Who Says I Can't Put Up a Bunch of Random Things at Once?

Some photo highlights from my Christmas vacation :)

Nana-isms

Spending most of my Christmas vacation in what has kindly been dubbed "Wrinkle Village" by my extended family, I've come to realize a lot of things about getting older. First and foremost, it's nice to know that as you advance in age, it becomes justification for pretty much any luxury you can think of. This place is all about the comfort of those ages 70 and up. Drinking fountains are refrigerated to make you believe that the water has been shaken with ice and flakes of pure gold before being spouted directly into your mouth. There are no recycle bins to taunt these geezers- they don't even want them around to make them feel bad. Cans, newspapers, and plastic get thrown in with worn out reading glasses and exhausted tubes of denture cream. The fitness center treadmills are majestic and huge- like boats- with individual flat screen TVs equipped with extra loud volume control. Everything is louder here. My Nana's garbage disposal, her washer and dryer, her telephone- everything seems to be shouting, trying to reach the one remaining good ear that each person has. And why wouldn't it? It's all about the comfort of the residents.

Wise beyond their years, the elderly have the unique combination of endless worldly wisdom, irrational stubbornness, and rapidly approaching senility. The end result is usually quite hilarious. I think a lot of people make the mistake of treating the older generations like children, grimacing at their inappropriate sexual innuendos and frowning about their alcohol consumption. We forget that these are people who have been around the block, war veterans and Depression babies. They've seen it all. As a result, they should be able to do what they want. After all, they've lived a life full of insane experiences that we could hardly begin to fathom.

Take my Nana- her childhood occurred during the height of the Great Depression. Her mid-twenties were smack dab in WWII. She's seen the Buffalo Bills through their very best and their absolute worst. She should be allowed to have an occasional cocktail and off-color joke regardless of the political correctness of her actions.

So, whether she has decided to have my sister consolidate her multiple bottles of alcohol (combining five different kinds of vodka together because she can't taste the difference when it's mixed with her mixers... water and ice) or is on the prowl with one of her many social groups at Wrinkle Village, AWOL (Available Widows on the Loose, a group of over-60 women who get drunk and play cards), she can do so. If she needs to steady herself on her walk in from a 4 hour cocktail party, my boyfriends butt is not off-limits for her tipsy tottering to her throne of an easy chair.

My sister Kristin, who spent a week here before returning home to the icy tundra of upstate New York, really got the in-the-trenches experience. She had 79-year-old men calling her a beauty and 75-year-old women giving her CVS coupons for Revlon lipstick. She got to witness my Nana calling Shocktop "Sha-sha" and heard her saying "I hope the Giants don't blow their wad too early this year." She asked Kristin when the first time she "connected" with her current boyfriend. When we giggled, she snapped back at us, "Oh, I didn't mean it in THAT way!!" It was Kristin who set up her Facebook account, something for her to be addicted to besides spider solitaire. The cousins and I are convinced she'll have more friends than us in a matter of weeks... maybe even a new, hip boyfriend.

It's an ongoing parade of entertainment hanging out with my family, and adding my Nana in the mix just makes it that much better. Especially when she's drunk and her filter REALLY goes out the window. Like when she asked Jack about his religious background only to tell him (after his 15 minutes explanation as to why he never had a bat mitzvah) that she wouldn't remember anything he just told her. Nice, Nans.

There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays

I heard this song during a drive to work one morning. At first, it made me feel pretty depressed. I haven't been home since the end of July and don't plan on going home until... I'm not even sure.

We haven't been home for the holidays since 2006. The past couple Christmases we've braved the holiday travel traffic to drive 24 hours from our house upstate to my Nana's condo in Fort Pierce, FL. Originally it was because my grandfather had gotten too sick to travel, but even after he passed away in March of 2008, we continued to go, craving the warm sunshine and cold beers that Christmas Day has come to mean. Now, in the living room of my sparse Charlotte apartment, my brother cooking bacon on a too-small skillet and the Yule log flickering from the TV screen, I'm really beginning to think that the song is bullshit.

Not one to call Christmas songs out for being bullshit, I'm adjusting my position. The song is assuming that home means only a concrete place, something that is fixed in the foundation of a house that has been in a family for years and years and years. But when I think about what home actually means, I know it's less of a place and more of a feeling. So whether it's pouring rain in Charlotte and we're sitting on the floor for lack of adequate seating, or we're on the each cracking Coronas, "Home for the Holidays" really just means wherever we happen to bring our hand-knit personalized stockings and holiday special edition twelve packs.

Season of Giving

My class, right before the celebration :)

Cute little moment today during the non-denominational classroom celebration we had.

First of all, holiday parties are really just a mid-year teacher revenge against the parents, stuffing their children full of any and all sugary processed foods you can find and then piling on the bus just before the sugar rush hits. By the time they get home their eyes are practically out of their sockets. You don't admit it, but you let the kids that give you the most... challenges... take an extra sprinkly sugar cookie, or two, or three. Or let them lick all the frosting off the remaining 35 cupcakes. Or give them an IV of Hawaiian Punch, pumping it straight into their bloodstreams. Merry Christmas to your mom and dad... heh heh heh....

Not really but the thought did cross my mind. A couple times.

The cute part was before the celebration, when I had them sit in a circle and explained that there were some very nice people in Charlotte who had "extra" and decided to give that "extra" to our classroom. I pulled out this bag of wrapped books (donated to TFA) and we counted them together. After figuring out that there wasn't enough for everyone to get one, I told them that I had decided to use these books to give to our classroom as much as we could by making a lending library. Then they all got to open the books and show the book they got. A couple of the books were repeats, and we decided that since we had "extra", we should give it away too. So we picked the five repeat books and walked them to the five other first grade classrooms to give to them. They were so happy to be giving them... it was so cute. Although it didn't necessarily go as smoothly as I just described it, considering that when we were lining up to walk to the other rooms, the kids just ran down the hall without me because they were so excited. Oh well.Anyway, it was a cute day. Tomorrow will probably be awful, riding out the after-effects of today's sugar high. Maybe I can counteract it by giving them salty (in the form of the 14 extra bags of chips I have... so much extra food).

Gripes of the Week... and It's Only Wednesday

Funny things (by funny I mean I have to laugh or I'll cry) have happened so far this week. Here's a brief taste since it is already past 11...

1- My kids and I had to wear coats during math time Monday morning because CMS is saving money by turning off the heat on the weekends. So if you had to pick how warm it would be at 5:30 am on Monday morning... yeah. Little do they realize that my classroom has two outside walls, one of which holds my whiteboard. The dry erase ink was FROZEN to the whiteboard... could not erase it.

2- I have now almost lost two scarves to near death school experiences, one with a forgotten hot glue gun and one with the industrial paper cutter in the media center.

3- One of my kids brought his backpack to school.... that his cat had peed in. Awesome that he didn't hesitate to put the urine soaked homework folder on my teaching table bright and early in the morning. I think I sprayed it with Lysol for approximately ten minutes.

4- When talking about intense lesson plan formats, another teacher exclaimed, "I mean, come on! We've all gone to school for this."

...Yeah, not really me so much. The other first grade teachers in the room and I thought it was unbearably funny.

