I've seen two odd slogan tees on some fellow New Yorkers in the last week.

One was on a very small child. It was similiar to those "Call 1-800-Grandma" shirts that are generally supposed to validate primary caretakers, rather than describe the child. They're emblazoned with messages like "My Mom's Hot" or "I Love My Daddy." This one read, "WORKING MOMS RULE!" I thought it was a pretty poignant sign of the times. I have had a working mom for most of my life, but yeah, who buys that for their kid? Someone feeling barely-masked guilt, thus leading to their need for validation, or someone proud of the fact that they pay someone else to take care of their offspring during the day? Someone who thinks that being a mom shouldn't be one's sole occupation and wants other people to know that? I'd have asked the source, but the caretaker was a nanny. Obviously.

The other shirt was in the same vein as those tight "Hottie" and "Sexy" shirts with bubble letters or some whimsical font. The shirt read, "I am not opinionated." That was it. I thought there might be some punchline on the back of the shirt, but there wasn't. I think these shirts are supposed to be funny, and this one, like most, falls short of that goal. Of course, it could be ironic. The voluptuous girl spilling out of the tee might be an indomitable opinion spitter. And of course, to say one is opinionated or not, isn't that an opinion? Maybe that would only work with an adverb somewhere in there: "I am annoyingly opinionated"or "I am reasonably opinionated." Or can you prove the existence of opinions (or not) as fact, thus not making it an opinion? Yeah, I'm pretty sure the sentence is a fact, not an opinion. Here's another fact, err opinion: That shirt is stupid.

So when do we make it free and available to women?

Head Honcho teased me today, because I kept turning the air conditioner in the office I'm using on and off. I never could get comfortable in the stuffy room.


From: Amanda
To: Head Honcho
Subject: This Room, A Haiku

This room is stuffy.
A.C.'s my one salvation.
Oops! Now I'm freezing.

*

From: Head Honcho
To: Amanda
Subject: RE: This Room, A Haiku

You.
Are.
Shot.
Kid.

*

From: Amanda
To: Head Honcho
Subject: "You Are Shot," A Haiku

Jeff says, "You are shot,"
as an expression of his
deep admiration.

*I meant to post this Friday. It's still pretty accurate, but my wrist feels much better.



HORNS UP:

*Having Molly, a super-sweet stylist from Houston, for my hair appointment on Wednesday. As soon as she walked up to my chair, I told her about my last salon visit when the stylist told me I have a nightmare back hairline, and I was really offended. Had I felt better, I would have complained or insulted some feature of hers. Molly laughed and told me my hairline has a pointy cowlick on one side, but so do lots of hairlines out there. "Lots of 'em." she said. "It's not a big deal."

I'll be honest - I kind of wish my hairline was an overachiever, excelling in chess or scoring a perfect SAT verbal, like Mama. But oh well, pointily average works for me. At least she's healthy.

*Congrats to the mentor who was mentioned in Brooklyn's largest daily paper earlier this week. Congrats to me, too, for paragraphs were taken verbatim from the press release I wrote for her earlier this summer. I'm not credited, but I know what I wrote and I'll point it out to whoever asks (and possibly some who don't).

*Keeping in touch with friends. I hung around with Elizabeth and doggers Thursday, Julia yesterday, and have talked to Renee about matters personal and occupational over the phone. Most people who worked with me at the progressive school last year have quit. S to the olidarity, man.

*Going to the Good Morning America Sugarland concert Friday morning. The band was peppy, the music catchy, and the crowd considerate. What a great way to start the day.



HORNS DOWN:

*I have carpal tunnel syndrome or some wrist injury. Being a hypochondriac, I should have self-diagnosed wrist cancer or multiple carpal schlerosis by now. Instead, I keep forgetting it hurts until I bend the right wrist and ow, owie, eeh!

*I locked myself out of my building the other day. I had to wait for Cade to get off work, go back to his place to get my keys, and then let me in, so I would go with him to the post office to pick up his energy bars shipped to my P.O. box. I had to walk to a McDonald's to use the bathroom and then hung out in Central Park for a while. I saw Large Neighbor there. We sat in the shade, swatting flies and staring at our stoop from afar.

