Okay, so Maggie has a point...

Poor Maggie dealt with my complaining through email, as well as on the blog. She has a point with this one:

"Ugh. Summer will be here so soon...only a few more weeks and you are home free. Although, keeping it in perspective, you aren't having a colonoscopy today, so it really could be a lot worse."

Here's to Abby.

Why does the computer lady hate me?

I'm two hours and twenty five minutes into my work week, and I'm already depressed that it's only Monday, feel completely hopeless at the realization that there are still 27 long days until the end of the school year, and realize that I completely and totally understand why 50% of teachers leave in their first five years in the profession. If one more child whines to me about their blog assignment, I may have to shoot myself.

Admittedly, part of my bad attitude is brought on by the fact that the computer lady in the media center hates me. Actually hates me. I'm not sure what I ever did to her (besides back up a kid of mine when she made him cry after falsely accusing him of ripping keys off a computer keyboard) but she actively dislikes me. She erases my name from the computer sign out and puts other people in the lab, tells the librarian that my kids are misbehaving and not storing the laptops correctly and neatly, and generally is rude, cold, and...well...MEAN to me. This makes blogging in the computer lab on Mondays less fun than it should be.

On a side note, the presentations at MCTE this past weekend were great...though I did puke three times from the food. Once in a garbage can. For the record, there's no dignity in that.

Group Work

Here's the thing: I could write a post about how my group for this presentation for class tomorrow decided to meet at 9:00 p.m. tonight in a bar near campus. I could add that the group meeting didn't actually start until 9:25 when we all finally assembled. I could also add that while I left our group meeting at 10:20 after a 55 minute meeting, we talked about our presentation for a grand total of about 8 minutes.

I could say all that, but I can sum it up like this:

Group. Work. Sucks.

"You would be here with her."

A couple of months ago, KC and I topped off already illustrious graduate school careers (I can say what I want on my blog, right?) by presenting at NCTE-AR--an entire weekend filled with professors and graduate students in the world of literacy education who try to, literally, outsmart the other people in attendance. It's intimidating company, but with a few reassurances from Jessie that were something along the lines of: "It'll be fine--you guys are smart, too!" we felt okay about it.

Here we are at the conference:

(Photo credit: Jessie)

For whatever reason (I think it's officially my fault this time), KC and I are presenting again next weekend at the Minnesota Council of Teachers of English spring conference--an entire weekend filled with English teachers trying to, literally, out-teach the other teachers in attendance. The crowd is less intimidating, and maybe it's just that time of year, but something about pulling this presentation together felt a little insurmountable. After Pizza Luce, a cupcake at Cupcake, and some good natured bitching about the school year and students (okay, it's DEFINITELY that time of year), we managed to pull a pretty smart looking presentation together.

To celebrate, we thought we'd brave the throngs of our high school students at the movie theater near school and go see In the Land of Women--a frighteningly cute movie with a frighteningly cute lead.

Sure enough, a student of mine enthusiastically took our tickets as we entered the theater. She was chipper, nice, and managed to not look entirely ridiculous in her red, polo, movie theater worker shirt tucked into her black pleated movie theater worker pants. The best part, though, was when I asked her how she was doing and she replied with:

"I'm doing well."

Well.

She was doing well.

It's pretty nice, actually, to see the students outside of school once in awhile. It does manage to remind you that they're real people that are, in some ways, trying to be more human than inhuman and aren't actively trying to make your life a living hell. And honestly, when they say something smart that you taught them like, "I'm doing WELL" and they actively choose the adverb over the much preferred adjective, you love them a little bit and you love your job a little bit more.

It was a nice moment--nice enough that my English teacher glow wasn't even dimmed by another student of mine who saw us after the movie, took one look at KC and me together on a Saturday night and said, "Oh man, you just WOULD be with her."

Because some days you need a laugh

So it goes...

Kurt Vonnegut died this past week. It seems a little impossible not to mention this--even briefly--on my blog.

For the NY Times article following his death, click here.

Nearly all of the articles I read about Vonnegut this past week ended with the following lines from his poem, Requiem:

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.

When I tried to find the full text of the poem, I found instead a short fiction piece that Vonnegut wrote called "Requiem for a Dreamer." It's a transcription of a conversation Vonnegut had with his famous character, Kilgore Trout, who promises to commit suicide if George W. Bush is reelected to the presidency. While the whole thing is worth reading, my favorite part was when Vonnegut is talking to Trout about graduate school, and the conceited nature of it all:

KV: ...OK, try this: After the Second World War I enrolled in the graduate division of the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago, the most conceited university in the country. And in a seminar for about eight of us, half of us vets on the GI Bill of Rights, my favorite professor, in fact my thesis advisor, put this Socratic question to us: “What is it an artist does?”
TROUT: Hold on: What makes Chicago so conceited?
KV: That it isn’t Harvard.
TROUT: Got it: That it isn’t high society.
KV: Bingo. Anyway, I’m sure we all came up with smart-ass answers, since a graduate seminar in any subject is a form of improv theater. But the only answer I remember is the one he gave: “An artist says, ‘I can’t do anything about the chaos in the universe or my country, or even in my own miserable life, but I can at least make this piece of paper or canvas, or blob of clay or chunk of marble, exactly what it should be.’”
TROUT: OK.

