quality earplugs that I've tried can overwhelm her instrument's high pitch, so gradually, I've become more accustomed to it . . . but occasionally when I'm doing intense law homework and she's tootling away next door, I want to scream a bit and maybe set something on fire. Last year, this lady spent about six months practicing her "Flight of the Bumblebee"-reminiscent part for a symphony that was performing (honest to God) "cacophonous music." The part that she practiced had no rhyme or reason, but repeated itself eerily so that I knew exactly when each assaulting bar of trilling and tweedling would start and end--and I was really relieved when the symphony for this piece was over, because the lady's constant practicing next door gave me perpetual feelings of paranoia while I was in the apartment. It was like living in a Hitchcock movie or something. The Birds.
More recently, now that it's July and all, the floutist lady next door has begun practicing for The Nutcracker Suite. It's pretty surreal when it's 95 degrees in the apartment and I have to listen to 90 minutes' worth of butchered bars from "Flight of the Sugar Plum Fairy." But she's got to make that December performance deadline, I guess...

4. Janie* the Shih-Tzu-toting coke dealer/dance major. She was a nice but slightly manic girl who ran a 24-hour rock shop in the alley in which the front (and only) door of my studio apartment was located. Through my living room/bedroom window, at any given hour of the day, I could see all kinds of dynamic and drunken characters hanging around in front of her apartment, and quite regularly, they woke or kept me up until about 3 AM with their Socratic dialogs. On a positive note, I guess this gave me a sense that I was living in a city much larger and more rugged than Eugene. I could be wrong, but I think it was not entirely unlike living under some bridge in San Fransisco.

5. Miss Hurff. I'll refrain from saying more, except these keywords: epic proportions of Jack Daniels, a mistreated man named Jimmy, a cat named Cheech, and another housemate with some pretty gnarly drug-related connections that I was not immediately aware of. After six months of bizarrity, I moved out. And fled to another state, and avoided phone-calls from aforementioned parties.

6. Peter* and the Wolf. Suzanne (the only awesome housemate I've lived with, aside from Andy,) knows this story well, for she was there with me: Peter*, our upstairs neighbor, was a bird researcher who had recently gone on an avian expedition to Alaska to do some graduate coursework. He returned from the Northern Hinterlands with a wolf-creature--a truly enormous and vaguely predatory-looking dog, which he named Cooper, or as I liked to call him, Pooper. (Pooper had parasites that the vet "had never even seen," which I thought was kind of ominous, but his bird-loving owner joked about his as though it was an entertaining tidbit of trivia. I wonder if little ol' Peter's* bowels are still intact.) Anyway, one day Peter* left Pooper in the apartment alone while he went out on the town. As far as we could gather, the ensuing flooding incident (known as the Great Flood of '03) unfolded like this: Pooper found some delectable dirty dishes in the sink and began to snort his way through them, and as he did so, he bumped his head on the tap, turning on the water. The sink, clogged with dirty dishes and nasty food, could not drain, and soon water began to overflow, flooding the entire upstairs apartment. The door to Peter's* apartment was locked, of course, so all of us living downstairs had no idea what was happening until water began to rain from our plaster ceiling; when we figured out something was going on upstairs, we couldn't do anything to stop it except call the manager. We covered everything in our living room with plastic tarps, placed buckets in strategic locations, and waited for the rain to stop. But it was a bummer because we'd just painted the living room and the ceiling mottled and peeled, and because, like, our living room was raining.

I could tell you about Maeve, the truly evil first roomate I had in the dorm at OSU. But I won't.
I'll just say that the six disastrous encounters above, even excluding Maeve, are enough to justification for anyone to cringe at the thought of living in an apartment setting EVER AGAIN.

A house, yes--that's what I need. For under $1100 a month though, damnit.

(*Names have been changed. God knows why.)

Dear you.

