Regina Spektor - Fidelity

I really like this, and no, my paper is not finished.

More Adventures in Signage

Is there a limit to how many winkies I can purchase at the sale? Or do I get one winky free with each purchase of a winky of equal or greater value?


Whatcha gonna do with all them humps, all them humps that rattle your trunk?


It degrades our town, not just the sidewalk or the backyard or your feet! Anyone who doesn't pick up their dog's steaming crap is un-American. Don't you get it?!


This sign outside a New Jersey butcher shop surprised me. I had no idea most of the kids I teach had been cut up and refrigerated.


Would you eat anything referred to as a "banger"?

Arby's commercial

The sound quality is poor, but I had to post this commercial. Supposedly, the black guy says, "Shit," in it. Also, the Arby's hats at the end suggest penises.

Hilarious Pepto-Bismol Commercial

I love the music, and nothing's scarier than giants with diarrhea.

I have a twenty page paper due in one week. You probably won't be reading much from me, unless I fall victim to procrastination, as I'm wont to do. In that case, I apologize in advance for the memes and pictures and potentially horrible puns.

Where I Hung My Hat

(Not an endorsement of that guy in the White House).

Grad Schoo' Haiku: Academic Edition

Paulo Freire
is a really cool dude, yo!
Get schooled to be free.

*

Did you know Plato
thought we were born with knowledge,
all there is to know?

(He would say you already did).

*

Aristotle said
we need to be rational;
knowledge is logic.

*

The one thing I know
about Thomas Aquinas
is: I like his name.

No macaroni and cheese this year. No Pillsbury crescent rolls, either. I joined Cade for my first real Yankee Thanksgiving. (Thanksgiving in NYC last year doesn't count - the pies were from Fairway)! Other than the absence of a few familiar processed dishes, it was pleasantly ho-hum. Home-hum, even.

En route to the restaurant/brewery where I had my Turkey Day feast, Cade's brother, Mace, motioned in the direction of a dingy building. "I went there once, and there weren't any girls there." I surmised it was a hole-in-the-wall bar...of the titty variety.

"No girls?" Cade and his dad began to ponder. How curious... Were they all on break, vacation, or dare I suggest, maternity leave? Absent tees, okay. But absentees? Not okay. If the billboard says boobs, give Mace boobs.

"Well, they don't call it The Shitty Titty for nothin'," Mace explained. Cade's dad gravely replied, "They should call it The No Titty."

I was one sticky ring on the particle board coffee table closer to my roots, lemme tell ya.

*A short list, if you want to know what else happened over Thanksgiving break: apple procurement from Solebury Orchards, an Eastern European dinner gone intrusive, Target shopping, drinks and standing around in Doylestown, PA, a butcher shop, ice cream, bacon every day, mushy conversations every fifteen minutes...

The Cranberry Sauce Was Delicious

I've seen this around and it's eerily prophetic...

'What will your obituary say?' at QuizGalaxy.com

Karen, my co-teacher: Teaching middle school is challenging. [Turning to the kindergarten teachers we're sitting with]. Your kids are challenging in a different way.

Me: Like, your students pee themselves.

Bob, a kindergarten teacher: [Sighs]. Yeah, I had three of those today.

Karen: [Incredulously]. THREE KIDS PEED THEMSELVES?!

Bob: Yep.

Liz, another kindergarten teacher: In kindergarten, when it rains, it pours.

I'll be heading to Pennsylvania tomorrow night for a genuine Northeastern Thanksgiving.

This will most likely be my last blog entry until Monday, as I'm packing, scrambling to do work stuff, and making one of those construction paper turkeys by cutting out my traced hands. May you revel in the carbs, faithful readers!

*I just l-o-o-o-ve teaching middle school! This was an emailed anecdotal at work:

Nyree talked throughout advisory today. She literally interrupted others talking when it was their turn, interrupting me when I was reading, and having her own conversations or argument whenever she felt. Numerous times during advisory she yelled at Quinton, kicked Quinton, yelled out asking to go to the bathroom, and snapped at other student. She did not correct her behavior even with endless reminders. In addition, her body language showed that she was not engaged. She kept slouching, pouting, sucking her teeth, rolling her eyes, and staring into space.

*Doesn't that last sentence conjure up an image of a seething chimpanzee?

This time last year, I was alone. It was the third consecutive year that I would be away from my family, my kitchen table, the leaves tightly fastened to the branches of oak and mesquite trees. I didn't really care, because Thanksgiving has always been a mere respite from school for me. It doesn't mean family or food or thanks. It's just a break with a large meal I pick at.

