Saturday, April 30, 2005

on a sesame seed bun, ya big dummy

I am no longer regurgitating. Hurrah! I'm sure you were all waiting, agog, for an update on the state of my digestive system.

The past two days are something of a delirious blur. The highlight of my Saturday was a trip to the supermarket to stock up on ginger ale, etc (rather a bad idea to mix driving and delirium, oh well). I was far from healthy, at that point, and my ashen complexion and unsteady gait doubtless unnerved my fellow shoppers. I felt like making the most of my zombie-like state by shuffling after people mumbling "braaaiiiiinnnsss..."

Thursday, April 28, 2005

ugh.

I have the stomach flu. It's a strange sensation; I don't think I've vomited for non-alcohol related reasons in, like, five years.

Worst part of it all?

The stomach flu didn't hit until midway through sixth period. Sixth period is when I teach the sixth graders literature. Normally, the sixth graders (all twenty-two of them) are a bit over the top, but I'm usually successful in using my sheer force of personality to quell/direct their energy. Not today. Unbeknownst to me, they had decided beforehand to play this game where every kid in class would try to get their number on the board. Number on the board, for those who haven't been in a middle school recently, is a warning which is a prelude to more severe administrative action. You get your number on the board for being bad. And boy were they bad. Tossing things, tipping chairs, starting impromptu sing alongs, and so forth. In my nauseous, muscle cramped, headache laden state, I really couldn't roll with the punches. I tried feebly to teach over or around the malfeasants; finally, at the end of class, my eyes started filling with tears. Yes, I get very emotional when I'm ill. No, the kids didn't realize I was ill. Instantly, I'm surrounded by all the sixth grade girls, who ALSO have tears in their eyes. We have a sniffly (thankfully, no one started bawling) moment of reconciliation. Once again, I wish I had gone into another field, possibly one where you only need to interact with inanimate objects. Then I drove home and started throwing up.

Monday, April 25, 2005

My family is famous:



We always knew that being Catholic computer nerds would pay off.

Sunday, April 24, 2005

Sooooo...tonight I caused a traffic jam and consequently met a nice highway patrolman! What did YOU do? Hmm? Anything nearly that cool? I didn't think so.

Actually, for once, I did nothing immoral, illegal, or unduly stupid. Rather, my car's emergency brake did not go off automatically when I shifted into drive, and I didn't discover this until I was on the onramp to the 5 in downtown San Diego. Woops. Also, there was no shoulder to speak of, so I was basically blocking a lane of traffic. I turned on the blinkenlights, and tried shifting the car into drive a few more times. Nope. No go. I called triple A, and gave them a confused sense of my whereabouts. They claimed that they would be there in 20 minutes. Meanwhile, people are driving past me at great speed, or better yet, zipping up to immediately behind me, braking, honking, and then driving past at great speed. I didn't really get the honking. Yeah, motorists, I'm sitting here with my emergency lights on just for shits and giggles. Your honking will totally motivate me to start driving again.

Just when I had resigned myself to an early grave, a CHP car pulls up. Hurrah! The officer and I have a powwow over the emergency brake situation. Was there a manual release? No, I said. It always goes off automatically...

Triple A called back. Actually, they won't be there for another hour. Psych! They certainly schooled me. Oh well. Fortunately, God takes care of fools and drunkards; since I'm stuck in the car anyway, I did a little light reading. Flip open the car manual to the section on brakes. Ah, yes. So there IS a way to manually disengage the brake. I found the lever whereof the manual speaks (it was, in my defense, a rather obscure lever). Yup, brakes come off. I walked back to the officer, confessed my idiocy, and drove off.

SPECIAL THANKS TO:

- the female motorist who stopped to make sure I was all right.

- the nice highway patrolman. I'll never speed again, honest.