Dear apparently-obsessive-compulsive-neighbor-across-the-courtyard
who-has-played-incessant-rounds-of-chromatic-scales
with-little-to-no-rhythmic-variation
for-the-last-three-months
on-his-INFERNAL-TROMBONE
at-the-most-inconvenient-hours-of-the-day,

There's a marked difference between knowing the alphabet and writing an epic novel.

Please a) generalize this message to fit the context of own not-so-private musical conundrum, and b) tattoo it on your right forearm (the one that so skillfully maneuvers the slidey-slidey apparatus of your notorious noisemaker).

Mhmm,
Your neighbor Nilly.

This is just to say

I fucking HATE my Law and Governance class and I've just struggled with an assignment for three goddamn hours without getting anywhere.
Got NOWHERE.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Bon anniversaire.

Four years ago today, while working on the Lewis Brown Farm amongst the cherries, I gave an adorable, floppy-hat-wearing, tractor-driving farm boy (who I didn't know at all) a mix CD featuring old Modest Mouse, The Shins, The Magnetic Fields, Sparklehorse, Paul Simon, Ben Folds, My Morning Jacket, The Decemberists (oh God, I know), The Kinks, Wilco, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, and--yes--my phone number, hastily scrawled in permanent pen before I could lose my courage and leave it out.
It was the most daring thing I've ever done. Something about the floppy-hat boy compelled me to undertake this unabashedly crazy act--it was an instinctive feeling I'd gotten when I first saw him. I immediately knew we fit together somehow; there was a strong magnetic pull of an interaction that needed to unfold, and I wasn't sure what it would lead toward--but it seemed necessary to find out.

My boss, Annie, with a twinkle in her eye, gave me an excuse to return some tools to the farm boy so I could deliver my mix to him somewhat discreetly, although in retrospect I'm fairly certain the entire farm crew knew I fancied him. I handed the harvest boxes over to him with the mix on top, and tried to look nonchalant as I gave a wave and drove away up the dusty gravel road. Victory was mine. I'm certain that, at that very moment, millions of shy sisters worldwide lit candles in honor of my well-executed daring deed.

Unbelievably, the farm boy called me right after work, and that evening we went to the Beanery on 2nd Street in Corvallis: our first date. We were so awkward. He talked obsessively about politics, and I talked obsessively about music; he rambled about backpacking through Tasmania with his best friend, and I blathered on about art, because the only places I'd really been were those I'd painted on canvas and envisioned in books. We were really dissimilar, but in our time together we reveled and grew individually in the eclecticism of our relationship (and we still do). We had only a left month together until he needed to move to Montana, and we milked it for all it was worth, swimming at the river and wandering up the beach, buying goodies at the co-op, making picnic lunches.
Five months after he left for Missoula--after literally hundreds of dollars spent on phone cards and hundreds of hours spent talking over hundreds of miles--I moved to Missoula to go to school with him, and we had an epic adventure together so far away from everything we knew.
Four years later, we've certainly had our growing pains and moments of chaos and distance and idiocy (mostly on my part; refer to last December for details, or please don't). We even survived my year of super-intensive graduate school, which I watched systematically eliminate the relationships of nearly everybody around me over a span of 12 months. We made it, my farmboy and I. It's hardly believable that one little mix kicked off the soundtrack to this entire adventure, but it did--and it's kept rolling with great resilience and beauty despite enormous obstacles. I'm so grateful to be with him.

My farmboy is in Alaska commercial fishing tonight, and he'll be gone for another three weeks. But this evening I'll raise my Beanery iced coffee to him from a thousand miles away, put on my dress (the only one I own, bought today because I know he'll like it), and dance by myself to a new mix tape: one we've made together from the songs that have accompanied us through our grab-bag of shared experiences.

I'll bet that if you open your windows, you can listen too.

To Andy Livesay, with love.

I am losing my ability to speak in cohesive sentences, and I think it's because Andy has been away for so long.
Love = language?

