Today at school there was a lockdown, a "code red," which I'd never experienced before, and I guess I could write about that but it turned out to be a false alarm, and I don't feel like saying much else about it.


Instead, I've got another anecdote:
The kids were in line, waiting outside the music room for their music class, when one girl turned to me and asked, "Are you really an elf?"

She was referring to a conversation we'd had, let's see, maybe before Christmas? When she had also asked me out of the blue if I were an elf.
"No," I told her.

"Then why did you say you were?"

She has been thinking, for months and months, that maybe I was, and maybe I was not, an elf. This might be one of the most enjoyable things to happen to me.
"I thought it was funny."
"Oh. Then why do you have that pointy thing on your ear?"
"Because my dad has it. We all look different, we have different things about us. Like, you've got blue eyes. And freckles."
"Ahhh, I hate freckles!"
"No, they're cute."
etc.

I am a stagehand for a play at Willamette. Aladdin. I do the lights, and MAYBE the fog machine. It is on the other side of the stage though, so probably I can only plug it in and unplug it. The sheep will likely have to run the thing.

It is really, really weird that I am involved with this.

Why am I? Had something to do with the time I told my supervising professor I was disappointed in the program's intellectual rigor. The, uh, lack thereof. That, along with several other things I've said and done, getting in trouble for eye-rolling, uh, other things, made me kind of worried about my letter of reference. I needed a way to seem nicer.

Here is a picture I took:


Here is one showing their idea of "Arabia":

There's the minarets, there, and also the giant dragon fans. And, lighted palm trees.
You should see the costumes. Festive.

teaching story!

We're doing a unit on the rainforest. For the writing prompt today, the kids were supposed to pretend they were going to go on safari. Many, many, many of them went prepared for bloodshed. My supervising teacher thought one was too much, though, so handed me his paper, asking that I help the kid "come up with a different way to treat an endangered species." He....hah, ok. He was bringing, among other items, a knife, with which to stab a three-toed sloth. Stab.
After some discussion, I got him to reluctantly change "knife" to "camera", "stab" to "take a picture of" (not that I'm spelling like he did, but you know).....but since we ran out of time, the last part of his sentence, "so I could take his toes," doesn't quite make sense.

teaching story!

This afternoon during math centers, one of the boys came up to me all distressed and tattley, and weirdly protective, telling me, "Ernesto and Will said Emily's hot!"

I could see, on the one hand, how this could be a disturbing situation. You sort of want to say, "Children, none of you are hot. You are children." Also, it's a personal remark...it certainly seems somehow inappropriate....

but, on the other hand, they didn't say this to the little girl, to bother her, they were just talking amongst themselves. She's pretty much everyone's favorite person in the class. And, it's not like they're 40 year old men saying a 7 year old girl is hot....they're 7 year old boys, hardly knowing what hot is, calling a 7 year old girl hot.

But...inappropriate for school, right? The little girl's mother was volunteering that day, mere feet away.

But....
So what I did was: shrug my shoulders, throw my hands up in the air, and say, "Well, what're ya gonna do." Yes, a reaction that hardly makes sense.

The boy wandered away, confused.

I've been stifling my urge to tell you about my amazing snot. But no more!

In the mornings, when I blow real hard: it's like a partially digested grape!! It has happened twice now! The first time, I had to test myself, say a few words, make sure they didn't come out "feeble zorp," that I hadn't blown out part of my brain!

Ok.

Nothing else to tell you of particularly, except that when I came back on Wednesday, the kids gave me birthday/congratulations on New York cards, that they'd made while I was gone. They sang to me. It was so cheesy, and nice. Some of them will miss me, they say, in the cards. They won't exactly, because they are 7, but it is ok. Also, since I was out in the reading specialist room last week, they were all on me-withdrawal anyway, and so were very happy to see me. Wednesday mostly, but even today a bit. Yet I am feeling particularly lame as a teacher lately. It is probably cold feet since I have a job, or also just something I'm going to keep having to deal with because of teaching being a weird profession for me. Not that I won't be ok at it, just it's not...it doesn't come naturally to me? Something like that.

This entry really lost momentum after the snot, I think. I should have saved that as the grand finale maybe.