*Insomnia isn't ever fun. It's even less fun when there is nothing compelling on television. I can only watch Kathy Griffin get a chilly reception at an Irish nightclub so many times.

*I think the book I bought - which is something I seldom do - might be disappointing. I'll know once I read the entire thing, but yeah, I'm thinking I should have waited to check it out from the library.

Perverts read this blog.

How do I know? These unique searches brought people to Amanda's MsAdventures in the last 24 hours:

"teasing my daddy" - Okay, maybe that's completely harmless. I tease my dad about his accent, etc.

"see my titties at mcdonalds" - Umm, yeah.

Thanks for visiting, pervs. Do come again.

You Got Served (An English Lesson)

Aight. So Usher and R. Kelly's joint "Same Girl" is all about how they realize they're dating the - gasp! - same girl. They're catching up on the phone, R. Kelly gushing about this sweet girl who works for TBS who "drive a black Durango, license plate say 'angel.'" Usher realizes he's dating the - gasp! - same girl, and the guys eventually find time to get together and compare cell phone pics of her in her underwear.

So the incorrect grammar in all this is beside the point - I won't go there. But the punctuation error at the very beginning when Usher looks at his vibrating cell phone to see who's calling cannot be ignored. The phone identifies the caller as "KELL'S".

The possessive apostrophe appears to be a major punctuation error. Of course, "KELL'S" might mean "Kell's Cell Phone," but who does that? Certainly not R. Kelly, who has saved Usher in his address book as "Usher".

So Usher, yeah, check yoself.

A book about a conversation I've had at least three times this week alone.

Liberal arts majors, take heed!

Shawna lived a few streets down from me when I was growing up. Other than the shared neighborhood, we lived really different lives. She was a latchkey kid, an only latchkey kid, which I occasionally envied. With my dad and sister always around, I never had the run of the house. Shawna had the kind of parents that believed things happen, people make mistakes, so there was no use being overprotective. The parent and child roles were more equal and fluid.

My parents weren't tyrants, but they were well, old school. You just don't tell an off-color joke to your mom or challenge your dad on something he's really passionate about. These weren't lessons specifically taught and learned. They were more or less implicit. There was a strict routine and way of doing things at my house, and it wasn't stifling, but just The Way Of The World. And mistakes? Things happening? Not on my dad's watch, they didn't.

Shawna came over a lot. At home, she watched a lot of tv and nuked a lot of Velveeta shells and cheese. At my house, she could watch tv, play on the computer, and do all those ridiculous things "losers" do alone that "friends" do in pairs. MASH was a fleeting past-time, but we came up with inventive categories to add to the game, like "Failed Birth Control Device" next to the blanks for "Number of Children." (I read a lot of books that were not age-appropriate). I also showed Shawna that old nursing school textbook of my mom's - the one with the full-page photographs of a woman from the 1970's giving birth. We'd cringe and fold our legs tightly in sympathetic agony.

The first time I visited New York, Shawna was there. She nearly got hit by a cab and spent $20 on a bag of candy she later forget at one of those Times Square tee shirt shops. We wrote notes throughout middle school and finger-spelled secret messages during lulls in Language Arts. We came up with nicknames for friends, foes, and crushes. Clearly, I was inspired by Judy Blume novels. Sometimes we'd go to home sports games and scan the crowds for boys from other schools, boys who might actually talk to us. I really hope that the George West football coach still has a taped scrimmage from around 1999, in which Shawna teases me about liking the skinny guy videotaping the opposing team's offense, defense, and our conversation about how cute he is. He was three bleacher rows behind us and later introduced himself, oh so thrillingly. Yep, that footage is a real diamond just waiting to be used in a documentary about awkward adolescence.

But one year Shawna and I stopped being friends. I recall fallings out with girls when I was a kid, how we'd say, "She's not my friend anymore. We broke up." It feels like that when you lose someone with whom you shared so much privileged information and time. There's no point in acting squirmy about the diction - "Eww, it sounds like they were lesbos!" When you lose someone you love, in any capacity, you're pummeled in a batting cage of regret and remembrance and complication. Sometimes, you grovel and go back. Sometimes you don't. Either way, you think about it, something scabs over, you move on and feel, "Hey, I've moved on!" in a surprising jolt.