Okay, so the bit about what an artist can and cannot do isn't bad either, but I enjoyed the bit about graduate school being a form of improv theater. I couldn't have put it better myself. Which makes sense...since...you know...he's Vonnegut and all.

Passions, Product Placement, and Paternity

Hi. My name is Rachel, and I watch Passions. I started watching Passions in college when I somehow managed to schedule my classes on only Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it's only been a matter of hours since I last saw an episode.

To be honest, I Tivo Passions and watch episodes mostly in fast forward because there's a part of me that believes that I'm not losing quite as many brain cells if I only watch certain segments of the one hour show.

Rationalization, I know.

My recent beef with Passions is that they've started pretty serious product placement advertising, and while I realize that product placement is going to become more and more of a reality because of Tivo owners like me who don't watch commercials if we can help it, I hate it. Hate it in the way some people dislike musicals because of the unrealistic nature of someone bursting out into song and dancing down the street with a hundred strangers who happen to know the same dance steps and appropriate harmonies to their song.

Today on the show Jessica was holding a pregnancy test box in her hand for an entire segment, brand name facing the camera, saying lines like, "This EPT pregnancy test is supposed to be the easiest and most accurate of all pregnancy tests. Soon it will tell me in this small indicator box if I'm pregnant or not! It's so easy to read!"

Ugh. Come on. It's not like I'm expecting Aaron Sorkin here, but seriously. Come on.

While I'm confessing pop culture sins, I'd like to mention my unusual interest in the Anna Nicole Smith saga. I wasn't at all interested in her when she was alive, but it's absurd how much ET I've watched to learn more about that situation since her death. I was, of course, watching video on MSN today about the paternity results released today.

Also, there was incident tonight with an insect in my salad at dinner.

(Writing this post feels a lot like how I used to feel in seventh grade when we were forced to go to confession. I was always worried I wouldn't have anything to say, would open my mouth, and realized I couldn't stop confessing embarrassing things about myself. I'll try to keep these to a minimum in the future.)

So this is Easter

I thought about writing this big long post about Easter--the ham and cheesy potatoes (yes, I think that's on everyone's menu today), the juvenile search for the Easter baskets that Mom still hides every year, the Monopoly loss to Dave and the classic nature of playing Jenga with the fam--but decided that the day could instead be encapsulated by this delightful family moment:

Cyndy and Dave brought their dog Addie over to Mom's for the day. Everyone loves having Addie around except for our Westie, Piper, who pretty much hates any other dog in her castle...Piper also has a problem with diversity, but that's a post for another time. Anyway, Piper and Addie spent most of the day "playing"--which sounded and looked a whole lot more like fighting, so to preoccupy Addie and keep her away from Piper's toys, Cyndy and Dave gave Addie a bully stick.

You can follow the link for more information on bully sticks, but the gist of it is this: they're a special treat for dogs made out of a bull's penis.

The highlight of my Easter, then, had to be when Addie was chewing on this thing, and Mom shouted out, "Is she chewing on that PENIS?!?"

It's hard to keep your composure, even as adults, when your mom is shouting the word "penis" at the top of her lungs. (Yes, this was frighteningly reminiscent of my tenth graders laughing at the word Uranus which came up in our mythology unit...I'm not saying I'm better than them.)

Jesus Christ is risen today, people. Alleluia. Or something.

Addie

This weekend I took care of my sister and brother-in-law's Brittany spaniel, Addie. They were finally using a bed and breakfast certificate they'd received as a wedding gift, and I thought it'd be a nice way for me to be a good sister AND try out living life with a full-time pet.

I've wanted a dog for awhile. I go through phases of checking the Animal Humane Society website on a daily basis, paying particular attention to the "Exceptional Owner Needed" section, believing, of course, that I could be the exceptional owner that some exceptional pet needs.

It occurred to me twice this weekend--once around 3:00 a.m. Friday night/Saturday morning standing in the rain waiting for the dog to finish chasing squirrels, and the second time when crushing up a pill in her food that supposedly keeps her from eating her own poop--that I may not be an exceptional pet owner and that having a pet may not be so exceptional.

Worth A Thousand Words, circa 1989