Bastardizations of English.

Words and Phrases That Make My Skin Crawl, revised 2008 edition. (Please forgive any repeats; I have ongoing battles with certain aspects of the English language in use.)

1. When people refer to flip-flops as "thongs." Obviously, if they'd ever attended a state university during the era in which it was popular for sorority girls to wear low-riders and show their G-stringed buttcracks in lecture hall, they'd know why I am opposed to their misuse of this word--but invariably it's someone older than 30 who's throwing around "thong" like nobody's business. Please, stop.
2. The word "germane," which is being used as a popular replacement for "relevant," an infinitely better word that accomplishes the same purpose without making you sound like you've recently immigrated from the reference section of the Law Library. I think I developed a real hatred of "germane" during this graduate program, when it was, like, THE hip word among dorky Professors of Education. I started to take tallies of the number of times this word was uttered during each lecture I attended, but there were too many to bother adding up.
3. The word "ubiquitous," which, I've decided, is actually just a keyword that people throw into their otherwise rudimentary vocabularies in order to make themselves sound (temporarily) more intelligent--that is, until the recipient of their bombast realizes they've misused it entirely. (I'm tipping my hat to you, Chicago Trustafarian.)
4. The term "quick and dirty," as in "This is just a quick and dirty explanation of Oregon's Student Free Speech statute." Why? Because it sounds raunchily sexual to everybody except the oblivious and be-frocked 50-something professor who keeps repeating it offhandedly during lecture.
(Have I mentioned this before? I think so.)

Alright, alright.

Fifteen songs that sound like twilight.

1. Yo La Tengo - Pablo and Andrea
2. Nick Drake - Place to Be (and so many others)
3. Beck - Beautiful Way
4. Laura Viers - To The Country
5. The Magnetic Fields - 100,000 Fireflies
6. Modest Mouse - Gravity Rides Everything
7. Ola Podrida - Day at the Beach
8. Pavement - Heaven is a Truck
9. U2 - One Tree Hill (shut up, I still love this album)
10. Van Morrison - Into the Mystic
11. The Velvet Underground - Here She Comes Now
12. Yael Naim - Paris
13. Ben Folds Five - Selfless, Cold, and Composed
14. Camera Obscura - Dory Previn
15. Fruit Bats - Seaweed

Temporary boyfriendlessness sucks.
Darn you, Alaskan fishing industry.

The funniest thing about Australians

is that they apparently refer their trucks as "Utes" (pronounced "yoot," and short, I think, for "utility truck"). I can't say for certain whether "Ute" is common usage or not, never having been there myself, but a while ago, Andy (who has) downloaded some tacky Australian country-western music, and one of the songs (sung mournfully by a nasally cowboy type) was called "She Only Loves Me For My Ute." I thought this was hilarious, but the cowboy seemed quite grave indeed, the poor sod.

Andy left today for Alaska to commercial fish for a little over a month. There'll be no cellphone reception or any of that, so for the first time in four years we won't have the chance to speak or see each other for an entire month straight. I'm a little weirded out, so, in classic obsessive-compulsive-artist fashion, I've begun about thirteen random projects to keep myself occupied, most involving painting, packing, or reading and making teaching-shizznit. My kitchen has become a riotous disaster of acrylic paint and glitter; right now I'm painting a huge mosaic-like artwork covered in leering, intricately designed calacas for Day of the Dead, so everything's vaguely fiesta-colored. I'll post pictures of my mess and hopefully the resulting artwork when Andy returns with my camera (assuming that it's not eaten by some 200-pound salmon or drowned overboard).

Other things:
We're (or should I say I'm?) looking for housing somewhere in North Eugene, Coburg, or even (yes) Junction City--which are all closer to the ambiguous but impressive mini-tropolis of H-ville. I'm on the hunt for something cute and cottagey, with a yard and maybe even a back porch where we can sit and barbecue and drink improvised mojitos. Most of all, dogs must be allowed, because I am adopting my dogchild at the end of the summer(!) without fail(!!) and nothing(!!!) will get in my way this time, cackle cackle(!!!!).