I lost my childhood best friend in eleventh grade. Fights and personality differences hadn't been foreign in all those years Shawna and I jumped on my trampoline and prank called people. In our latter years, judgement and competition (for popularity, achievement, and all those other badges we always seek) began to outshine the fun we used to have. Other people moved into the spaces we used to occupy in each other's lives. College was a fresh start for me. I didn't keep in touch with anyone from my past. Even at the beginning of the first semester, at my cockiest, I knew that was sad. Not a fresh start so much as a barren start. And when things got worse and I started to feel blurry, it felt worse. Who was I? Who knew me when?

But it was always fleeting. I'd think of Shawna randomly and less and less often. I heard she changed a lot, not in character necessarily, but in life situation. Of course, those two are intertwined like the nature vs. nurture debate. Change is a loud sort of applause, with one hand being what life throws at us and the other how we adapt to it. It took years and the invention of Myspace before I ever got back in touch with Shawna, and I was pleased that nothing was awkward.

Neither of us apologized for whatever drove us apart. It was hardly mentioned. What we did discuss when I mustered up the courage to invite her to my parents' house during my visit home was...everything else. Who we'd loved, what we wanted to do, what we're like now. It was like meeting someone I already liked and felt comfortable with. Maybe that's something some people naturally feel, how they approach meeting people, but yeah, not me.

My childhood best friend looks older now. She fills in her eyebrows. She's birthed two little boys since we last sat near each other, whispering something no one else should hear. She says I look the same, but I'm not sure.

I met Shawna's younger son, Alex. She was pregnant with him in those scorching months last year when we got back in touch, furiously emailing about gynecological issues and such.

"My childhood best friend is having a kid," I thought at the time. Mental images of the crowning hippie woman flashed.

When I held Alex a good long while, though, the thing that struck me was how he made faces I'd seen countless times before across a table, on the next swing over, beside me on my bedroom floor amid a sea of cut-up magazines.

He looks like Shawna looked, how she still looks. That was the jolt, the flash of memory awakened, the echoes of applause in my ears.

The Country - Billy Collins Animated Poetry

I was flattered to get an email from Leo at JWT about the newest poem the group has animated. This is so imaginative and wonderful. Check Youtube for more in the near future.

A story on Yahoo's mainpage today: "Doctors find no cancer in Bush's polyps."

I start to ponder. Is there anyone online that had been dying to know if something benign or malignant had come out of that guy's ass, anyone finally satisfied upon reading the headline?

I prefer headlines about how many more people have unnecessarily died in a war America shouldn't be fighting. There's an asshole involved in that story too, well, really a few, but polyps are beside the point.

Cade is eating peach yogurt. I notice "fruit on the bottom" advertised on the container and experience epiphany - a marketing campaign for another Rap Snacks product.

Me: Hey! Wouldn't it be funny if Rap Snacks also had yogurt with "fruit on the down low"?

Laughter, much of which is my own.

Cade: It would be bodega fruit, though! Like Starburst!

Me: Or that stuff they put in toaster streudel!

Cade: Yeah. And it would be called Rap Snacks Yo-Gurt. Yo dash Gurt.

Me: What about Yo comma Gurt, like, "Yo, Gurt. What it do?"

Cade: Nah.

Me: The commercial would show a kid and his dad sitting at the kitchen table. The kid tastes the spoonful the dad offers and says, "Mmmm! Dis is mad good, son."

While Cade devours the latest and last Harry Potter book, for which he waited over an hour in a bookstore cattle drive, I've finished Seedfolks. The spare and lovely children's book about a Cleveland community garden is just under a hundred pages and my edition has Sid Fleischman's reflections on it and his writing process. I liked this part:

"Books don't usually come from a single source. Like rivers, many tributaries flow into them, streams that might have begun running in childhood along with others no more than a few months old. Each book is its own braiding of waters. Sometimes authors themselves are unaware of what lies behind a book. A veil drops over our eyes when we're writing, shielding us from our realization. It might be lifted when the book is finished, or five years later, or never."