I said to myself or someone yesterday that I am never so insane as when trying to do academic writing, but oh man, scratch that: I am never so insane as when I have the flu and am trying to do academic writing. Listening to this Brian Eno song on repeat that I just heard today, "Spider and I," over and over, my hands over my eyes, because it is not only nice for the burning eyes, but comfy for the sore neck, rocking back and forth, atonally humming, stopping to laugh at how this must sound to the neighbors on the other side of the paperthin walls, whose tv seems louder than usual, looking at my computer screen briefly, my body says, "oh kristi, let's curl up in a ball and listen again," i resume atonal humming......
I have listened to the song approx 50 times, I kid you not. It's got this great sadness and hopefulness, and this line that sounds really good in context, "we dream of a ship that sails away. a thousand miles away".
I would give it to you, but that involves more effort than I can muster.

[18:42] Admiral Fancy: i'm just so slow
[18:42] Admiral Fancy: so insanely slow
[18:42] pookie: only cause the assignment is lame
[18:42] Admiral Fancy: no
[18:42] Admiral Fancy: because i'm insane
[18:42] pookie: oh. ok. then

yeah, this is how much I suck at doing work

For some reason today I was thinking back about the first real story I ever wrote. It was kind of late in life, considering I'd always been good at and liked writing and wanted to be "A Writer".

It was my...second year of college? I think so. I was taking my first writing class, Fiction, one of the big 3 of lower division writing (the others: Non-fiction, and....I would swear there were 3. Personal Narrative? Isn't that Non-fiction? Whatevers, UCSD. OH SHIT. I suck: Poetry. Poetry. Well, of course that's the one I forgot. That might even have been my first. But it was fake. You hardly even had to write poetry.). Ok, so....
my first grown-up story. I'd done some things that I guess could have been called stories, but they were...I don't know. Most anything I had any real aspirations for I never finished. In fact, everything. Me and self-doubt, long-term relationship.

So I was freaked the hell out by this fiction class, for which we had to write a piece, like for reals. I worked hard, and all these tiny things I'd collected in my head for whenever I would write a real story, they all came together, and the story came out, pages and pages, and it had a flow, it had a heft I guess, there's this thing Bob Dylan said about songs, that a song is anything that can walk by itself.

We had review groups for our rough drafts, and the day we were going to go over mine, before we were even like officially all gathered together some of the people were telling me good things. I don't remember what. All I remember are the looks on their faces, which were like, "Oh. You're a writer writer." Respect. And it wasn't just a one-time thing; several times I've impressed people with my writing.

My teaching studies are slowing, and I'm remembering the promise I made to myself during one of my more stressful times this year, that I wouldn't forget the writing. That I'd never think of myself as not a writer, that I'd treat it properly, as one of the things that saves me over and over, maybe not my living but something I do to live. And, though it's not the best reason to write, I really want to get that look again.

MAYBE WITH MY ACTION RESEARCH PAPER, I WILL ILLICIT THE LOOK.
ha ha
Oh I kill me. But no more distraction, no sir. Totally doing the homework, now.

To procrastinate further on my work, I thought I'd go ahead and make a thank you call to the aunt who sent me a gift card for my birthday. I used the number my mom gave me, the person on the other end was all, "Kristi!" like they knew who I was, but something was...odd. "This kinda sounds like the other aunt," I thought. Well, I know me my aunt voices, because oh my. So, I thanked her for a gift card, got awkward silence, then a reference to some house that this other aunt had owned, and wow, oh you guys, so embarrassing. She was really warm and nice, talking with me about New York a lot, because that news has made the family rounds, but ohhhh man. So then I called my mom, all "YOU MADE ME CALL THE WRONG AUNT. DO YOU NOT KNOW THE DIFFERENCE. HINT: ONE SENT ME A GIFT AND ONE DIDN'T. ONE HAS ONE NAME; THE OTHER HAS ANOTHER. OH MY GOD, MOTHER. ARGH. ARGH TO THE NTH."
So what happened was, in my mom's new cell phone she had the number of the aunt I called under "D M"--D for her first name, M for her husband's first name. COINCIDENTALLY, these are the exact initials of the other sister and her husband. Oh my god, mother.

This might set me back about 7 steps in my phone phobia program, pretending I have one.

Moral: Do your homework. Don't look up. No stopping. To do otherwise leads to terrible things.

It is my birthday today.
I usually keep it all quiet, because I don't like them, the birthdays. But for some reason today I feel like notifying.
Tada! I am 25.