Speaking of offensive t-shirts, I saw a teenage boy skulking around in one on Thursday that said, "I lost my virginity. Can I take yours?"

Blech. He was actually kind of cute, too. Blech.

Friday nights in New Hope start with the journey to Cade's apartment then to Penn Station and then to New Jersey, where Paul will be waiting. Cade and I talk about our respective days during the ride and try to catnap. When we arrived last Friday and met Paul in the parking lot of the train station, we headed to my suburban utopia - Pizza Hut. I live in the same city as the country's first pizzeria, a place where real Italians make pizza using hundred-year-old recipes, yet I'd rather "gather round the good stuff" than go to an authentic restaurant in Little Italy. Admitting it is the first step to recovery, right?

*I must add that I do love real brick-oven pizza, too, but Pizza Hut reminds me of childhood lunches before going rollerskating with my dad, sister, and cousins and all those years I participated in Book-It.

Pizza Hut was amazing as usual. Did you know that the corporation has tried to revamp its image, though, and is now trying to tout itself as an Italian bistro? I'm wondering if this bistro nonsense has invaded Texas. I doubt it, as people are still wearing tapered jeans from the first time around in some hicktowns. Who would buy anything but pizza at a place called Pizza Hut? It's like going to Kentucky Fried Chicken and ordering the fish snacker. Do you want ebola?! Maybe I'm being close-minded, though.

So we ate and headed back to Paul's house. He had a social gathering to attend later that evening, so Cade and I watched a Chris Rock special with Paul's dad and later Jim, of Jim and Jenny's wedding fame, dropped by. Much of the comedy special was devoted to the cons of marriage. Jim laughed, and Paul's dad remembered that his 29th anniversary was on Sunday. The special ended and we switched to Bill Maher, so as not to end the evening in a good mood. Why do people from Fox News exist?

The next morning, Paul went to a baseball game in Philadelphia, which then turned into a debaucherous trip to Atlantic City. Jim came over again and he joined Cade and me on a trip to Solebury Orchards. I was going to pick raspberries and apples and flowers, dammit! In the end, I settled for apples. Sadly, raspberries are no longer in season. Only Empire and Pinata apples were ripe for the picking, and they were crisp and lovely. We received large baskets and rode on a trailer to their rows. It took about ten minutes before Jim and I started eating them off the trees. Then I started eating everything else in the vicinity that happened to be hanging off a tree. I didn't know crabapples really existed...or that I'm deathly allergic to them. I kid. But they aren't so tasty. Ditto for cocoons, spiderwebs, and those "Warning: Pesticides" signs.





Post-picking, I perused the orchard shop and bought apples and cider donuts. I walked outside and saw a caterpillar. It was the first one I had seen in a long time that wasn't construction-colored yellow and tearing up shit. I spent at least five minutes taking pictures of the catatonic caterpillar while Cade tried to explain to Jim, "They don't have these where she's from, and mentally, she's an eight-year-old boy."
We left the orchard and walked around Peddler's Village, a slew of New Hope shops that for the most part, sell stuff you can't afford. We did go into a wine shop and buy spiced apple wine. There's an annual scarecrow contest in New Hope, and we walked all around to inspect all the creative (and often horribly punny) entries. Check out the scarecrow adaptation of Grant Wood's American Gothic.



The next thing I'll recount could be a blog entry unto itself, but I have no desire to talk about pyramid schemes. Basically, Jim met a shifty-eyed pyramid paean randomly. Jim was invited to an "interview," but wasn't completely sure if the guy was in a pyramid scheme or just plotting to violate him. I came up with the idea of Cade and me going to Starbucks, where Jim planned on meeting the guy, and pretending to not know Jim while sitting nearby and eavesdropping on the entire conversation. I wanted enough material for an expose in the sleepy local newspaper or an interesting blog entry. Sigh. The schemey creep prattled vaguely about "being one's own boss" and "making the big bucks" without explaining what he does exactly. It took more than an hour to do so. It was the most tiresome eavesdropping ever.