5- My word family flip chart left on "g"-"art". I'm really proud of my kids for being mature and NOT flipping it to the previous letter when I wasn't looking. I was really tempted to do so myself.

6- I fell asleep at 7:04 pm last night, all ready to go to yoga... sort of. Something about eating a huge bowl of chili does NOT seem conducive to an hour and a half class. But really, asleep in a spandex suit and my Uggs (I mentioned how cold it's been in Charlotte, right?).

7- My kids' failure to understand what I'm asking sometimes. The question? "What are some places in your neighborhood that people all share?" One student's answer? "The United States!" This is the same one that told me Barack Obama had a jetpack in his Secret Lair beneath the White House... at least he's patriotic.

Gripes, but funny ones nonetheless. Nothing too serious. My kids have all been good this week, cute and funny (still driving me a little crazy, like always), but very good. I'll end on a few happy notes:

1- One student WHO never stops talking finally focusing during small group reading and PROGRESSING!!!

2- A student who hates writing apparently just hates writing in his chair. I let him sit in my spinny chair and he wrote more than I've ever seen him do... just great.

On that note, goodnight!

Really, A Nice Little Saturday

Got a little social time Friday night, finally getting out of my apartment with two other TFA-ers. We went to this little neighborhood bar and had some drinks. Consequently, I felt terrible this morning and woke up at 1 pm. STILL got to have a nice little day. I was out with my roommate, going to Target for new yoga clothes (yay!), an hour and a half of yoga class, a nice lunch at a little cafe (complete with FREE gelato), and a browsing session at Books a Million. I love bookstores. Could spend hours in one. Then we came back, made some homemade chili (aka dumping a bunch of cans into a pot and heating it up), and just watched TV. Such a great little day :).

TWEET TWEET

I'm on Twitter now. I'm not quite sure what I'll be doing with it but... I'm on it! http://twitter.com/saraefi.

Laugh to Keep from Crying, Blog to Keep from Falling Asleep

My week has actually been a pretty good one, at least after my multiple meltdowns leading up to the first day back from Thanksgiving break. My kids have been really funny and cute this week, in spite of the overwhelming amount of time I've had to spend with them. Having my one 45 minute planning break CANCELED two days in a row was rough. All day, all in my room, just me and 20 six year olds. That is the definition of madness. At the end of the day, though, they all wanted to miss the bus so that they could stay and hang out with me. Even I don't want to hang out with me that much. Some of the highlights from the week:

-The holiday program. Both times I had to sit through it. Something about hearing six renditions of Jingle Bells on the recorder (yes, apparently you can capture the subtle differences between Traditional. Country Western, Native American, Waltz, Rap, and Cha Cha Jingle Bells on the most annoying flat-toned instrument in the world) really let me look past all the frustrations and stress of teaching... at least for a little while. Plus during the school performance, all of K-2 kids were shouting the words... it was adorable.

-When the loudest girl in my class asked me how many children I had. She included a picture of me with my husband and baby in her writing piece. My husband had no arms and triangle hair, and my baby was a tiny stick figure that stood on my left shoulder.

-One of the more country (read: redneck) kids saying "Holy flapmother!" What does that even mean?

-Surviving what is called the worst week in teaching. High five... to myself.

A Lot of Random Stuff

1) In love with yoga. I went to my first yoga class ever on Monday night, after deciding Sunday that I was sick of whining about my lack of a life. "I'll do something for myself!" I exclaimed, and marched down (by marched I mean drove) to the studio by my apartment to sign up. The girl working the front desk was really friendly AND is starting an after-school tutoring program for Title I middle schools, so we got to talking about teaching stuff right off the bat. The class... was awesome. Yoga is a perfectionists paradise. I loved it because it was the first time in three months that I got to focus on the little things. And that I could be in control. I realized that I'm actually quite a competitive person (never really thought I was) and it doesn't really matter if I'm only in competition with myself... I still feed off of it. I got to obsess about moving my foot a half centimeter and breathing for two seconds longer, with no wise veterans looking over me tsk-ing at my inability to let the little things go. It was glorious. My instructor was a pregnant lady, who was hotter than any pregnant lady I've ever seen as well as hotter than some un-pregnant ladies I've seen. She was also not afraid to move your body- at one point she was straddling me to get my *insert yoga pose name here* correct. At the end, when you're just laying there thinking about how awesome you feel, she came around and put a cool wet washcloth on my forehead that was soaked in lavender. Again- AWESOME. The whole time I was thinking about how I couldn't wait to blog about it (kidding... sort of). How yogi-ish of me.

2) I had to use two board books to scrape the ice of my windows this morning (at 5:10 am). Just thought I'd share. I found it a little funny... and sad at the same time.

3) I've been thinking about posting on comfort a lot lately, because it seems to preoccupy my mind quite often. It's funny how it's something that can come really easily or not come at all. I think about friends I have and people I know and how some of them are just... easy. I can click instantly and feel like I'm snuggled up in sweatpants with my stinky and slightly challenged dog. Other people just make me feel out of place. It'd weird that things can change so much from person to person, and it's even weirder to wonder why we become friends with the people we become friends with and why we date the people we date.

Comfort is always in mind. "I'm too hot." "I'm too cold." "My feet hurt." "My head hurts." "I'm tired." "I'm lonely." When it comes down to it, life is all about being comfortable. You change how you're sitting, standing, chewing, breathing... LIVING, all in the name of comfort. Sometimes, it's as simple as shifting your body weight, or staying away from dairy. Other times, it's a little more complicated.

With people, I find it funny that some are just easier to get comfortable with than others. Especially when I think of the relationships I've spent months, even years finding a comfort level in comparison to the instant comfort I find with a special few. Some examples? My sister and I. Instant comfort. Granted, we came from the same womb, so generally anything you might want to hide goes out the window. There's no judgment, and if there is, it's right out there in the open. My new roommate, for another. We can laugh about anything from her crazy life coincidences to a cow with explosive diarrhea on the way to the outlets (FYI, that is a severe driving hazard. We almost got into a car accident we were laughing so hard). But beyond laughing, there's the ability to just sit in silence and not feel discomfort. That's hard to find. Of course I have the feeling of comfortable-ness (not a word, I know) with my boyfriend too. That silence factor is there, even on the phone. Silence on the phone is hard to write off as not awkward, but somehow, we manage to do it.

I just love finding that. Because usually it comes when you least expect it, when you're not looking for it. I remember the very early stages of my relationship thinking, "Oh my God I can actually talk to this person. Where did this come from?" And with my roommate... well, I asked her if she wanted to live together after three days, so I think the level of instant comfort is pretty obvious.

It's cool to me that even as we get older, we meet people that click with us instantly, that we can go to new places and be totally alone one minute and then BAM. Instant comfort the next. You think that relationships and friendships take all this work, but then you're reminded that they actually don't. Not when you find someone who understands your weirdness and occasional awkwardness (or someone who chooses to look beyond those things). Sure, you have to work a little to keep them up- staying in touch, remembering birthdays and anniversaries, but the really comfortable relationships come about effortlessly and without a whole lot of thought (most of the time anyway). I've been reminded lately that these comfortable relationships can be found all over the place- in family members, in new friends, in old friends, in boyfriends, in colleagues- and it's very... comforting... to me.