Each time I go home, I have to visit Big Lots. It's not exactly a dollar store, though many items there sell for merely one greenback. Big Lots is a warehouse of cheap stuff, ranging from leftover merchandise originally sold at Pier 1 Imports to weird-ass snack food items even the shoddiest convenience stores won't stock. For instance, mad cool Rap Snacks Potato Chips:
Available in Southern Crunk Barbeque...

Or a honey barbeque variation. Mmmm, Lil' Romeo likes it!

If you eat enough of these Rap Snacks potato chips, you might need to upgrade to some larger skivvies. Big Lots has you covered (and covered and covered and covered).

The Amazing Soap Eating Bulldog!

The trouble with having a blog is that it gets to be a garden that needs maintenance. The blogger has to fill the roles of plant, soil, shovel, etc. Anyone who has read far back enough knows I'm no good at that manual labor stuff, especially when it involves dirt. Even when it's completely metaphorical labor involving completely metaphorical dirt.

Going home provided much blog fodder, just as it should. I meant to play around with putting all the thoughts and feelings into words today, but... Remember when I mentioned that I had a mentor who had me doing PR work for her real estate clients? One of those clients contacted me over my Texas vacation and offered me a gig at his office doing simple work and a newsletter or something. My new job starts in August and in the meantime, I'm working at another midtown office and setting my own hours - holla! The majority of my workday was spent gabbing with Head Honcho and eating an inordinately large salad.

So there's an excuse of sorts for not writing. I'm still tutoring, too. And the noisy gutting of the apartment next door to mine has unleashed a torrent of roaches my way. Nice - roommates.

Speaking of roommates, I mistakenly referred to my next door neighbor as my roommate today. This mislabeling speaks volumes. The wall between our apartments is so thin that I can hear his cellphone vibrate. He no doubt hears the thud of my jumping jacks to old Stevie Wonder songs. Once I sneezed, and I think I heard him say, "Bless you."

Not to mention that I look inside his open refrigerator from my window, often while I'm in my underwear. That boy loves his chips and salsa.

The Portrait of an Abby

Yikes! The NYC steam pipe rupture occurred right where I'll be starting the new job in August. Cade works in Times Square, but left work early to welcome me back. We didn't even know about it until hours later.

This will be the book jacket cover photo of my memoirs.

It features my chicken legs (so labeled by Kevin-Michael Dueitt in third grade), Megan's rusty bike, and the serene Buttercup.

Megan must have taken this picture, aiming for something else entirely - she was awfully little for her age. This picture reminds me of all those things I might forget otherwise. Like how the backyard at the old house never quite took to the squares of carpet grass my dad planted. Part of the ground was tamed in neat, uniform plushness, but there were always unruly cowlicks of crabgrass, stickers, and stinging nettles. Those nettles were hop-on-one-foot-and-screech bad. You'd take one wrong step and have raised bumps on your ankles for three days. Megan would dart for Mama's aloe vera in the flower bed and tear off a piece. It was more fun to tear up another plant in some kind of retaliation than it actually was soothing.

I used to be pigeon-toed. Before some kids at school pointed it out, I thought at least my feet were tolerable. Then the revelation. Even they were problematic, joining a litany of maladies: stick-straight hair and milk chocolate freckles and chicken legs and a total lack of coordination and confusion about directions and the inability to tie shoelaces and so on. Rollerskating straightened my feet and made my calves bigger. I still have kinky clusters of hair left behind by an impulsive junior high perm. My freckles adjust their color with the seasons.

The one time the gate was left open, and the dog ran for Buttercup, I couldn't forget that. I'd never known a rabbit to make noise, but that shrillest of screams was unforgettable. It's the sound, I guess, of something completely innocent and beautiful endangered. An assault on something sacred, like growing up before you're ready without the luxury of ever forgetting how.

*I found this old poem in a bedroom drawer last night, folded neatly amongst crusted over nail polish bottles and single lost earrings. A poem out of place for a person out of place. Adanna Thompson, wherever you are, I still don't know how much I should read into that last line.

I'm glad that you've finally let yourself go.
You love boldly and without shame.
You feel alot more and you don't
care if people can read it in your face.

You laugh louder.
You even giggle more.
You're so beautiful to me now.
I can feel all of your thoughts
and they're comforting since they
often echo mine.

And I love the fact that you've grown to love me.
Now I know it's true when people
tell me that I could charm the devil.