Jim and the rest of us got out of Starbucks alive and barely awake. We wanted some fresh air and headed to Bowman's Hill Tower, but missed the tower. We got the trees instead...and a creek...and a space for quiet reflection...and a picture where Jim looks like the Ariel to my Prospero.





The weekend was beautiful. I hope to go back to Pennsylvania soon to see a whole kaleidoscope of chlorophyll-drained leaves and pick more apples. I ate the last one from my basket today.

1) A leering, drunken man clinging to the fence around the schoolyard and yelling at the first graders to come talk to him? Check! A second grader twisting on the jungle gym in such a way that the whole school knows she isn't wearing underpants? Check! I still have one more day of recess duty for the week? Check.

2) It's Wednesday and I have yet to document my peaceful weekend, which has started to feel more and more like last weekend, not to be confused with this weekend spent running errands and fulfilling obligations in the city. This week has been somewhat high pressured at work, so bear with me. I have a lot of writing I want to get out in the near future.

3) My sister gave a guy her number for the first time ever last weekend...and it wasn't for the completion of an emergency contact sheet! "It was a total Man move," she told me. (She's always called me Man). Go, Megan!

4) My mom started a blog. It's like mine, except without the irreverent jokes and polka dots. Please don't stalk her too much.

A Bee's Breakfast

New Hope[ful] Botanicals

Grad Schoo' Haiku

Reading verbatim
from copious, handheld notes,
the prof evokes yawns.

*

Readings on Plato
were not nearly so dense, man.
Not so dense as you.

*

Hear her cellphone ring,
that anthem of jubilee.
Everyone checks theirs.

*

My classmate reclines
on the brown sliver of desk,
his cheek indented.

Yawn! I returned from Pennsylvania at 11:00 pm, had to unpack, lay out clothes for tomorrow, deal with a cellphone charger dilemma, shower, and finally fell into bed. I slept until 7:10 and joined the morning rush to work. When I exited the subway, I heard someone yelling my name. I turned to see Renee, smiling and bobbing in the crowd of commuters.

Time, we agreed, is not on our sides. At school, where we have both just started, hundreds of emails are sent each week. Every evening, I leave school with some understanding of what the next day holds. I prepare as well as I can. The next morning, my understanding is reshaped as I check the barrage of emails that have come since I turned off my laptop and went home. (I refuse to take too much work home and will not check work email there). I compare all the daily decisions and processes of this year versus the last one, and I can feel my short-term memory start to spit and squeal, like a saw going through a 2x4. Where's the time to do all this stuff? Where's the memory to remember to take time to do all this stuff?

There's always something. A field trip on Friday. Sending in points I'd like the principal to bring up in a parent conference I can't attend. A question about forms. Visits from a staff developer. It's productively busy, so I can't complain. However, I can finally see what co-workers were telling me when I started this job in the summer - this school can easily become your whole life. If you let it.

I'm not going to do that. I can devote all my time to teaching when I'm at work. I'm taking graduate classes that will help me be a better teacher, but doggone it, I will never miss Project Runway. And I intend to leave the city again to revel in the changing fall foliage as soon as I get another full weekend. And I have got to do my laundry before it mutates, developing suckered feet and hands that will enable it to open the refrigerator, climb in, and copulate with an expired fat-free container of strawberry-kiwi yogurt.

I want to write and explore and write all these papers for my classes early and get in better shape and keep a cleaner apartment and sleep more...and someday feel like there's a lot more I'm doing than not doing.

That's all.

But until then, guess who just got home from a graduate class and is now making cupcakes for the eleventh birthday of a student who is not one of her favorites?

Not that I do much writing on weekends anyway, but I'll be out getting some r&r in Pennsylvania for the weekend. Pictures of berry and apple picking, hiking, and tree-hugging to come.

I got off the subway yesterday and walked up the stairs, staring at the weary posteriors of strangers. Upon ascent, my hair mussed in the air's chilly hands. The last two days, I've been going out of my way to get home. I take the train to a spot eleven short blocks and four long blocks away from where I live. The bus could drop me off a block from home, but I want to walk, because when I walk, I think.