Alright enough random blogging. Time for bed. Gotta get ready for my next yoga class TOMORROW, maybe inspiring yet another blog. Or maybe it'll just be another episode of getting manhandled by a hot prego woman. Whatever.

Dealbreakers

What matters in life?

Pretty deep question to begin a post on, but I've been thinking about it a lot lately. How do people determine what takes priority in their life? For most people, making money tops the list. Your job is the one way that you can fuel all the other needs that exist- food, clothing, shelter, maintaining relationships. My roommate came back from her break today, exasperated about the importance that jobs have over nearly all other aspects of life.

"It controls everything!" she exclaimed, eyes wide and arms raised. "People leave their families because of their jobs! People live with people or don't live with people because of their jobs... people move hundreds of miles away, they change their lives for their jobs. It's so messed up!"

There's a small bit of her that is being overdramatic- of course people give things up for their jobs. After all, we need them to acquire our other needs. But it made me think about how much of our identities our jobs can become. When does that part of your identity override the other important things in your life?

Even beyond the broader things that people prioritize- jobs, family, friends, relationships, pets- within each of those are more things to rank in order of importance. Looks or personality? Duty or desire? Head or heart? How do we choose when presented with two options, equally important but in different ways? As we get older, these choices get harder and we're forced to make more compromises because of the increasingly complex web of obligations that tangles up our priorities.

Somewhere along the line, we are confronted with people or things that have nothing to trump them. Our dealbreakers. For some, it's staying at work past 6 on a Friday. For others, it's smoking cigarettes. We choose and define our breaking point, a line we draw in the sand and mark with a sign- Do not cross.

One of the worst parts about being young is the ignorance of what our boundaries are. Very few of us have real dealbreakers, and if we do we hesitate to admit them because we are still unsure. I think we get to our breaking point, to our limit, to the place where we need to yell "STOP! This is enough!" and we can't say no. We're conditioned to not quit, to keep trying, to work it out. If we were older, wiser, we'd recognize this and find an out.

But maybe this is the beauty (or really, the shitty part) of being young. That you figure out your boundaries and breaking point by testing them and surpassing them. That you find your dream job by trying the million and one jobs you absolutely hate. Or, that you find your dream job by hating it passionately at first and then pulling yourself up, inch by inch, until you understand what it's all about.

Maybe I'm just rambling in an effort to find a way to avoid the Sunday night anxiety and the Thanksgiving break horror so many TFA teachers have been warning me about. But it's an interesting thing to consider.

Surprise!!!

Where I REALLY went for Thanksgiving was not home, like my boyfriend thought I was, but to Tampa, where his family was visiting his mom's parents. It was pretty cool to successfully orchestrate a surprise, especially since I've known since the beginning of September and somehow managed to keep the secret to myself.

It's funny to spend time with other people's families. It makes you think about what's normal, if there is such a thing in families. My family is nuts, as you may be able to see from previous posts (and if you are lucky enough to know them). Needless to say, I think I felt pretty at home down there- about as comfortable as I could be if I wasn't with my own family. One thing I've noticed, getting to know different people and their mothers and fathers and siblings and cousins, is that very few people actually talk to them. I mean REALLY talk to them. That was definitely not it down there. It made it much easier to be away from my family because I could laugh at inappropriate jokes about penises and farting without pretending I'm coughing.

Not to mention the food was WONDERFUL.

Now I'm back in Charlotte, first of my roommates in the apartment, trying to get some planning and stuff done for the final three weeks before Christmas. I'm feeling so blah about getting back to teaching, especially after such an awesome break. It's always such a roller coaster, getting so excited about seeing someone you love and then having to go back and do something that you still haven't settled into. Hopefully I won't get too bummed out (especially on top of the typical Sunday night anxiety).

I am thankful for...

Two posts in one day... what you get when I get to the airport so early.

Anyway, I figured that a tribute to all the things I'm thankful for is something I have to do, some kind of generic rite of passage that each blog should contain. Plus I was a little inspired by my Starbucks cup (even more generic, ick). I had my kids start with the prompt above, so I guess I'll use that.

I am thankful for...

Family: the people I can count on to say the only things more ridiculous than the things my kids say. The people that inspire everything I do, for better or worse. My family is hilarious and I'm so lucky to have them. It's weird to be doing this now, without them around me, because usually this conversation is reserved for Thanksgiving dinner, fueled by glasses of wine and food comas. At this time there's oil all over the kitchen floor from my dad's careless oiling of the paper bag ritual for the turkey (top secret family recipe). There's leftover bagels in the trash and hot cocoa spills on the porch, splotches that eerily resemble blood splatters from a murder scene. It's not a murder scene, just the transition to the Pie and Glove race early in the morning, when my sister and I are still sleeping off our Thanksgiving Eve hangovers. The circular discussion usually centers on things we are jokingly thankful for- "Dad, for holding my hair back," "late night Doritos," "Not getting arrested"- because what we're really most thankful for doesn't need to be said. One year my grandmother really killed the buzz by exclaiming after her thankful speech that she prayed every day that we would stop drinking. Everyone but my 15 year old autistic cousin had a drink in their hand. Oh well.

Friends: another cliche one, one that I can't really talk about because my friends and I are so weird that anyone reading about us would just be confused. But I couldn't be more thankful for finding people that I can be a weirdo with, that appreciate my horrible jokes and my strange tendencies, and that can answer back with horrible jokes and strange tendencies of their own.

Lovers: that's you, Jack. So actually I guess it's just "Lover." Your first name mention in my blog... you should feel special. That's all ya get though.

My School and Support People: I would have been face first in the bush outside of creepy-downstairs-neighbor-Randy's balcony if it wasn't for all the staff at my school and in TFA who listen to me cry like a baby and complain and freak out and have meltdowns. Thanks for choosing (or not choosing, some of the people I vent to are only there because I corner them... hah) to calm me down and help me out.

My Kids: I don't know when it happened, but now my kids are really MY kids. As much as they drive me crazy and I want to run out of the room on them, they have really brought a lot of good things into my life. Stress, anxiety... oh wait, right. GOOD things. I spend 5 hours straight with them, and they make me laugh almost as much as my friends and family can. They try to impress me, they do things behind my back, they put things in their mouth that they aren't supposed to, but in the end they teach me something new every single day whether it's about myself or about people in general. And they're learning. Almost all of them are meeting their goals for this time of the year, and I'm pretty grateful for that (my sanity is grateful for that, too).

For their Thanksgiving prompts, most of my kids talked about their moms and dads, their cousins or pets. Some of them talked about God (this is the South, after all). One kid, though, talked about something else.

He said, "I am thankful for learning how to read. My teacher taught me how to read. It was fun. Now I'm a good reader. A real good reader."

Unfortunately, I still haven't taught him how to write so it looked more like this: "I am thankful for lrng how to red. My TCR tote me how to red. IT wuZ FUN. NoW I'm a GuD ReDR. RiL Gud RedR."

I didn't let him take it home... kept it for myself, for those days I do feel like throwing myself out of my classroom window. Maybe he's the biggest suck up in the class, the one always pulling on my arm to tell me he's being a good helper, the one asking my TA to tell me that he was "very focused," the one who loudly proclaims, "Please share the crayons with me and be a good friend," just to try and please me. It's still something I'm thankful for.