The day before Thanksgiving last year, I went to Riverside Park and collected a bagful of colorful leaves. I didn't know what to do with them. I pondered mailing them as good tidings to my parents and sister in Texas. In the end, I piled them on a table in my bedroom and snapped pictures, which I forgot about and later uncovered when I developed the roll of film months later. (The rest of the pictures were of a blizzard that came to symbolize the end of something. The first pictures were of fall leaves. Leaves to snow, color to starkness, changing seasons - it was all too perfectly symbolic).

Hours before Thanksgiving dinner last year, I ate lunch at Subway. I wasn't sure if I'd like the dinner, as I've never been crazy about turkey or stuffing and gravies. I found the company nice and the food okay. That night, I went home hungry and walked the streets looking for a store with milk and cereal. The solitude was so crisp and beautiful. A lot seemed possible.

This year, I have Cade. I'll be with his family and surrogate family around different dining tables. I'll take digital pictures of leaves (yes, more leaves!), which I'll quickly upload to this blog. I don't think I'll be hungry after a Thanksgiving lunch and dinner.

There are times when I look at Cade and think that he's mine, has always been mine, but other times when I realize I'm looking at a guy I met just nine months ago. It doesn't seem like much, but that's long enough to gestate. And we have.

It'll be our first Thanksgiving together - the first one in four years with someone who feels like home, though home is so far away.

I feel like I already have the longer piece of the wishbone.

Grad Schoo' Haiku

Forty-four minutes
past the starting hour - argh!
Two long hours left.

*

I whittle away
hours looking at sweaters
classmates are wearing.

*

My lovely black tights,
though oh so chic and slimming,
lead to overt itch.

*

Visit library.
Pack bag for Thanksgiving trip.
A to-do list born.

*

A master's degree
implies rigor and challenge,
or so I once thought.

*

The haikus shall cease -
my counting fingers reveal
how I multi-task.

Three Confrontations

I've long believed that as much as it can be painful to be a woman, I wouldn't want to be a man. Men are allowed less freedom of expression than women. It's more difficult for them to live sexuality and gender as fluid constructs. And men's clothes are really boring.

Last week, I read Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again by Norah Vincent. For a year and a half, Vincent adopted the identity of "Ned" and dressed and lived as a man. ("Twelfth Night," anyone)? She visited strip clubs, bowling leagues, boardrooms, and even a monastery to find out what it's like to be a man. She learned a lot about attitudes towards women, bravado, and sharing emotions. Her conclusion? Being a man is hard, as is being a woman. We've got to cut each other some slack.

Those are the crib notes. For those of you still interested, here are some choice passages:

"Men get married, but their sexuality doesn't then magically disappear amid the bliss of family life. Hence the preponderance of married men loping off in shame and secret to the strip club.

Sometimes even respectable men with respectable lives have primal ugly stuff bracketed somewhere in their minds, kept in its place apart from the purported love that goes with the responsibilities of fatherhood and husbanding... It was only society's prevailing myth, or perhaps female wish fulfillment, that had pretended otherwise. As a result...sometimes it was too hard to successfully resolve the conflict between baseline male sexuality and the civilized role of a man."

"It was just the way of things in the wild when you were male. You were the eager athlete, the brightly colored bird doing the dance, and she was the German judge begrudging you the nod."

"At first the three women looked us over like inferior produce in the supermarket. Then they smiled weakly. They were well brought up. They knew enough to cover quickly with the kind of anemic politesse that we all use on bores at cocktail parties."

"[Women] think of ourselves as emotional masters of the universe. In our world, feelings reign. We have them. We understand them. We cater to them. Men, we think, don't on all counts. But as I learned among my friends in the bowling league and elsewhere, this is absolutely untrue and absurd. Of course men have a whole range of emtions, just as women do - it's just that many of them are often silent or underground, invisible to most women's eyes and ears."

"Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time, they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colors and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned... If women are trapped by the whore/Madonna complex, men are equally trapped by this warrior/minstrel complex. What's more, while a man is expected to be modern, that is, to support feminism in all its particulars, to see and treat women as equals in every respect, he is on the other hand often still expected to be traditional at the same time, to treat a lady like a lady, to lead the way and pick up the check."

