Gung Hay Fat Choy, y'all!

Hey, it's the Year of the Dog. That's the same year I was born. This year, I'm given to understand, I get +2 damage on all successful casts of magic missile. Booyah!

Topically, Chaz points all men of good will to: this.

Mostly, when I discuss my teaching experiences, I tell the horror stories. All those laser pointers I had to confiscate from the seventh grade boys (and then proceeded to play with, to make them jealous)? Comedy gold. The high school kids wrapping themselves in duct tape (which they nicked from the emergency box, I might add), and then, after they were all thoroughly swathed, somehow getting the roll of duct tape stuck so far up someone's arm that they couldn't get it off, and running through the high school in hysterics? Pretty darn funny.

However, besides children being more entertaining than teevee, there's another reason I enjoy going to work every morning. That being, I teach at least one genuine saint. At an age when, to most kids, peer approval means everything, this sixth grade girl doesn't care a bit which of her classmates are "cool," and which not. She includes everyone, befriends everyone, and remains oblivious to all the petty social machinations which seem part and parcel of the middle school experience. Her thoughts revolve around the lives of saints and how to love others. I'm not sure I'm getting this across properly, but she's just peaceful, holy, and happy, in a way that strikes me as saintly. Of course, her classmates love her. And as for me, I now have a tangible reason to be mostly good; out of fear of a be-freckled mini-saint who I have to face every day.

I made the two hour trek to the grandparent's house this afternoon. Along the way, I marveled at the number of asshats out there driving pickup trucks. It's as if Ford dealerships have a certain set of asshat criterion which must be fulfilled before they'll sell you a truck. The pickup truck driver, as a species, has a blithe disregard for the rules of the road, and they have cumulatively made numerous attempts on my life, mostly via nearly swerving into me in a fit of asshat whimsy.

Further, if multiple guys are leaning out the window and hollering at me during a traffic jam, they are almost always driving a pickup truck. I imagine their conversation in the truck, pre-hollering, went something like this:

"Oh I say, old bean, there's a single female driver in traffic beside us!"

"How marvelous. Should one or the other of us yell at her, do you think?"

"I think that would be simply smashing. Just...do you think it would be entirely proper?"

"Well, faint heart never won fair lady, old chap!"

"Too true. All right, I'll give it a go. Ahem. HEY BABY, CAN I HIT THAT?!?!? CAN I HIT THAT?!?!?!"

"Oh how droll! Here, I'll try. DO YA THINK WE'RE HOT? DO YA?!?!"

"I am in stitches, my good fellow! But I'm running out of ideas."

"Well, that first thing you shouted was a bit of good."

"Capital! I'll reuse it. HEY BABY! CAN I HIT THAT??!?! CAN I HIT THAT?!?!?!"

"Who could resist our siren call, what what? Oh dear. Traffic is moving again."

"C'est la vie, old bean, c'est la vie."

I don't wear much makeup to teach class. My mornings are rushed enough as it is, and the only people I see during a typical school day are my twelve-fourteen year old students, my mostly married or female coworkers, and the gym teacher (who, God bless him, eats his sushi with a fork).

On one occasion, though, I did wear lipstick to class. My students were tremendously impressed by this, commented on it several times, and still refer back to the occasion wistfully. Sometimes I'll call on one of them, and it will turn out that they do not want to tell me about apostolic succession, nor still do they have a question about the titles of the Church; instead, they want to know "When will you wear lipstick again, Miss P?"

It's a bit over the top. Then last week, I wore a new skirt for the first time in...a while. This set them into ecstasies. The quality and color of the skirt were extolled. Suggestions of which of my (five or so) shirts I could pair with it were given. Finally, after I thought the novelty had died down, Katie raised her hand with a thoughtful expression on her face. "Miss P?" "Yes?" "You know what would go good with that new skirt?" "Nooo.." "That lipstick you wore the one time."