I think about how I felt last year when I came home from work. I was tired then, and I feel tired now. But this is a different kind of tired. It's not a my-soul-is-crushed-and-my-ideals-are-gone kind of tired. It's an I-had-recess-duty-and-read-aloud-and-talked-to-four-different-kids-about-reading-today kind of tired. I'm actually teaching and helping children learn to read and interact with their peers.

What a good thing to do with my time! No wonder I'm a little sleepy - I'm, excuse the cheesiness, making the world a better place.

Yeah. I'm serious. I know how YOU feel. These foreign feelings of contentment and positivity and enjoying my job are freaking me out, too.

Not such a good implication. I just don't think I'd ride in a car from any place that wishes me luck before I get in.

HORNS UP:

*My ipod battery died once and for all last week. I'd noticed the shorter battery life for the last few months, but somehow I really thought it would live forever. I guess one machine can only take so many Barenaked Ladies songs. It could be a huge predicament getting a new battery and then installing it, but my dad is a generous handyman. All I had to do was pack Claude (my ipod) in a miniature Corn Flakes box wrapped in old star-patterned socks and off it went to Texas. Could it be any easier? Well, maybe. My dad loved my secure packaging so much that he has decided to send it back in a half-empty Chex Mix box wrapped in dirty underwear.

*Look, Ma! I'm an NYC Blogger!

*The season premiere of America's Next Top Model and Project Runway on the same night! It's a fierce potpourri of addictive reality television! I live for Wednesday!

*I'm reading Bailey White's oeuvre. I've graduated to Quite A Year For Plums and have read her two memoir collections. I most loved Mama Makes Up Her Mind, but I really like reading about life in the South in all her books. It's really different from what I normally read. Bailey White also seems to be such a strong, interesting woman - as far away from the Southern belle stereotype as you can imagine.

*Two new obsessions: lighting candles/burning scented oil and eating fresh raspberries.

*I'm going to Pennsylvania this weekend to hike and take pictures and breathe fresh air with Cade. Yay!

HORNS DOWN:

*My blogging crisis Monday night. The thought of losing my blog or any of its silly accessories makes me break out in a cold sweat. Without my site meter, how else will I validate my existence? My career? The loving relationships I've maintained? My knowledge? My literary repertoire? Doritos?

*My graduate classes are trying. Very trying. Some of my classmates are completely computer-illiterate and most of them are digressive. I don't feel like I've learned anything from my professor or classmates. I want to get my money's worth and seriously, it's grad school. I can handle some higher level thinking assignments. In addition, getting the textbooks I need for one of them (you know, to teach myself everything) has been difficult, but I'm trying. I'm trying.

*One of the reasons for my new love of the scented candle/oil burner is the musty, damp towel smell that pervades my apartment. I still haven't had time to drop my grody-clean clothes at the laundromat.

*I missed seeing John Legend in concert at Bowery Ballroom Monday night, because I had a class to go to. I really wish I hadn't missed the concert, especially when I found out that the class is full of the same kind of clucky old Bed-Stuy women I had in my summer class. God help me.

*It's hard to accept that I weigh more now than I ever have. I've always been underweight for my height, but it appears I am now close to normalizing. Well, according to the scale at school when I'm fully dressed. I don't think I look heavier, but maybe my diet is finally catching up with me. Fast metabolism may have left the building. I feel slightly wrong to feel this uncomfortable in a size 1-2, but I do. On top of it all, now I feel like a weak woman who succumbs to unrealistic and unhealthy societal expectations of beauty.

A fat, weak woman.

Cade and I are sitting in chairs at a hair salon, waiting for his name to be called. I look up from the magazine I'm thumbing through when a man's cellphone ring pierces the quiet. It is coming from the tall, sloppy-looking man who is paying at the cash register.

The man answers, "Hello? Oh...hi. Well, yeah, I'm just running errands. I'm getting a colostomy tomorrow, and I'll be tied up-"

Cade looks at me and reads my mind.

"Yep," he says. "That's bloggable."

Yet another reason to love Cade: He found the old code for my site meter and blog ring link. The former is no longer truly up-to-date on hits, but I'm just glad to have it back.

The Happy Dance (with Renee) shall commence!