NO THANKS TO:

- Triple A

- the 500 lb guy at the smog testing place who, I'm convinced, broke the emergency brake to start with

Saturday, April 23, 2005

I was chatting with one of my seventh grade students on Friday. She likes school, but manages to drift through her classes without allowing the educational content to have any appreciable impact on her. Initially, she and I were at odds with one another (I tried to involve her in class discussions, and stuff), but eventually I just let her doodle undisturbed. Now we are pals. Oh well. For every future rocket scientist, there is a corresponding future space cadet...

Moira: "Last year I got an F- in Science."

Me: "Umm. I didn't think you could get an F- in anything."

Moira: "Oh yeah. My mom still has the report card. She pulls it out every once in a while to laugh at it."

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Sex without babies.

Contraception is one of the things that I find hardest to talk about with non-Catholics. The notion that God would care about whether or not one, within the context of marriage, uses prophylactics, is very weird to them. And, in a culture where we deliberately eat calorie-free food and then slather ourselves with sun screen and spray on a fake tan, the notion of nature acting for an end is also quite foreign. Therefore, I don't think that the act itself (ahem), or a discussion of God's will (interference with), or even a discussion of natural vs. unnatural, is the best place to begin.

Instead, let's consider the overall objective of the use of contraceptives. Essentially, the objective is to have a small family, or no family at all. No one uses contraceptives to have only nine children. An ostensibly justifiable use of contraception would be to wait until you have sufficient financial resources, secure jobs, a residence in a place with a good school system, and so on and so forth, before you start bringing forth progeny. Again, hypothetically, you would stop bringing forth progeny before you have so many kids that your time, energy, finances, etc, are exhausted. Sounds reasonable, don't it?

What you are doing, essentially, when you wait to have children until your job, house, etc are all set up for them---and you have only a few children, so as to avoid over-extending your resources---is creating a box in your life where children fit. You are creating a space in your life for children, rather than allowing a family to take over your life. This, again, does not seem unreasonable.

However, the results of this kind of family planning can be very nasty. Children do not like to live in a box. They naturally rebel against it. Children always (no matter how small the family) make insatiable demands on their parent's time, energy, and resources. They refuse to be kept within those boundaries set by their parents; they try to take over their parent's lives.

Now, sometimes (hopefully, often) the "planned" parents have a change of heart. They realize that children are a greater gift than prosperity or free time, and they re-structure their lives so that their children come first. However, many parents of the contraceptive, children-in-a-box mentality are unprepared, and eventually resentful, of the box-free nature of kids. They continue to try and juggle family, finances, and free time in a situation when no juggling is really possible. Tada! Frustrated parents and neurotic children! Fun for the whole, uh, family.

I taught at a super-expensive technology summer camp for the past two summers. The kids I taught were from small families, or were only children. Now, gosh, some of these kids were awesome, well adjusted tykes. Their parents said hi to me every day, asked about their child's progress, oohed and aahed over their child's video game (wherein a puppy dog solved a maze and then pooped apples), and so forth. However, most of the kids (especially the ones from Marin, eesh)...were not well adjusted. Nor were they awesome. They were unenthused about everything I tried to teach them. Sullen, intractable, and jaded (ever seen a jaded eleven year old?*). And why shouldn't they be? Their parents had placed them in a tech camp, not so much because the kid had an interest in computers, as because their parents needed a babysitter. These parents were eager to fork the kids over in the morning (giving young Tyler or Kai a quick kiss on the cheek goodbye while simultaneously talking on their cellphone), and reluctant to pick them up in the afternoon (many the long, dull half hour I spent waiting for a tardy parent to get their sullen childblob). These kids knew that their parents had other priorities...and they usually either stayed silent and unhappy the whole time they were at camp, or made mad grabs for adult attention when they had the chance.