Mel tagged me, so I guess the internet will just have to deal with my top five weirdest habits list thing:

1. Before making any major life changes, I cut my hair - The Spartans braided their hair before going into battle...I chop my hair off before taking a new job, moving, etc.

2. The less comfortable I am around people, the larger my vocabulary gets - If I don't know someone well, or am for some other reason less than bestest buddies with them, I tend to speak in terms of long, stilted sentences littered with ten dollar words. e.g. to a friend I would say "Hi, how's it goin?!" but to someone I don't know well, it's more likely to turn out "Hello, and how is your day proceeding...today? The weather patterns recently have been, um, splendid." This habit embarrasses the hell out of me, but the more embarrassed I am, the more grandiloquent my speech patterns get. Just shoot me now.

3. Perpetual fear of bank statements - For some reason, getting my bank statements in the mail fills me with terror, even though I don't live beyond my means and have never overdrawn my account. So, I've worked around the situation by only checking my bank statements online. Ditto my credit card bill and my phone bill. As long as it isn't in an envelope, I'm fine.

4. I fall asleep at parties - I find having lots of people standing around and talking very soothing. Combine that with alcohol, and you'll usually find me curled up in an armchair asleep before the end of the evening. Put a funny hat on me and then leave me in peace, please.

5. Compulsive buying of abstruse books - I often buy books which I know, in my heart of hearts, that I'm never going to read, but which I feel I would like to have read (e.g. the multiple tomes on calculus I've accumulated over the years). Some people buy clothes in a size too small, to motivate themselves to lose weight...I buy books which require more mental effort than I'm capable of, in an effort to motivate myself to be smarter.

I probably have weirder habits than these, feel free to point out any I've missed. Tag: Chaz, Deirdre, Dan.

AAAIIIEEE!!!

I'm all for an integrated curriculum. But this is just silly.

Reasons to break up with Aristotle:

1. Believes that men and women can never truly be friends. Hence, sees nothing wrong with spending Friday nights watching television in silence together.

2. Is unduly sensitive about bald spot. Keeps claiming that baldness is a sign of virility.

3. Insists on paternal right to expose unsatisfactory infants (e.g. those born deformed, or female, or looking likely to turn into a natural slave).

4. Wants you to hand feed him peeled grapes while he contemplates examples along the lines of:

"Let us suppose a time ABC and a thing D, D being white in the time A and not-white in the time B. Then D is at the moment C white and not-white: for, if we were right in saying that it is white during the whole time A, it is true to call it white at any moment of A, and not-white in B, and C is in both A and B. We must not allow, therefore, that it is white in the whole of A, but must say that it is so in all of it except the last moment C. C belongs already to the later period, and if in the whole of A not-white was in process of becoming and white of perishing, at C the process is complete. And so C is the first moment of which it is true to call the thing white or not-white respectively."

5. Can be kinda smug.

Reasons to break up with Nietzche:

1. Has syphilis.

Ever since I started reading Understanding Media, I've been asking myself "What would Marshall McLuhan say?" about pretty much everything.

For instance: there are a disproportionate number of Asians who swing dance. WHAT WOULD MCLUHAN SAY?!

I'm not really sure, but it might well involve the Eastern nonlineal intuition of that which is funky. Jazz, according to McLuhan, represents an end to the Western "homogeneous and repetitive rhythms." Here's another choice quote:

"Jazz is alive, like conversation; and like conversation it depends upon a repertory of available themes. But performance is composition. Such performance insures maximal participation among players and dancers alike. Put in this way, it becomes obvious at once that jazz belongs in that family of mosaic structures that reappeared in the Western world with the wire services. It belongs with symbolism in poetry, and with the many allied forms in painting and in music."

Further, swing dancers participate in "syncopation and symbolist discontinuity that, like relativity and quantum physics, heralded in the end of the Gutenburg era with its smooth, uniform lines of type and organization."

Subvert Gutenburg, and slap that bass! Really, I have no idea what McLuhan is talking about half the time, but I know that I like it.