Also, have I mentioned? I've decided that the film-making class that I'm teaching in the winter is going to be centered around doing homemade "remakes" (or unsold Sweded films) ala Be Kind Rewind, instead of the usual documentaries. The thought came to me last night when I began to consider how hilarious a homemade rendition of Return of the Jedi would be; Andy and I were discussing how a kid wearing a full-body painted cardboard box and wandering around on stilts would make an awesomely awkward Imperial Walker. You could also re-shoot the entire Endor forest scene using remodeled bikes, sped up at 4x the normal pace. Hockey masks on the riders, perhaps, and spraypainted super soakers as blasters (or is that illegal in a school system?).
Yep, I'm absurdly excited about this. I'm going to have four groups of kids (about five kids per group), and they'll choose their own film to remake, and when the process is through, we'll have a big film class festival at the end. The best part of the whole thing is that they'll still be learning the basics of film-making (including the different types of shots and sound and lighting basics) while having fun and making hilarious final products.
Homemade props are a must.
I'm a lot more comfortable teaching this than documentaries.


If y'all want to re-enroll in high school and be in my class, be my guest. :)

Sneeoosh.

That's the sound of my youth flying by at warp speed.

I'm back, but I'm still waiting for my personality to kick in after a three-month series of insane events. I'll keep you posted when she arrives.

I'm off to a good start though: yesterday I got the most 1980s-fabulous shaggy/punkrocky/girly haircut ever, surprising even myself with such a bold and bohemian move. I look perpetually like I've just rolled out of bed, and it feels fantastic after such a long record of maintaining a guise of semi-professionalism while student teaching. My hair now screams "dye me pink!," but I'm resisting, because I fear this wouldn't go over well about a month from now . . . and it has to look a little more conformist by then, because (surprise!) I've been hired to teach 11th grade global literature at a high school in a little town close to here, which has a name beginning with 'H.' I'll rattle on more about this later inevitably, because I'm really excited about it. For now these are the essentials: I get to teach whichever texts I like within reason (so I'm teaching The Hobbit and the hero's journey, of course, among other things), and I am also in charge of another class where kids plan and shoot their own documentary films.

The utter chaos that is student teaching.

Wow. I have been made a slave to the world of student teaching and haven't had much time for personality-related things such as writing and . . . enjoying life . . . since my last post, which was godknowswhen. So in this five minutes of freedom between lesson planning and writing a post-assessment, I'd like to say hello, friends. Just so you know that Helen didn't bury me in her back yard an' all.

Aside from the fact that my life now feels perpetually like finals week (honestly and without exaggeration), it's going miraculously well. I'm full-time student teaching at the high school now, and I have three classes of wee and not-so-wee chillens under my wing.
My sophomore class (my favorite) literally has 19 boys and 5 girls, which was initially a bit of a shock. Rarely do public school teachers get classes that are nearly all-male, but I was lucky enough to land one, apparently, and there are also enough class clowns and miscreants in the ranks that three other teachers literally laughed out loud when they looked at my class roster. I was sure after my first class that I was facing an unsurmountable obstacle, but actually, the cosmos seem to have aligned in my favor or something, because it's been pretty successful so far. I've needed every inch of my bohemian cowgirlism just to keep the class in line and loving life, but they've paid back by being good lil' lads and ladies. Although on Fridays I sometimes feel as though I'm living Lord of the Flies rather than teaching it, at least I have a good student following. They like me, by golly.
Makes a big difference.
Huge.