Holiday Crazies

In typical me fashion, I have arrived at the airport a full two and half hours before my flight. When I say arrive, I mean I am sitting at my gate, settled and ready for boarding, meaning that I parked more than three hours before departure. I'm going to pretend that I really thought it would take that long, but the truth is I wanted to sit in the airport and people watch. Weird, I know.

During this time, I also realized that I broke the rule mentioned in my last post, that Thanksgiving must be given its own moment of glory before Christmas can settle into its overbearing reign over December (and January, for me).

I only had two days of school this week, but the kids were crazy enough for one full week. They're so intuitive and I think they knew in their little brains that they needed to squeeze in all their antics in those two days. At first, I was annoyed. Why is it that the holidays cause them to go so nuts? I never appreciated having Halloween on a weekend more after realizing how much time children ACTUALLY need to recover from the sugar rush that comes along with it. The problem is that by the time they get out of that candy trance, along come Thanksgiving and Christmas, which set them off in a way that makes Halloween look like Flag Day.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that this holiday frenzy is something that affects kids and adults in very similar ways (I use adult in a very loose way here, because I'm actually including college students in that classification). I can complain about the way that kids go nuts, acting like they've been snorting Pixie Sticks on the bus, but I think I react in kind of the same way.

Let me explain. I love the holidays (clearly, from my last post). Very recently, Thanksgiving Eve and Thanksgiving have climbed up in the rank of important holidays, especially with the passing of my 21st birthday. I was finally able to get out to the glorious strip of bars in my small hometown, one street of tired libation stations littered with the kids from my high school that never left town. Thanksgiving Eve is the biggest night of the year, a drunken procession from bar to bar, searching for old faces that dominated my childhood and adolescence. My friends and I went crazy, reuniting and reconnecting, reliving our nights the next day in the only restaurant (a pizzeria) worth going to.

In college, the approach of Thanksgiving meant a sharpening of the dichotomy of social life and academic life. As dates for final exams and massive papers loomed closer, so did Christmas parties. My senior year, we had our first Christmas party the weekend before Thanksgiving, a party that began with us tamely drinking red wine, watching the Yule log, and admiring the newly chopped down tree our guy friends had just put up in their room. It ended with Michael Jackson videos and paper snowflakes poorly cut out from the empty beer cases.

The holiday season in college is characterized by pop-y remixes to Christmas favorites, usually with a new rap verse added in and half-naked girls in Santa hats dancing in videos. It means glittery tops and wrapping paper on walls and candy canes sent in care packages from overprotective mothers. My junior year it meant nearly puking every Sunday. That was the year when every alcoholic drink we made contained milk, a recipe for hangover more certain than tequila. Try ingesting gallons of eggnog, Bailey's, hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps for three weeks straight. It was not pretty.

But the bottom line is that we use holidays as an excuse for giddy behavior, whether we're young or we're old. It's not just the kids that go crazy. Just take a look at the frenzied shoppers holding 12 boxes of Christmas lights, at the increased traffic in liquor and package stores, at the stupid cards and little gifts sent just because you're "feeling the spirit." I forgot that the holiday fever affects us all equally, heightening our craziness beginning with Black Friday and lasting until we;ve caught up on sleep after New Years.

I guess I'll just have to embrace the fact that my kids are going to be off the wall for the next three weeks, and maybe that's okay. Maybe I just need to go off the wall with them.

Christmas Countdown

For some reason, The Station for Soft Rock 102.9 has decided that it is the appropriate time of year to play Christmas music, at least from 5:30-6:00 am and 6:30-7:00 pm (the times I'm going to and from work). I thought there was some kind of commercial rule that Christmas had to wait its turn until after Thanksgiving. Sure, Christmas decorations are put out right on November 1st, as the Halloween decorations go to rot in back warehouses and all the stray pieces of candy corn are collected from the gutters and repackaged for the next year (sometimes they're given out to elementary school teachers in an effort to keep them from going crazy throughout the day... or maybe that's just at my school?). BUT it seems like the Christmas hype- all the sentimental commericals and boy band remixes of "Let It Snow" and employees wearing red and green- waits until after the quiet, turkey/pie/beer-induced coma has passed.

Let me be clear. I have absolutely no objection to this early Christmas madness. I love Christmas. I would play Christmas music all year round if I could. I would be lying if I told you I skipped past Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You" when it comes on my iPod shuffle in April. But part of what makes it so special is that it only happens for that one part of the year. For me, that one part just happens to last approximately three months.

My love for Christmas began in my childhood. Our Christmases were further proof of the fact that my parents relished in the idea of tricking us. I think they got a little too much pleasure in our gullibility. Christmas home videos reveal timestamps of 12/28/89 and 12/23/91.

"Christmas came early that year?" my sister and I would ask when we dug up the ancient VHS tapes crammed behind the endless monotony of cross country races on film. They were known for telling us that Santa was waiting to visit our house last, or that my mom had called him up and told him we'd be out of town. We joke about it now, how the birth of Christ was the same for everyone except us.

On Christmas morning, we would have to wait at the top of our stairs, peeking shamelessly into the living room where our presents were arranged in five piles, one for each family member. We'd wake up at 6 am, me still sleepy-eyed with my skullet* and my brother and sister twirling and tumbling, drunk with the excitement that can only come from the combination of Christmas morning and unmedicated ADHD. (Note: skullet is a term coined by one of my college teammates after seeing a baby picture of me. I didn't have hair until I was three, and when it finally started to grow in, it sprung from the center of the back of my head, curling down on my neck in tendrils while the top of my head remained only slightly grazed with blonde peach fuzz. Party in the back, skull in the front-> skullet). The rule was that until my parents had a cup of coffee (or 3 or 4), we had to wait at the top of the stairs, hopelessly close to the presents that were still just out of reach.

They'd take their time getting the video camera set up, a mammoth piece of equipment only seen in the '80s. I think it weighed about fifteen pounds, if I had to make a guess. Only then were we allowed to waddle down the stairs, clapping our pudgy hands and squeezing each other's arms in unbridled excitement.

Jon was sadly the recipient of my sister's and my hand-me-downs, despite being the prize male child of the family (hah). One video shows Kristin coming down the stairs, decked out in brand-new yellow foot-y pajamas, followed by the child-sumo-wrestler version of me, The Incredible Skullet (did I mention I was overweight and ate everything in sight before the age of five?) in decidingly older blue foot-y pajamas. Finally, came Jonny, no exception to the pajama uniform of Christmas, his pink and fraying version threadbare in the foot portion, with a piece of the arm gnawed off (probably from an incident where breakfast came too late and I couldn't contain myself). His blue eyes sparkled and little curls bounced, oblivious to the fact that he wore foot-y pajamas that had already endured the bodies of a hyperactive tomboy and an overeating child genius (yes, I came o ut of the womb reading "Are You My Mother?").

It was the same smile he wore when he got a "new" bike for his fifth birthday, which was really the Barbie bike I had helped Kristin unwrap for her fifth birthday, one we shared until a few days before when my dad spray-painted it a manly black and orange for Jon. See? Tricked!