In my time back home, I've tried to read during the lulls. My in-flight book's back cover boasted something about containing the "female David Sedaris," which is quite the accolade. And it wasn't by Sarah Vowell...or any author I'd even heard of, for that matter. I read Susan Jane Gilman's Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, a memoir of a woman growing up in my neighborhood in the sixties and seventies. NYC was much rougher and grittier then. People could afford their apartments, but worried about walking the streets too late at night. I enjoyed Gilman's book, but am glad to report it was not laugh out loud funny. She is not the female David Sedaris, especially because she grew up in New York and hung out with Mick Jagger. Only women from terribly boring small towns with such ludicrous, short-lived obsessions as pantomime could be the next David Sedaris. Or could aspire to. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the book and could read it for sustained periods of air travel.

My second read of the vacation was a re-read of Paula Vogel's "How I Learned To Drive." It's amazing how much I read in high school that I can't even remember. These were the days before the intense over-analysis that would get me more A's than a can of alphabet soup as an English major in college. I read these books before I had much life experience (read: before I was as jaded as I am now). "How I Learned To Drive" is a brilliant, brilliant play about a girl's driving lessons from her pedophilic uncle. Driving is an extended metaphor and film strips are used to label the scenes. I'd love to see the play on stage. It won the Pulitzer in 1998, but I'm unaware of it's production history. It's a disturbing look at sexualization, cycles of abuse, and family. Incidentally, Paula Vogel is married to Anne Fausto-Sterling, the sex theorist who suggested that "man" and "woman" are not sufficient sex markers for the population. Hmmm...

Yesterday, I re-read another adolescent pick: Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I remember my good friend, Les, telling everyone to read it. He was - and I'm sure, still is - a very groovy guy. He once talked the sample guy at Bath and Body Works into letting us help him squeeze out holiday lotion for strangers. "Excuse me, sir! You NEED this," Les would proclaim to the least feminine guy in the crowd. Or he'd dangle a bottle over my head. "It's mistletoe mist, fellas! Come and get it!" I don't remember The Perks of Being a Wallflower being so good when I was younger. I know it's because I was sheltered from anything deviant or particularly traumatic. It wasn't until college that I ever had my heart broken, trust beaten within an inch of its life and then left to scar. And even now I'm exaggerating. Teenage life was pretty peachy, especially once my braces came off.

But I've grown up and things have gotten worse. Nothing so bad as Charlie's friend committing suicide or his discovery about Aunt Helen, but enough to make me cry and pray for more moments of feeling infinite. These allusions are designed to make you read or re-read the book. So are these excerpts:

"Then, I turned around and walked to my room and closed my door and put my head under my pillow and let the quiet put things where they are supposed to be."

"It's like he would take a photograph of Sam, and the photograph would be beautiful. And he would think that the reason the photograph was beautiful was because of how he took it. If I took it, I would know that the only reason it's beautiful is because of Sam. I just think it's bad when a boy looks at a girl and thinks that the way he sees the girl is better than the girl actually is... It's very hard for me to see Sam feel better about herself just because an older boy sees her that way."

"Maybe these are my glory days, and I'm not even realizing it because they don't involve a ball."

"He looked like all old pictures look. Old pictures look very rugged and young, and the people in the photographs always seem a lot happier than you are."

"Do you enjoy holidays with your family? I don't mean your mom and dad family, but your uncle and aunt and cousin family? Personally, I do. There are several reasons for this. First, I am interested and fascinated by how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other."

"I guess what I'm saying is that this all feels very familiar. But it's not mine to be familiar about. I just know that another kid has felt this."

"And all the books you've read have been read by other people. And all the songs you've loved have been heard by other people. And that girl that's pretty to you is pretty to other people. And you know that if you looked at these facts when you were happy, you would feel great because you are describing 'unity.'"

"Maybe it's good to put things in perspective, but sometimes, I think that the only perspective is to really be there. Like Sam said. Because it's okay to feel things. And be who you are about them."

When my aunt repeated for the fourth time that riding that one water park ride was like getting an enema and thorough douching at once, I realized I haven't written in a while.

I'll try to get to that soon - I've gotta exercise that gene that gives me the predilection for potty humor and weird similes.