My freshmen, which is more gender-balanced but still heavier on the male side of the scale, just slogged their way emotionlessly through Romeo and Juliet, which I have decided absolutely should not be part of 9th grade curriculum, in any situation, ever. Even when we decoded Merucutio's insults at the nurse, and I tried to sell Romeo as a pathetic stalker of a character (which he is, no doubt), I couldn't teach the play effectively in two weeks, which is all the time that was allotted to me.
Next time I am going to demand to teach The Tempest instead, and I'll reserve four weeks and really do the thing properly, with costumes and all.
Meanwhile, the Yearbook class that I'm co-teaching exists somewhat on the backburner of my chaotic brain. Lots of Adobe programs and editing bad grammar in overly sentimental articles about student life.
Not much else.

Everything should be done in about 5 weeks. I'll probably yammer more then, and be at least 200% more interesting.
Until then, ciao.

Barack Obama Rally in Eugene

For some reason this hasn't been publicized at all, but I got an email from the campaign site, so I'm spreading the wealth.

Friends, Oregonians, countryfolk, lend me your ears: Barack Obama is coming to town.
When? On Friday, March 21, of course. Happy spring Equinox, the king hath cometh.
Where: University of Oregon's McArthur Court. (From Highway 99 South, get on Patterson Street and take a left down 18th. Drive until you see a massive, cheering throng of progressive-looking people. Then struggle to find decent parking.)
Doors open at 7:00 PM. The Barack Obama show starts at 9 and y'all better be there to show your support.
I sure will.

Free Rice.

If you haven't yet, you should check out www.freerice.com and play its quick registration-less vocabulary game to donate free rice to the United Nations. It's a cool project and I've seen it a lot in the schools where I've been working. Beat my score of 44! Muahaha!

The itinerary.

So.
I'm heading to Colorado in about a week for Andy's family's reunion, which is bound to be inescapably social and thoroughly overwhelming, to be frank. Andy's mom has no less than six siblings, all of whom will be there with their spouses and kids. Furthermore, I have good reason to believe that Andy's Grandma Helen, the formidably bright matriarch of them all, secretly has it out for me--so if I don't return, you'll know whose back yard I've been buried in. (You can find it in Grand Junction, Colorado.)

When I return I'm set to teach my freshmen and sophomores at least four different novels in the course of ten weeks, which is a total cosmic joke, because I've only read two of the four that I'm supposedly teaching, and that was way back in... 9th grade, when I was an absolute and unabashed ignoramus. Oh GOD. I shall scramble more madly than I have ever scrambled before, for certain. I evidently don't know shit about high school reading content (thank you, degree focus in English Renaissance Literature). But, if I can somehow keep the kids from catching on to this, I might make it through June.
If they do recognize I have no idea what I'm doing, I'll threaten them with lessons in iambic pentameter or make them sniff licorice-scented Mr. Sketch markers. Something--anything--to ensure my survival.

On a totally different note, what ever happened to the next Narnia movie, might I ask? Was filming delayed due to puberty-onset voice-cracking crises?

Today's special.

Ramen for lunch, followed by a cheap can of beer and a massive cup of coffee.

It must be dead week.

The best part of having www.scotsman.com as my permanent homepage...

... is looking at the bottom of each article to find readers' furious spats about current events, often written in raging Scots dialect.

Example of a spat between an English respondent and a Scottish respondent, found in the forum at the bottom of an article about how a BBC documentary has basterdized and trivialized Scottish history:
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CROSSED GEORGE (an English respondent)
11/03/2008 02:38:43

True, the [article] headline is a joke, and this newspaper inflames the rubbish these people spout, see the reaction I get when I defend my constantly criticised country. Scottish like to dish it out, but hate it when they get it back

Wisnaeme,wisnae there (a Scottish respondent)
11/03/2008 03:54:22

Awa an chase yer dragon, George.

Gie's peace.

9 items for the 9th of March.