If we ever noticed this trickery, or cared about it, it never showed. We were always intoxicated by that Christmas time happiness, characterized by new sparkly tights (even for Jon, hand-me-down ones that kept him warm under his courdoroys), evergreen garland that hung everywhere in our house, and Harry Connick, Jr. on repeat.

My parents egged on this Christmas mood and continued to do so as we got older. My dad is the only male in his school that participates in The Great Cookie exchange, baking 12 dozen sugar cookie angels to bring to the middle-aged teachers at his school. One year, when Kristin and I were in college, he had this brilliant idea of doing the Fiorillo family shopping exchange. Each of us got $100 from him and had to spend $25 on each family member. We had two hours in our tiny mall to gather all of our presents the day before Christmas Eve. I worked methodically, a detailed list in my pocket of what I would buy each person, the prices and tax calculated precisely next to each item, as well as a plan of when I would go buy a cinnamon sugar soft pretzal with the $2.69 that would be leftover. I ran into my sister mid-spree, holding a three-foot long, three inch diameter cylinder in her coat.

"What the hell is that?" I asked.

"A sausage," she said breathlessly. "How am I gonna hide this from Dad?"

Just then, my cell phone rang. It was Jon. "What do you need?"

"What does fleece mean? And how much do I have left to spend if I already spent $17 on Mom?"

The funniest part was that my mother had gotten Kristin a new cell phone, but had to use it as her own until they could switch the numbers over after the holiday. It was a new kind of flip phone that was way over her head to use, and whenever I tried to call her to ask where she was, she would answer flustered...

"Hello? Hello?! What the... is this thing even on..." Click. So much for only spending two hours in the mall.

When we exchanged presents, we saw that my dad had gotten us all mugs with a family picture on it. He smiled, completely satisfied with himself. "This is what started the whole idea!" He exclaimed. "Wasn't that great?"

"NO!" We shouted in unison. "Why didn't you just buy them for us while we stayed at home and watched Toy Story 2?" He had seen the sausage Kristin had tried to hide from him, and my Mom had nearly broken Kristin's new cell phone when she tried to answer it discreetly with my sister right next to her.

One of the Christmas videos, the one made about three days after Christmas, starred only my sister and me. I was too young to fully grasp our family obsession of Christmas, still bald and too fat to bend over without looking like a plumber, but Kristin was already drinking the punch. My dad was video-taping us coming in from the car, probably from Buffalo where my mom's family lives.

"Sai-wah! SAI-WAH!!! IT'S CHWISSMAIS! SAI-NTA CAME!! OH MY GOSH SAI-NTA!!" (please note the glorious combination of upstate New York accent and a tongue thrust speech impediment that my sister had... priceless)

Kristin opened her first present upon entering. I was more skeptical, boasting my signature two-year-old look of "I'm too busy for this"- my few strands of hair in the back matted beyond recognition and Mardi Gras beads that I demanded from my mother adorning my neck.

"Look Kristin," my mom explained, her inch-thick '80's glassed taking up half of her face. "A sweatsuit. Just what you wanted!" With those four words, came a frenzy of screaming that took over our house for the next half hours. Those words implanted an idea in Kristin's head, one that still exists today. It is the idea that every single thing she saw was just what she wanted. She could be happy with a pet rock, a house with no door, living at home in the basement... anything. But on that day, it was exclusively a Christmas idea.

"Just what I wanted!!" to a pair of dress-up heels and purple sparkly boa.

"Just what I wanted!!" to a pair of jean overalls promptly thrown to the side at the sight of another present.

"Just what YOU wanted, Sai-wa!" to a Christmas sweater embroidered with gingerbread men that I eyed, licking my lips.

"Just what I wanted!!" to my Dad's new kitchen spatula.

"Just what I wanted!!" ... "Kristin, that's a piece of wrapping paper."

That one video really sums up Christmas for our family. No matter what Christmas is during a particular year, whether perfect or going all wrong, it is just what we want. The year we were in Buffalo and a 6 foot snowstorm required ALL the family adults to "rescue" my uncle, abandoned on his snowmobile, by taking him to a karaoke bar with all 12 cousins under the leadership of Kristin. Christmas in July while we were camping with my Mom's college roommates and our van got hit by a deer. A Christmas Eve party at my Nana's condo in Florida, with no one under the age of 75 besides us (no alcoholic drink under the proof of 75 either). Christmas decorations still up in late March, the Harry Connick, Jr. CD left in the CD player, scratched but still working. It's still our crazy family, just what we want.

There are so many of them.

I had a moment today that I can only equate to going camping. It was like waking up in the morning, right when the tent is starting to trap all the heat and get really uncomfortable, but when there's still dew on the sides that gets you all wet when you roll into it because your dad set it up on an incline. You open your eyes, and you think, "Man, this is uncomfortable." And then you see a spider. And then you see a moth. And then you see about 20 other bugs (so 22 in all, math whizzes). And then you think, "Oh... my... God. There are so many of them." And this feeling of horror fills you up and you potato-sack it out of the tent, legs still in sleeping bag.

That's how I felt today when all my kids were finally in the room for writing.

I mean, I have 13 six-year-old boys. THIRTEEN. Do you know how much burping, fake choking, and fart jokes that equals?

Hopefully I get over that feeling by tomorrow... yeeks*.

*obviously a made up word... it's been a long day.

Weekend Getaway

After spending the weekend in lovely Hartford, CT, I come back feeling... a little frazzled. I had a student transferred into my class 5 minutes before students came in Monday morning, so I got to have fun scrambling around (in addition to all of the scrambling around I normally do Monday mornings.

Even so, the weekend was glorious. It was so good to see all of my friends and hang out with my boyfriend. I got a little out of control on Saturday, but who doesn't? It's homecoming. Plus I rebounded for Saturday night, so no harm done.

I'm still a little torn about whether seeing people that mean a lot to me makes me feel better or not. Coming back was probably the worst it's ever been, sitting in the airport with that ache that comes after a really great Trinity weekend and trying to breathe life into my dying phone and computer. It was just long enough to snap into a feeling of carelessness, of no responsibility and happiness in stretch pants watching bad daytime TV. I don't get to feel that way often in Charlotte, not in the way I did when I was in college. Of course, I was reminded of things I hated at Trinity, at least by the end of my time there. Things like pretentious party "bouncers" rejecting unfavorable guy to girl ratios, drunk bitches (I'm sorry, there are no other nonvulgar word that can accurately describe those things) pushing past you to get a beer half filled with foam, and tiny college refrigerators that don't really keep any beverages cold enough. I still found myself wishing (at least a little bit) that I was back to being able to just lay in bed all day, lazy and soaking up the life where anything that was a real concern could be put off during the weekend.

On a lighter, more teaching-related note, I've been trying to re-test the reading level of some of my kids so that I can put them in new groups after Thanksgiving break. One of my girls started out this year right about on grade level, reading well but still pretty average. Today... she was reading at SECOND grade level (already!! It's November!!) and going strong. I still have more books for her to read to see exactly how high she can go. I'm so excited though. A little skeptical that it was me ("So, uh, what exactly do your parents do with you at home?") but excited nonetheless.