The problem with contraception, as far as I can see, is not so much the act of putting on a condom or popping a pill in order to thwart a pregnancy, as the attitude towards the value of human life. In most large families I know, the children obviously come first. The mothers and fathers of large families have sacrificed almost everything that our culture values; they have no free time, no savings, no security, no nothing. Large families are untenable economic units, and stifle the opportunities for personal and financial development on the part of the parents. And yet, large families, both the families I grew up around, and the ones I'm lucky enough to currently teach, tend to be much happier than small families. Why? Because a large family is so obviously one in which parents place a greater value on human life, on children, than on anything else in the world. The kids in a large family recognize this, and tend to be personable, secure younguns. They aren't prone to the saddening attention-getting techniques that I had to deal with when teaching the yuppie spawn; they know that they are loved and valued.

This is not to say that the only happy families are big families. There are, obviously, lots of happy families which are on the smaller side. However, the act of contraception is intrinsically one which says "I value my *space/health/money/whatever* more than I value children..."; it tends towards an attitude wherein kids are an imposition, rather than a gift. This is not to say that every married couple who uses contraception is guilty of this attitude. Still, essentially, what makes for a good marriage, and a joyful family, is living for others, not for yourself.** Contraception, while not always used for selfish intentions, tends towards a kind of selfishness which is injurious both to your relationship with your spouse, and to your relationship with your children.

Speaking as the future teacher of (screwed up) generations to come, I'd like to implore y'all to refrain from reproducing until you are entirely ready to devote your life to your spouse and children. Thank you, and goodnight. Oh, and also, I submit myself to the correction of the Magisterium, blahblahblahfishcakes.

* I haven't even touched on the spoiled uber-materialism of most of these children. Good gad. Talk about passing on family values.

** This goes back to the notion of marriage as a vocation. This requires fuller explication. Which I'm not presently giving, nyah.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Habemus papam!

I was listening to the radio with the high school kids when Pope Benedict XVI was presented. Quoth clueless radio newscasters, when the name was first given: "Did they just say his name was Decimus Sextus?" "Our translators, umm, cut out. Yeah, that's what it sounded like."

And that, children, is why we should all learn Latin. Or Italian. Or something other than clueless-radio-newscaster-ese.

Sunday, April 17, 2005

Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. - Matthew 10:34

Perhaps I smell religious; in any case, people whom I've met very recently often start talking to me about Catholicism. I try to answer their questions as best I can, but often the whole conversation leaves me sick at heart. Most of the time they trot out a quasi-history of the Church (y'know, where Galileo and crusaders and anti-popes and pedophile priests dance a debased cosmic ballet on the backs of oppressed medieval peasants), and contrast that with their (selective) memory of the teachings of Christ. I endeavour to correct them, but really, they've already made up their minds. My faith has boundaries, rituals, hierarchies, and absolute truths, while they believe that faith should be indefinite, non-doctrinal, eminently personal, and free of external ritual. In most cases, I accomplish nothing more than give them more anecdotal evidence of the rigidity of organizedreligionizers. I am completely incapable of touching them or moving them in any way towards the truth. So why does God keep sending these people to waylay me? Surely there are more articulate, more attractive representatives of the Church. I'm hardly the ideal spokesmodel of holiness. I'm just as likely to retreat to my hovel, crack open a beer, and mutter "Fuck y'all, all y'all." as I am to pray for the redemption of their souls. Well, I pray too. After a beer. Still. What's an incompetent apologist to do?

Friday, April 15, 2005

I, for one, welcome our new wolphin overlords.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

The first couple of months I was teaching, the kids walked all over me. And I let them. They told outrageous lies, talked over my efforts to explain polynomials, complained at length about homework and tests, side tracked me on discussions of classroom procedure, and so forth. They really aren't to be blamed; they only did it 'cause they could. Now I'm more assertive, more confrontational. I've realized that an Algebra II class is not the time or the place to have a Socratic discussion about the nature of authority; instead, I bark orders and give schedules. They whine, certainly, but not nearly as much. There seems to be progress; no one flunked their last Physics test, even the most recalcitrant are turning in homework regularly, tests are taken with minimal griping. Now, however, they have a new complaint. "Miss P, why you gotta be so negative all the time? Can't you give us more positive reinforcement?"