1. Etsy is one of the best things that's happened to me in a while. Since I finally overcame my embarrassing phobia of all things be-needled and got my ears pierced (like a big girl!) in November, I've been buying earrings on Etsy, where they're often affordable and really unique. If you're into the idea of traipsing around in vintage 1960s lucite hoops, see Leetie's shop. Lucite lovelies for yer ears, 8 bucks a pop.
2. Today Andy is bringing home his 30 gallon aquarium, and we are going to start ourselves a splendid covert fishery right here in the hovel. Aquariums aren't technically allowed in our apartment, but I have to do something to appease my continuing craving for a dog. (I still think about poor lil' Perkins every week. I am ready to be a devoted dogmother.)
3. I have glasses now. I am supposed to wear them more often than I do, but frankly, I can't fight or flirt very well in glasses, so it doesn't happen all that often. They are quite spectacular though. This time around, I got bolder dark brown frames with white interiors... they are super 1960s mod. They make me look like a beatnik cartoon character--which is the best I can hope for with glasses on.
4. This spring I'm supposed to teach Romeo and Juliet and To Kill a Mockingbird to the freshmen, and something unknown to the sophomores. On top of that, I'm going to be an assistant teacher in the yearbook class, which should be a real throwback to my mostly-terrible PHS days. I'm only committing to it because it gets me out of the task of becoming assistant track coach, which (lazy as I've become) I feel really unqualified to do at this point.
5. Apparently M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel (the girl from the movie Elf) have produced a new record together... it's supposed to hit shelves on the 18th. Might be a good one to sing along with in the car.
6. Andy got a job fishing in Alaska this summer, so he'll be gone for about a month--a month during which I will have to strongly resist the urge to adopt a furry companion with a wagging tail. Andy'll be fishing in Bristol Bay, which I think is northeast of Homer, where my aunt and uncle live. I'm not sure he'll be able to call me from where he's fishing, so it might be a lonely and sucky start to the summer.
7. Never wanted to admit it before, but jalapeno tofu pate is actually fantastic.
8. I saw an abandoned Ugg boot in the middle of an intersection yesterday, and privately celebrated as I drove by. One lost Ugg= one less doofy-looking girl strutting around in the streets like some sort of perverse Esquimo caricature. Hooray.
9. And hooray for Obama's success in Wyoming. He might not have much experience, but at least he's not basing his campaign on fear-mongering, which is what I feel Clinton has resorted to lately.

The evidence.

You ask, I deliver.


More pictures are available at Flickr. Unfortunately we didn't get any of us actually in class, but you get the idea.
I have to say, the whole experience actually was really quite mortifying.

Yodelayheehoo indeed.

As promised, yesterday Project German Yodeler commenced quite spectacularly in the horrendously boring and funeral-like teaching methods class I've been taking all term. Shay and I wore full regalia to the lecture: improvised (but quite convincing) liederhosen, bright red and bright green Peter Pannish hats, ridiculous loafers, old man suspenders, puffy-sleeved blouses, and sweater vests, topped off with beribboned pigtails. All that we were missing were wienerschnitzels and flagons of beer, and it wasn't for lack of trying; I looked all over for the campus hotdog vendor, but he was nowhere to be found. It would have been so classic to bring a big greasy sausage to class and eat it conspicuously amidst 60 bemused classmates... but no.

Anyway, our dramatic presence was met with a mixture of admiration, awe, and/or undisguised disgust from our classmates. Some people were really into the costumes, asking to try on our hats and snapping our suspenders approvingly; some asked us to dance a jig (to which Shay of course obliged). Others gave us the stink eye and demanded to know what was going on. Ultimately, I think we've been blacklisted by about 50% of the people in our program now, and we've decided that this entire escapade was probably a great way to weed out those without a sense of humor. At least the professor took it all much more smoothly than I had anticipated--she simply ignored the hats and drilled us with questions about the reading. Fairly humane, really, in light of the fact that we were still wearing our hats an' all.

During break, Shay and I strumpeted down 13th street, drawing many a curious look.
Hail the conquering heroes.

[I will upload pictures as soon as I get them onto Andy's computer.]