For now, it's back to more lesson planning and what not. I could go on in much more detail about the weekend... but I'll spare you.

A Whole Lot of Sara Blogging... BAM. In Your Face.

I've been a little absent in the blogging world... okay, maybe a lot absent. I've felt lost for words lately, and I'm not quite sure of the reason. Maybe it's a confidence thing because I have about 17 saved drafts that I feel aren't good enough or interesting enough to post... perhaps I should bust a few of those out if another dry spell occurs.

My life most recently has been consumed by the perfect storm of administrative nightmares. I'll give you a brief list so I don't get myself too worked up:

1) Report cards: IT SUCKS. It's hard. It's putting a number on your kids, especially in first grade when you have a scale of 3. THREE. Imagine rating guys or girls on a scale of 3. It wouldn't give you a good picture of whether someone is actually good looking or not. For some people, you don't need a good picture though, I guess. My boyfriend's friends sometimes use binary code to rate girls, giving them thumbs up ("Yeah, I would...") or thumbs down ("No, not even with a bag on her head."). I'm sure it's just them... he would never be that crude (not).

2) SQR=FML: I've officially found my least favorite education acronym so far. School Quality Review, basically the school equivalent to your overprotective mother in law coming to visit. As much as it was stressful and tons of work and tons of pressure to get everything presented all nicely, it felt good to be so organized and on top of things when it was all over.

3) Data: Don't get me wrong- I like data. I don't like testing and re-testing my kids 8 trillion times though. Not when I want to... hmm, what's the word? Oh right... teach.

Clearly a lot of complaining on my end. Believe me, you wouldn't have wanted to be one of the people on my speed dial these past few weeks. All of it's a part of education though, so I guess I'll have to get used to it.

On an exciting note, I'll be returning to my college campus for some Homecoming activities and I could not be more excited. Especially about seeing all my old friends and teammates... and of course the BF. He's a 1 (in binary code, duh). Or maybe I should say a 3- consistently meets expectations (FYI consistently is defined on the report card as 80% of the time or more). I'm not looking forward to physically being in New England in November, because it's quite lovely down here in North Carolina. BUT I feel like it's been Christmas Eve for 4 days straight. WOO. Can't wait!

And of course, I think some birthday festivity recap is necessary. That 10 of a boyfriend of mine finally tuned in to my love for greeting cards, sending me TWO. Two good ones, too. I love cards. My sister's boyfriend is still in the phase where he feels the need to suck up to me, so he sent some delicious (and pretty) cupcakes to my DOORSTEP (he must really like Kristin). My roommate was amazing, as usual, probably winning the prize because she got up before 5 am to make me cinnamon rolls before work. The teacher that is in the room next to me (I would be completely neglecting her influence on my teacher life if I did not acknowledge her for this) jumped in my room and yelled "Happy Birthday!". The best part of that one was how she reminded me about how special it was about 7 more times after she did it. I love sarcasm. And I love my birthday. I always feel so... loved.

My mom was here this weekend to celebrate with me, and it was just what I needed. Literally. She bought me all the clothes I needed. But really, it always helps to have her around, talking me down from the ledge and giving me endless wisdom about teaching and life in general. We have too much fun together, especially when she pretends she's my sister and that our waiters are hitting on her. Good one, Mom.

We got to go to my aunt and uncle's house for a little family dinner, which was also nice. I underestimated how great it would be to have family around, especially because I didn't spend much time with them before moving here. Overall, an excellent birthday weekend, only to become BETTER because it is extended to last for Homecoming. Did I mention I can't wait?

More on Growing Up

I think this is what I really meant to blog on when I thought about growing up and all of that business. Reflecting on the fact that I am 23 now, and finally at the age when birthdays stop meaning anything. My kids were so cute when they found out it was my birthday, probably because we're finally starting to love each other. They were trying to guess how old I was. The first guess was 31, which kind of depressed me, but listening to their "logical" guesses after that (ranging from 90 to 9) I realized that they still need work on North Carolina Standard Course of Study Competency Goal 1 (number sense... duh).

But after spending the day telling them to sit up and stay focused and finish their work and use nice words... I started to wonder when those become things we beginning doing without being told. I think of it every time I sit in a chair without my feet on the floor, when I don't tell the cashier they didn't ring up one of my frozen dinners, when I check my cell phone during a TFA lecture on the core values. Don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal, pay attention- as children we believe that all adults follow these cardinal rules, that with growing up comes a maturity that is built only from time, minutes upon minutes up days of sheer experience. We believe that growing up happens simultaneously as we grow bigger. We believe that virtues like honesty and loyalty come out like facial hair or hips.

That's not true. I think that's one of the most disturbing things about growing up. The moment I realized that adults lied and cheated and stole, that they could be wrong, I felt this sense of disgust. How can children ever learn if the adults in their lives are doing things that, had they been back in 1st grade, would get them referred to a school therapist and admin team. We use the labels in the schools all the time for our kids- crybaby, bully, manipulator- but some of these things don't wear off with a growth spurt and a dose of puberty. At least not unless you take the initiative to follow those basic rules introduced in kindergarten and have people around you shaping you into a better person.

Just a birthday thought.

When I Grow Up...

I was sifting through piles and piles of student work today in an effort to get through report card grading (which, by the way, is HARD), when I came across an activity I had my kids do the first week of school about what they wanted to be when they grew up and who their heroes were.

As children, we think a lot about growing up. Not only are we constantly asked what we want to be when this happens, but we pick our role models and idols from those who have already reached that stage. Sports stars, music icons, community heroes- we look at those older than us and decide who we want to be like. We idealize these people. I remember teachers, babysitters, neighbors who I thought could do nothing wrong. I see my kids with these same kinds of idols.

I also remember seeing these idols disappear before my eyes, after finding out someone smoked, or swore, or lied. People always wonder where the heroes of their youth went. All those idols we had fade and tarnish over time… or maybe we just grow up and realize that we were tricked. Idealism blinded us and convinced us of greatness where there was only mediocrity. We see the mistakes of our fathers, learn the faults of our mothers. We see the whole picture and find that the people we put on pedestals throughout our childhoods do not belong there. We learn that loving someone, looking up to someone, is more than finding a person surrounded by perfection or wrapped in light. We find our real heroes and our true loves in the ordinary light of day. They are people we can fight with, people we can talk to, people we can watch and criticize. But most of all, they are people who touch us and become a part of us. They are the people who can survive the harsh world of the real and the true and yet, somehow, remain good in spite of their faults.

What You Don't Know About the President

During social studies, my kids were doing an activity where they had to describe and draw one of the duties of the President. I was making my rounds, seeing what they were doing, when I stopped at one of their desks.

Me- "Oh, now what's your picture of?"

Student- "Barack Obama saving the day." His picture showed him in a cape scooping people up... so cute!

Me- "Well, that's a good thing to draw! But it looks here like he's flying, and you know Barack Obama can't really fly in real life. He does save the day sometimes, but maybe you could show him doing that by making a speech or leading the troops."

Student- "He's not really flying. He's got a jetpack on."

Pause... me- "...a jetpack?"

Other student, nodding vigorously- "Uh huh! He has a jetpack."