"I was curious to see what would happen to her supposed attraction to Ned when she learned that he was a woman... Many would and have argued that that is all love ever is, an attachment to something illusory. Lacan wrote that love is giving something you don't possess to someone who doesn't exist. Perhaps Ned was an object lesson in that principle..."

"Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me of all things, into a momentary misogynist... I disliked [women's] superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the sucesses unbearably humiliating."

"There was a residual sexism in [salesmanship] for women, a benign twist on being thought useless in the world of work for so many centuries. If we did it people would say, 'pretty good for a girl,' and if we failed we were still commended for trying. But a guy, he was a useless clod if he couldn't perform, and he said to himself at least as harshly as anyone else did."

"People will literally stand paralyzed for a moment, sometimes in mild, sometimes in utter panic when they don't know what sex you are. You can see the confusion registering, or with polite people, being suppressed, and then you can see the adjustment being made either for male or female or for an extremely uncomfortable and robotic neutral ground between the two. If they don't know what sex you are, they literally don't know how to treat you. They don't know which code to opt for, which language to speak, which specific words and gestures to use, how close they can come to you physically, whether or not they should smile and how. In this we are no different than dogs - with the notable exception, of course, that no dog has ever been mistaken about anyone's sex."

"Being the second sex imprisoned us, but it came with one sizable benefit. We didn't have to carry the world on our shoulders. The feeling is officially mutual. Women thought they held the world up and made it go, and for that service deserved a vacation. Men, it turns out, think the same thing. And we're both right."

"Men's liberation isn't a platform you can run on, even if it is the last frontier of new age rehabiliation: the oppressor as oppressed."

"Men's healing is in women's interest, though for women that healing will mean accepting on some level not only that men are - here is the dreaded word - victims of the patriarchy, too, but (and this will be the hardest part to swallow) that women have been codeterminers in the system, at times as invested and active as men themselves in making and keeping men in their role."

"Maybe it will happen. Slowly, fitfully, tentatively. I hope it does. Men haven't had their movement yet. Not really. Not intimately. And they're due for it, as are the women who live with, fight with, take care of and love them."

She called in tears.

The moisture turned her words into soggy balls of meaning, like bread chewed and spit out. "I just broke up with-"

She couldn't finish. She didn't need to.

We talked for a long time about the guy I never met, the guy who hurts her in both dashes and slow brewings. It was the most personal conversation I've had with a woman in...my entire life?

I hate to sound like I'm celebrating her pain, but I was thrilled she called me. Me. We haven't known each other that long, but there's this feeling that we should have. She gets it, something no one has been able to get in so long. For a feminist, I have been seriously lacking in the sisterhood department, and I've had my ideas why. 1) I am unlovable, unrelatable, or both. 2) Women are, for the most part, jealous, relationally aggressive bitches. 3) I am intimidated by the idea of female friendship after some damaging experiences in my past and am unable to move on.

She later said, "I'm sorry. I'm blabbing on and on. Usually I want to come across as strong, but I just didn't have anyone else to talk to."

My heart soared.

I felt myself billowing with empathy and trustworthiness and hope. She chose me, as I have wanted to choose her. I need a female friend. It's the whole idea of simultaneous destruction and rehabilitation. Painful moments can provide perfect opportunities to build something unidentifiably new.

My friend, my Shiva, she and I can move on together.

Let's go to the 99-cent store!

Renee leads the expedition...


99 dense.


Just what I need - a timer that looks like a boob!


Everything you need all in one place.


Why Mommy had to call the poison control hotline.


Crotch Lion would be more appropriate.


You don't have to explain. I understand.


Awfully suggestive, dontcha think?


The bib for bastards.


"It's the Great Bolony, Charlie Brown!"


You shouldn't have. Really.


The gift bag that steals your soul.


Just add water, oil, eggs, and sexism.

I'm feeling the dementia kicking in early. A message from someone who supposedly knew me when I wore a locker key on a fluorescent green lanyard around my neck and corrected everyone's grammar in a sniveling, completely unironic way:

"wat it do amanda u may not remember me but i went to junior high and elementry wit u back in odem....i moved to houston at the end of 6th grade i got the year book still from that year cause my tias graduated that year.....u look good and i cant tell its u from your face still cute.......anywayz hit me up check out my page see if u member me aight laterz mami"

And now homeslice is talking to me like I'm a cool kid? Huh?

Any other former classmates reading this? Reveal thyselves!