Me. Being inappropriate. At a job interview.

Interviewer (gray-haired, liney-faced, concerned Republican principal):

"What kinds of responsibilities, outside the school, do you think teachers have in their communities?"

[Weighty pause.]

Me:

"Well . . . above all, teachers are role models. So you can't just throw on a tube-top and go down to buy a keg at the local 7-11 without considering who you might meet in line at the register. You know?"

Cardboard boxes = best toys ever.

Today I stole a huge, empty cardboard box from the media center at the high school where I'm student teaching. Andy and I are going to assemble the box in the football field next to our house, and take turns taping each other inside and tackling it.
It turns out that we both used to do this for fun as kids--not with each other though. We discovered our shared penchant for box-tackling during a conversation the other evening.
Box-tackling? Perfectly normal, say we.


Anyway, I had to ask one of my students to help me load the box into my Golf, because the back doorhatch is broken and the thing was too huge to cram through the side doors. (When I carried it through the hallway it completely obscured my tiny birdlike body; it must have looked hilarious to innocent bystanders and the school principal, who I passed with a smile and without explanation of any kind.)
I probably shouldn't have told my student what the boyfriend and I are actually going to do with the box. I'm sure word of my eccentricity will get around. Perhaps it will simply add to my pedagogical mystique.

I'm waiting for Andy to get home so that I can reveal the surprise waiting in the car. Feelin wiggly, feelin wiggly.

Of sleeping positions, other people's emails, and wearing costumes to graduate classes.

Find your own pose!

I shouldn't really afford the time to write here tonight, so I'll just copy and paste the email that I sent to my brother's girlfriend. How's that? Loyal viewers of the Nilly Milly show will particularly appreciate the last little chunk of information--my latest and greatest scheme.

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Hi!
What's up with you guys?
I picked up the Augustus Borroughs book yesterday actually, and (accidentally) read a chapter while waiting for Andy to get ready to go out. Excellent first story--I'm really looking forward to reading the rest, after I'm through with this teaching madness. I was assigned to teach Julius Caesar and had almost all of my stuff ready to go, but my assignment was changed three days before my teaching's supposed to begin, so I am now frantically putting together a month-long writing unit. Bollocks. I start on Tuesday and will be flying off the seat of my pants.

Have you gotten around to reading any of the Jonathan Safran Foer stuff? (I miss reading.)

One of my night-classes is incredibly bad this term, to a painful (yet somehow hilarious) extreme. The lecturer is the head of the Education department--a frumpy, curly-haired, peach polyester suit-wearing makeup cake who really should have retired some twenty five years ago. She never smiles, and if she did, she would probably combust. Stony-faced, she drones on for hours about how teaching is like being a doctor... and she lectures about the "vital signs of learning" while our class of 70 grad students gradually glaze over and begin to drool. (You have to check your pulse after class just to make sure you're still alive; vital signs of learning are non-existent.) After enduring this torture for three weeks, my best friend Shay and I have decided that this farce of a class simply cannot go on as scheduled. We're devising jaw-dropping costumes to wear each week to class as a pair. For our debut next week, we're going as mad scientists (with lab coats, goggles, charcoally faces, and disastrous hair). If asked, we're going to say that we've been lesson planning.
The week after that, we're going as German yodelers (complete with leiderhosen and fucking hilarious hats with feathers). After that, we might actually dress as the professor herself. Or as rabbis with beards and sideburns, if we can find the right stuff.
I'll keep you posted on how it goes, assuming that Shay and I aren't crucified or beaten to death with metal-edged rulers.

When are you guys coming back to Oregon?
Tell Nojo hello for me.
Cheers,
Nicole

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Also: got into a big spat with the ex-boyfriend Chicago trustafarian, and have made myself a glorious enemy that I have to deal with in each and every class for the next year. Brillig.

And: I am feeling in love with Andy again, which is very, very good.