Me- "That's really imaginative, but don't you think if Barack Obama had a jetpack, we would see it somewhere on the news? Or in a magazine?"

Student- "No. He keeps it in his secret lair."

Me- "His secret lair?"

Student- "Underneath the White House."

Nodding student- "Uh huh! It's true!"

This is what makes my days so so good sometimes.

A Day Off

Today I went to this New Teacher workshop instead of going to school. My lit facilitator arranged the sub and everything, so it was essentially a little break from having my kiddies. As I was driving through probably one of the nicest sections of Charlotte, a few things dawned on me. And when I say dawned on me, I mean literally because it had been awhile since I had seen the sun in the morning.

There are some things I really don't like about teaching. See following list:
1) Getting up before 5 am. In the dark. In the cold. Yes, COLD. I know, I thought I moved to the south, but apparently it's going through a spell where it likes to FROST. IN THE SOUTH. What the heck.

2) The pressure... now, hear me out on this one. There is pressure at every job. There are things to be filed, paperwork to fill out, accounts to close, things to do... but these things will not vomit on your shoes or pee on your rug or give you swine flu because they want to whisper something in your ear at lunch and they sneezed instead. These things will not have their parents call you about their behavior. These things will not grow into real, functioning members of society who may continue to do things like vomit on people's shoes and pee on people's rugs if you do not stop and redirect them.

3) The inability to wear things that are fashionable or attractive. Please see the part about the pee and vomit.

But then I realized there are things I really like about teaching...
1) No monotony. Every day is different, for better or for worse. And when they're for better, it feels pretty good.

2) Kids are funny. I overheard one of my kids at lunch expressing a lot of enthusiasm for joining Boy Scouts because he would finally be able to "kill a bear." Another kid called me Mrs. Bologna. Another knows Beyonce's Single Ladies dance, but assures me she won't do the dirty part in school.

3) The kids... period. As much as all the work stinks and is stressful, at the end of the day it's pretty fulfilling to see a little kid walk out the door doing the trapezoid/hexagon dance instead of the Single Ladies Dance. It's fulfilling to see them learn how to read, or remember how to add, or become a better, more helpful person. Even if it's just a little, teeny tiny, still growing and learning person.


Short, and not well-written, but I thought I'd blog on it anyway.

Riding in Cars... Without a Clue

A lot of people don't know very much about cars. I am one of them. First of all, I'm not a very good driver. I can't see well and I have bad depth perception. As a result, I don't particularly like doing it. That, added to my lack of knowledge, lends itself to one clueless driver. My sister isn't much better. She's been known to pull hanging pieces from our cars because they don't look important.

Anyway, this week I was sitting in the Goodyear by my school, waiting for them to change the four BALD tires on my car. I was waiting for them to do the alignment and all that jazz thinking about how clueless I am. I can't change a tire, I can't check my oil, I barely know how to add windshield wiper fluid to my car. BUT, the one thing I do know how to do is pop the hood.

Whenever relatively common situations arise- your car isn't starting, a door that should be open is locked, you have a weird stomachache- there are certain "first response" reactions that every person has (especially when they don't really know what they're talking about). When a door is locked, that reaction is to jiggle the handle. I don't know about you, but very rarely has jiggling the handle opened a locked door. Still, it's the socially acceptable thing to do. Whenever you call someone and say, "Help, my door/cabinet/toilet flappy thing won't open" they will respond, "Well, did you jiggle the handle?" For stomachaches, it's going to the bathroom. You could be pregnant and going into labor, and if you told someone who was not aware of the whole pregnancy thing, they would probably answer with, "Maybe you should try going to the bathroom."

For cars, that response is to pop the hood. This one is funnier than those I just mentioned because popping the hood has absolutely NO effect on how your car is running. At least OCCASIONALLY going to the bathroom or jiggling the handle MIGHT do the job, but popping the hood (ONLY popping the hood) will not. Because it is so useless as a strategy to fix cars, of course it is the one that I employ first.

Just to reiterate, I know NOTHING about cars. You could tell me my car's rotary cuff was fractured and I'd believe you. You could tell me my gas tank was infested by flies who were laying eggs of mutant babies and I'd believe you. You could tell me that my license plate was slowing down my acceleration because of the angle it was screwed on and- yep- I'd believe you.

My sister is kind of the same way. Her calling card is to call my parents in the midst of whatever car catastrophe she is having, hoping that my dad's quick thinking will get her out of it. When we get together, it's even worse. We had to drive to Ohio over the summer to move her stuff back home and one of those things was her queen size mattress and box springs. We had about 300 feet of rope and my dad's truck, so we were set to get everything tied down and ready to go.

Big mistake, assuming that we could complete this task without messing up. I'm a pretty intelligent person, but tying knots is not one of my strengths. Combine that with my sister's stellar critical thinking skills (that was a jab, Kris) and you've got a recipe for disaster (aka an SUV getting destroyed by a mattress that flew off a truck with a New York license plate... that didn't really happen but it could have). Our strategy was to wrap the ropes around the little rope-holder things as many times as possible, taking extra safety measures of weaving that same rope through various other pieces of furniture, tying sporadic knots along the way. Our catch phrase was, "What are the odds that ALL these knots/tangles come undone at the same time?"

Needless to say, we ended up making it about an hour (about 20 miles) before turning around and coming back so that some former boy scout guy friend of hers could properly secure the mattress. This is after we were parked at the side of the road by an abandoned building, covered in mud and ropeburns, after my sister nearly got run over on the highway when she got out of the car to retrive the top that flew off one of her plastic storage bins, after a man in another truck looked at the leaning mattress and flapping tarp with a look of apocalyptic panic in his eyes.

Kristin's responses in these emergency situations is to call my father. Example: she ran out of gas at an intersection. "Dad, I have no gas and people are beeping at me." She saw something weird hanging out the bottom of our van on a road trip and pulled it off (as I said at the beginning of this post). "Dad, was that okay? Now the heat only works in the left side." She didn't have any money for a toll on one of the NY interstates. "Dad, what do I do?"

My response, on the other hand, is to pop the hood. I think that's a pretty common thing for people to do. The problem is that popping the hood is merely a step in LOOKING at what's inside the hood. The only thing I can say once I've completed that is, "Yup, there's an engine in there." Even that's a stretch, because engines and the inside of refrigerators probably look pretty similar. I just think it's funny how much people rely on those first common reactions when they hardly ever result in something productive happening.

Thankfully, I have my dad to take care of that stuff, to walk me through baby steps of figuring out what is wrong and then handing over his Goodyear credit card to get it fixed. If it were up to me, I'd be driving down the highway with no gas and the check engine light on, my sister in the passenger seat trying to pay tolls with Canadian dimes, and one of the tires completely missing off the back passenger axle.

Quarter Life Crises

As the typical Sunday night anxiety sets in (with me and all my roommates), I'm starting to wonder whether this anxiety is just connected to TFA or if it's something that all college graduates experience, a suffocating paranoia that our lives will be the same- miserable and hard- from this point forward. That maybe it never gets any better, that maybe we'll be worrying about money and jobs and relationships forever.

That's depressing.