"When I look down, I just miss all the good stuff. When I look up, I just trip over things." - Ani DiFranco

Today I lined up my bottles of vitamins on my desk and took every single one of them: Centrum Performance, vitamin E, and iron supplement. I washed them down with a small glass of orange juice and headed to work in a pencil skirt and smart black wedges. All day people complimented the look and I like to think that I felt a bit peppier today. I had to work individually with one student all morning on an assessment, and he worked surprisingly well. Then I taught my fifth-graders, whom I tend to either love or loathe. Today was more of a love day, I guess. One student, an extremely defensive chub named Aaron, smarted off at me in a thuggish way, got pulled outside, and promptly started bawling and snotting all over the place. Awesome. Tears are good, because they show his emotions aren't squelched yet. It's the "hard" kids who don't respond that you have to look out for.

I felt so agreeable today that when a man walking behind me on the street said, "Girl, you got some niiiice legs," I thanked him. Really. Then I told the fourth grader on teacher removal about how my sister used to get mad when I'd hum while I ate and how my dad used to get really angry at us and bag many of our toys, ostensibly to donate them to kids who would appreciate them more. The girl agreed it was an effective punishment, and asked me not to tell her mom about it.

My final change? A vow to watch America's Next Top Model and not gorge on food that is bad for me. (I don't know - something about watching mostly vacuous, aspiring models just makes me want to eat my feelings and then chase them with an entire bag of Doritos).

I'm writing this in part, because even I've noticed that right now writing has to be squeezed out of me. My camera is one of my favorite things and I'm obsessed with changing leaves and taking a few too many pictures looking up. I've also been overwhelmed with the demands of work and some existential matters. Frankly, I need to take better care of myself in the realms I can control. Thus, I'm going to dedicate myself to better intake of everything. I'm going to look at the world straight on.

Big city.
We fought and
pangs of fear
struck me.

I could live
the rest of
my life here,
looking for you
on Amsterdam Avenue.

Never finding again
your smile half-asleep,
how you say my name
across the table, your
salute across the subway
tracks. My side uptown,
your side down.

We lock eyes, we lock-step,
lock me up and throw away
the key if that's what it
means for you to love me
in a city that lets too
many people like us
stay strangers.

*In response to recent inquiry: Cade is still very much in the picture and actually sitting feet away from me and shrugging after I've asked him,"What are we? An item? Together? Dating?"

*I wrote this last night in longhand and intended to type it for the blog, but my dad called and talked about how he predicts that when I'm 25 (what is apparently a ripe old age and the cut-off date for knowing what I want to do with the rest of my life), I'll look back on this day - on the last one year plus of days - and realize it was all a waste of time. I resent that very much, and needless to say, it didn't put me in the mood to do anything but fume and cry and feel a distance from him that surpasses miles.

This morning, I rounded that corner, rainboots heavily stomping up the stairs to the street. I walked through clouds of stench - pot smoke and onion rings, cocoa butter and urine. This is my weekday miasma.

It's too early to feel this way, I thought. This corner, walking past this crowded bus stop most days until the end of June. I signed up for this, which happens to be here. And weather like this, with its soggy cotton candy sky, might be beautiful where I come from, a reprieve from sunlight. But here it is dreary.

Somehow, though, a lightness. Like the gold edged clouds in a Precious Moments illustration. Marcus lets me help him, instead of acting like he can read just fine on his own (which he can't), dammit. We work together, and I'm not the only one speaking, brightly and stupidly like a mother to a mute newborn. It took two months.

It strikes me that I am the teacher who best reaches the frenetic fifth grade Bernice, who reads at a first grade level, stutters, and spastically does the Chicken Noodle Soup dance when it strikes her. In the middle of a quiz, in line to lunch, her legs will suddenly kick and her smirking mouth explode into crooked teeth and cherry scented spittle.

And then my Advisory students will not stop laughing after our read aloud book has the word "breast" in it. I read it and continue moving through the sentence. When I look up, the fifth graders are mouthing it to each other and biting their lips.

"Yes, I said 'breast,' guys. It means 'chest.' You've heard of a chicken breast, right?"

They laugh and at the same time, I think we all imagine it - a chicken with boobs that jiggle with every cluck. I smile and move on, "Now enough about breasts."

And I think all that pot and onion rings, tattered paper under my feet, the wearing away of my soles is actually doing some good.

Adventures in Signage

Something tells me that whoever wrote this didn't go to colleg...


Are you really sorry, though? Or are you just saying that?


Ever read the book Found? Just as heart-wrenching.


C'mon, everybody, do the Times Square Shuffle!


Conveniently close to Chelsea.