Today I had to go to the eye doctor and then to the dentist. (Insurance, schminsurance.)
It is also my father's birthday. He told me about vine trees.
But what I really want to say is that two of my 8th grade acting students are dating. It is so stinking cute I almost can't stand it. Not cute like those ridiculous black & white cards with touches of pastel, but cute as in I loved that part of being a teenager. The every-kind-of-touching-is-new-and-can-you-believe-she's-getting-green-contacts part of being a teenager. Love it. Even better is that Eli and I totally spotted them flirting during class last week and this week, before class even started, P swaggered up to me and said "Guess who's going out!?! C and M!" And then I walked outside to pick up other students and C&M were totally holding hands and leaning on each other and looking at a fire truck.
I'm well on my way to being an eccentric old woman. Last week I yelled "Hey, you kids, get out of our yard!" to two guys playing in the leaves (it was at 2:30am and kinda like the cute version of this year's Halloween costume). This morning I stood on the porch waving a bag full of trash at Gavin while wearing my short white robe with an apron (not because I'd been cooking, but because I couldn't find [read: didn't even try] the belt) and in hair that hadn't been washed since Saturday.
I am the very picture of stylish composure at any time of day.
It's times like these when I think my parents have been withholding some really great stories about their youth.
"Do you realize how many websites have your name in them?" was the first thing one of my students said to me today. She hadn't even sat down yet, she was framed in the doorway.
That, my friends, is what loosely disguised pseudonyms are all about. I know we all know this, but today that knowledge was power. (Read: thank god I used a fake name!)
I was also powerful enough to eat two cookies. Ginger snaps. From Larry's. They were really fucking good.
We'd better start planning our secret escapades; the fog is ripe. I'm agent Double Blind and you are Emily Bronte.
So I was supposed to take my students to see the show which features The Greatest American Hero. We were supposed to go at 11:30. I got a call at 10:30 telling me it had been canceled. Then I ran all over the place making sure that the three students who were at SAM didn't leave that field trip early to go to a canceled one and met up with the other students to tell them we weren't going and yes, they had to go to their regular class. (Guess how many of them had not done their homework thinking they wouldn't be there?) Kinda like the opposite of a snow day, today was. And what if I hadn't turned my phone on in between being at a meeting and going to school?
But really, what I'm pretty glad about is that I didn't have to see the show again.
Still kinda mucks with my curriculum, though.
Sometimes it takes awhile to remember that it's Veteran's Day, even though your first clue should have been the man in green pants walking around Seattle Center carrying two rifles and wearing a windbreaker.
And since my initial reaction was one of "heyheyheyheyhey—that's not right," it was followed by this: if you're going to sling guns around, why bother wearing a trench coat? I mean, who's going to try and stop you? You can just hear the kid operating the Space Needle elevator saying in a pimply-teen Simpsons voice "Um, sir, you can't take those guns in here..."
Contrariwise, when we were moving all those things out of Annex (read To the Dump), someone called the police because Natty Gann and I were walking around carrying handfuls of rifles. True, he was wearing a blue shirt with the word POLICE in bold yellow block letters across the front and I was wearing a Cherry, Cherry, Lemon shirt, but does that really make us suspicious? They were fake guns.
Once when I was temping I received a memo that said a SWAT team would be practicing at 2:30pm, so not to worry if we saw men in black SWAT outfits carrying big guns wandering around the building. It was later followed with a memo that said the SWAT practice had been canceled and if we saw men in black outfits carrying big guns that they were "actual bad guys and call security."
SWAT is a really great word. I'm not sure what it stands for, but I'm pretty sure it's not self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. SWAT. Okay, okay, yes: I like SWAT because it rhymes with a dirty word. Heh, heh, SWAT team.
I love that it is delightfully normal (um, in my world) to arrive home at 1:37am and immediately put on roller skates--coat and glasses still on--pour a bowl of Lucky Charms and skate around the house while eating them.
Also: Julie at Satellite is the glorious new favorite server. How many do you know who will sit right down and be catty with you and appreciate your math references?*
*Update as of 11/10: I know who she is.
I did it again: I slapped my own ass in front of middle schoolers. It wasn't a double-handed whammy this time, but it was still pretty noisy and coupled with the word "tuckus."
I'm not even wearing ass pants today; I'm wearing The Skirt. Clearly, ass-slapping is a behavorial gesture of mine and that's just the way it's going to stay.
Let us suppose you teach a class at a private high school. Let us further suppose that this class involves an assignment where the students must choose and attend a theatre production at any Seattle theatre. Let us imagine that you are currently in a production in a Seattle theatre.
Would you encourage your students not to attend the production you were in, not because they have to review it, but because, as a dead mermaid, you were wearing a floral bikini top?
It appears, my friends, that the answer was Sjet.
Monday started with a root canal and ended with a difficult conversation. In the middle were teaching and rehearsal (you know, where the love is) so there were plenty of Things That Are Going Well, but still, thing one and thing two made me cry.
But I kinda like crying now. I never used to do it, so these days it makes me feel like a real girl: now I'm happy, now I'm sad, grrr now I'm mad, now I'm sad again, happy!happy!happy! Okay, but even after that declaration of Tear Pride, I still gotta say that the root canal part only made me cry because, like, the tear ducts in my right eye behave irrationally and just get all leaky all the time. When I yawn, for example. And my mouth was all open wide and stuff for the root canal. The conversational crying was The Real Thing and happened because it was a big deal, yo. But back to the tear duct thing: do you think maybe it's related to the disorder that causes my cheeks to feel cold when I eat cheese?
Why why why why why do Seattle audiences seem to give every frickin' equity show a standing ovation?
Based on the staging, I'd say Gordon Edelstein is leaving ACT to direct skits at some high falutin' sleep away camp.
I should have knocked down the soprano and stolen her shoes.
(She had really good shoes.)
The Assfire is back on the street.
I don't know where the Annies are.
Maria, Auntie Mame, and Dolly: fair warning.
Molly and I discovered that the consequence of remaining in the movie theatre and talking about bagpipes for an hour is getting the lights turned off on you. That's all that happened. No one yelled at us, no one looked to see if anyone were still in the theatre. When we walked out, we discovered that the theatre that had been Spirited Away when we went in had become Comedian: our film had been spirited across the hall.
Next time we're going to stay all night, eat all the candy and see if we can get the projectors to work. The only thing we're missing is a big white horse as our getaway car in case we are discovered.
Lefebvre parked Erin's car (the illustrious Ford Assfire) on the lawn last night. I woke up at 6:45am with the big idea of making a little sculpture of a man running away from it. I even went so far as to go down into the scaryscary basement to see if we had any material with which I could make such an artistic Calvin & Hobbes-style masterpiece. That's when I realized that building a little man would be a lot of work and that it wasn't even 7:00 yet.
We got in trouble once for letting our grass grow too long. The landlord said our neighbors complained. They were trying to sell condos and we were bringing down the neighborhood. Maybe I'd better make that man afterall...OH!
I just remembered that I have these two freakazoid Annie dolls upstairs that some lady made when Erin was Tessie in the Columbian Basin Allied Arts' production of Annie in 1984. They're about the size of a four-year-old and made of stuffed muslin with red yarn hair and painted-on faces. One still has the Annie dress on; the other only has underpants.
The Annies Get Run Over by the Assfire
Now our lawn looks like this: the Red Dress Annie is trapped between a pile of leaves and the left front tire. I put a cowboy hat with a blue sheriff star on the naked one. Now she is Naked Cowboy Hat Annie and sprawled against the windshield.
There were no survivors.