I'll be in Texas July 4-18, just in time for major flooding. Thank goodness my Mama's chicken is waterproof. All that Crisco sure comes in handy.

The license plates of two cars parked outside the nursing home:



gad·fly (gād'flī') n.

1. A persistent irritating critic; a nuisance.
2. One that acts as a provocative stimulus; a goad.
3. Any of various flies, especially of the family Tabanidae, that bite or annoy livestock and other animals.

Whenever my mom meets people going into teaching, or parents of people going into teaching, she likes to recommend me for outreach. This is something Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers (which is either a medium-sized or big joke to teachers out there) would not like. I taught two years and left. I'm no longer a dedicated individual teaching comma splices on the frontlines, so I should just stop typing right now.

But I won't.

People still ask for my opinion on matters educational, and I'm supremely flattered. You think I know what I'm talking about? You haven't read my blog, have you?

So my mom told me she met someone who went to my college and got into the same Teach For America program that I got into. Like me, she is excited about spreading her social awareness in the inner-city while her parents are terrified. Like me, she will likely disregard the warnings, protests, and faces of abomination. Like me, she will probably leave teaching.

I've had some amazing teachers, and I admire them for their gifts. I remember going to a public school that was by no means wealthy, but that had a comfortable structure and well-kept facilities. Discipline procedures were known and followed. Some teachers started their careers at the school and stayed until retirement. My mom went to the same high school, and we actually had two of the same teachers.

Schools in NYC are not like this. Teach For America puts teachers in needy schools. It is not designed to nurture Education majors, as most of its teachers have no background in pedagogy or applied learning and development. Teach For America prepares college graduates who look really good on paper in a matter of weeks. And a lot of this preparation is a lesson in political correctness and sociology, which I appreciate, mind you. But really, Teach For America doesn't teach anyone how to be a teacher.

Some would say only experience can do that. But when a kid hits you? And your administration blindly turns its head? And you're expected to give homework everyday, but have to pay for your own copy paper and copies when the machine is broken for five months? And you're on a crappy pay schedule, which looks really good
when you start, but doesn't mature much if you continue to teach?

Teaching taught me this: I don't want to be in a position where my effectiveness is judged by how I manage someone else's behavior. I don't want to be in a position where I have to be "on" every minute. I don't want to yell about showing up late, test scores, dress code, academic posture, and the plethora of other concerns teachers are expected to address. It interferes with teaching, which I actually learned how to do.

I've worked in two schools in NYC. Though they appear to be completely different systems, with one being an overpopulated, chaotic prison and the other being small and progressive, they are both mired in the same nasty politics of urban education. They aren't schools that prepare students. They aren't schools that keep teachers.

There are good schools out there, I know. They aren't all in the suburbs, either. But are they schools where Teach For America will send its corps? Hell, no. Are they schools that hire young teachers? Not so much.

Godspeed to anyone joining any of the teaching programs that may become your waking nightmare, your regret, or I hope, a series of bumps on your path to fulfillment.

I don't regret my two years of teaching, but I think it's because I never planned on being a career teacher. Had that been the case, I might feel robbed of time and valuable learning experiences elsewhere. I might be (more) jaded and cynical. I might be pissed all of my teaching materials got stolen.

This is probably the last teaching anecdote I'll ever post. It comes from Renee, who teaches lower-grade students.

Renee is chaperoning a field trip. While a third grade class rides the subway to their destination, one student stands. He spins around while hanging onto the pole, bumping into fellow passengers.

Renee: Jasim, stop! What have we told you about the proper way to behave in public?

Dramatic pause.

Jasim: In Public? I thought we was in the United States!

I'm standing in the long express line at Trader Joe's. It has slowly snaked around the perimeter of the store. Throughout this time, the woman behind me has been catching up with a friend on her cellphone.

Woman behind me: Oh, girl... Guess who I heard from? The $4 Guy. Out of nowhere he just sends me a text message with a picture of him topless. It says, "I miss you." Ha!

The friend replies with something along the lines of "Who?"

Woman behind me: You know, that guy I was dating. He was so broke he couldn't pay the $4 for my chicken and broccoli at the Chinese place. I was like, "No! Uh uh! I can't be with no guy that broke!"