These are the same teenagers, you realize, who I've tutored after hours and over lunch (for free), chased after to make sure that they turn in their homework and don't flunk my course, written letters of recommendation for, praised lavishly for correct answers, and made exception after exception for when it comes to late homework and missing tests.

It was at about this time that I realized that the care and education of children is a very thankless job.

I mean, just look at me. As a child, as far as I can recall, I was bratty, overly talkative, self-absorbed, and largely amoral. As an adolescent, I was less mischevious, and instead cultivated being introverted, sullen, and prone to irrational crying jags. Ooooh, and let's not forget the quasi-British accent. Wow. Why my parents didn't strangle me, I'll never know.

In any event. Why do I do this to myself? I mean, my parents, through not throttling me, at least reaped some Darwinian benefit of passing along genes. I'm not even related to the kids I teach. Is this some maternal instinct gone haywire? A life vocation to the dissemination of knowledge, no matter how ungrateful the recipients? What?

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

My dad made this:

The Pope-U-Lator!

So. Damn. Cool. Roll your own pope!

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

If gas prices don't go down, I'm going to have to sell either my car, or a kidney. And all I'm saying is, I'm not going to sell my car...

Sunday, April 10, 2005

c'mere baby, show me how you get loose

O what a beautiful day.

I walked around my neighborhood for a little while. This is not a usual activity of mine; normally I just frown about the lack of coffee houses and bookstores, and drive down to San Diego instead. However. The weather was gorgeous, all manner of things were in flower, and the fact that two story houses are largely nonexistent in this slice of suburbia meant that the sky was endless. My neighbors were out tinkering with cars, cleaning porches, watering lawns, painting white picket fences. I wandered to a nearby park, where big beautiful Hispanic families were picnicking complacently. The fat, happy ducks in the pond were being fed by equally fat, happy children. Couples were cuddling on the benches. Young men in gold chains and impossibly low slung pants were playing soccer. All was right with the world. Who needs coffee houses, anyhow.

Saturday, April 09, 2005

Sometimes I wonder if the parents of the kids I teach actually want me to reprimand same for being obnoxious egotists. After all, there seems to be a definite correlation between having an overbearing personality and worldly wealth and success. If I ever succeeded in getting across to my students that reading is fun and that material shtuff and social acclaim are not the point in life, I will have de facto restricted their future income potential.

Argh. Since when did men switch from asking for your phone number to giving you their business card? Also, what is the Miss Manners approved response to men twenty years your senior who, after making awkward chit chat for several minutes, silently hand you their business card? Should one:

a. Say "Thanks, I'll be sure to call you if I ever need a..." *glance at card* "systems manager!"

b. Scrutinize the card, exclaiming over the fact that they have a cell phone AND a pager.

c. Accept the card graciously. Retreat to other side of dance floor.

d. Stare at it, with a puzzled expression, and murmer "Umm. OK."

I went with option d. So smooth, I am. Argh again. Trouble is, I really feel sorry for the sweet computer geeks with abysmal social skills. Dammit, I don't want to hurt their feelings. However, talking to them is like walking with a four year old clinging to your ankles (I'm really too tired to explain this analogy, take it as you will).

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

She is a queen among woman. Multi-talented, omniverous, and never glum. Well, I don't know if I'd call her gracious, exactly, but she's definitely regal.

He is a wise fool with an addiction...to truth.

And I am happier than you are
And they were happier than I am
And the fish swim in the lake
--- and do not even own clothing.

Ezra Pound, Salutation

Monday, April 04, 2005

One of the advantages of driving the giant grey steel beast is that cops do not pull me over, even when I'm doing 90 mph. Although normally I'm pretty good about spotting cops, I still occasionally sail through speed traps at overtly illegal velocities. My hypothesis: highway patrol assumes that, since they can't see my head over the back of the seat, and I'm driving a Caddy, that I'm a midget grandmother with a bad attitude. And nobody messes with the little old lady from Pasadena.

Go granny, go granny, go granny go...

Sunday, April 03, 2005