I'm looking at the things stressing me out tonight, and of course teaching this week is occupying one of the top places on the list. But I'm actually in a good place to start this week. I'm planned, I know the things I need to get done and when they need to get done by (and I have time to get them done), there are only a few loose ends that need to be tied up (especially in comparison to where I've been in past weeks). There are other things, looming, behind all the teaching stress, things like missing my friends and family and boyfriend, things like feeling uncomfortable in this region, like I'm out of place among the people around me. There's the fact that I have to worry about money and bills, that I don't understand my health insurance, that I need new tires on my car and I have no one to help me. Stupid things, on the spectrum of things that one should worry about.

But then, looking at them all together, I see them form one big, dark cloud of real life, hovering over everything I do. And that's the same for everyone, I think, regardless of what they choose to do after college. We all move away from our friends and family, we all struggle adjusting to new things and new places and new people.

I guess that's what it comes down to. Change will inevitably be stressful, and difficult. You have to redefine what being happy means and sometimes the things that used to make you happy can't make you happy anymore, at least not in the same way, because the context of the new situation doesn't translate. I'm finding that I'm not making the adjustments necessary to keep myself happy the way I used to because I'm expecting the same things to work. That's the reason for the quarter life crisis- whether it's mine or my roommate's or some recent college grad I don't even know- that the final shift into "real life" has occurred and that's scary as hell.

Communication

When I was in college, one of my creative essays was about how things has changed with the advent of instant electronic communication. I'm thinking about it again now, especially because my communication skills with others has been lacking so much, and why? What is my excuse when I can shoot someone a text, an email, a phone call, a web-call, all with the click of a button (or a few buttons)?

I'm relying heavily on conversations I've had with older people about what it was like before all this fancy-shmancy technology, back when people used things like the US Postal Service and landlines. My parents wrote each other letters when my dad was working down the Cape and my mom was stuck in Buffalo. That's right- LETTERS. When's the last time anyone has written a letter? And I mean a real letter, sent in the mail with a stamp. People still write letters today, but most of the time it's because they're just too chicken to say what they need to say out loud. Example: people who are trying to win back an ex-boyfriend/girlfriend (usually at night, when it's raining) and don't want to be rejected right to their face, or people who are lazy and would rather tell their coach in the written form that they deserve more playing time (that ones for my sister, a college volleyball coach). It seems that today, letters are reserved for the cowardly, the people who consciously choose not to say things out loud. The more I think about it, the more I've come to the conclusion that ALL textual communication can be used by those who are scared- scared of rejection, or of having to respond without proofreading their thoughts, or simply having to interact face-to-face, voice-to-voice. People use emails to complain to a boss, text messages to break off a relationship (talk about COWARDLY... and lame), webchats to search for new crushes. But given the platform for true expression- just using your voice- we tend to freeze up.

Just now, a cashier flirted with my roommate (I'm blogging in Breugger's Bagels) by taking $7 off her total rather than just telling her he wanted a date with her. Granted, he was about 40 and a creepshow, but still, he went far out of his way to avoid just talking to her.

We don't write letters anymore, but we've become reliant on these new forms of text to fuel our relationships. We've grown into a generation of subtlety, a generation that obsesses over whether to use one period or three, whether using the word "fine" instead of "okay" is the right decision. Our friends proofread our love lives and our parents do the same for our professional lives.

Back in the olden times (15 years ago), letters were a necessity, not a cop-out. They were something that had to be done because long distance calls cost more than just minutes out of a monthly allowance.

I'm all about bringing letters back, the real kind of letters that are romantic and sentimental and worth keeping around in a special letter box along with an engraved sterling silver letter opener. I can't tell you how many times I've had to put back letter stationary kits with wax, a monogrammed stamper, and paper made from the bark of 100 year old trees. Usually, what makes me put those things back on the clearance rack (always on clearance because, again, who sends letter, especially ones sealed with wax?) is the fact that I don't really know how to write letters. What happens when you send a letter to someone and they call you before it arrives? ("I'm sorry, please call me back after you've read the funny anecdotes and related questions I've sent via snail mail") What do you even talk about? Half the things I usually talk about look so uninteresting when put on paper. I've only gotten as far as greeting cards, which are allowed to be silly and pointless (ask my friends who have received a card from me).

I'm wondering if it's because vocal communication is so much easier now. I could write a letter about it, but why? Why do that when I can call up that person and give them the benefit of voice inflections, of pauses, of that indescribable tone added when a person talking is smiling? I think I'll stick to that, rather than writing it all done, stuffing it in an envelope, and sealing it with an S-imprinted wax circle.

When It's Right

I was thinking today, on my miserable 5 am drive to work, how people know when things are right. A lot of people have been asking me if I will stay in teaching after my two years with Teach for America, and I answer them every time with "I have no idea." Anyway, part of it is that right now, I don't look past 2:15 pm until I get there.

In my zombie state this morning (one made much worse than usual because of a pretty sucky day yesterday) I wondered if I would ever feel "right" in teaching, wondered if that "this is for me" moment happens right at the beginning, in those first few minutes or hours of the first day of school.

If that's true, then I made a very poor decision.

But then I got to thinking about other things, other places where people always claim to feel "rightness" and I think that those kind of realizations don't happen because your pre-conceived expectations have been met. I think it's more than you are exposed to all these new things, things you don't have expectations for because you've never even considered them before. I thought about all my friends, the ones that have been there for me through everything, and how I came to know it was right. It wasn't because they ranked well on some generic checklist accepted by the general population. It's because some part of them came completely out of the blue and surprised me, whether it was some incredibly strange personality trait, an ability to make fun of me in a way that was absolutely hilarious, or simply the fact that they owned a red cape and liked vampires (oh, how we make friends in elementary school...).

I guess it comes down to that in any part of life. In jobs, in friends, in relationships-- we find that "right" person or place or thing (whatever it may be) when we find something intangible, something that blows our expectations out of the water, something we could have never counted on until we have it, and then suddenly we don't know where we would be without it.

I Eat My Feelings

Something about eating my body weight in cinnamon rolls makes my general failure at life seem not so bad.

Good thing the teaching diet has shed off my excess weight. That and the fact that I got lost for an hour and a half on my run yesterday. I did manage to find my dreeeeeam home, in one of those neighborhoods where you get intoxicated off of the smell of expensive landscaping. How is it possible for mulch to smell that wonderful?

Anyway, tomorrow's another day, and so is the next day, and the next...

Lack of Blogging

Am I really running out of new things to talk about, only in October? I guess it's the same stuff that's hard every single day, and I don't want to bore anyone with all those mundane details.

An interesting moment- one of my kids calling me Mrs. Bologna... not even close to Fiorillo. Not even a little bit. Aside from being a long shot from my real last name, they've had me as a teacher for over a month. Also, apparently I'm the type that looks like I would actually marry into that last name, that my husband is made of all the leftover processed meat and could be slapped on an elementary lunchbox sandwich at any second.

I'll have to re-blog when I get something fun to talk about...

A Funny Moment in Starbucks

Overslept by about THREE HOURS for work this morning... thank GOD it was only a work day. Anyway, I had to stop for coffee/breakfast at Starbucks on the way since I didn't have time to eat. I ordered my usual- blueberry scone and a plain coffee. I was in a rush, so I was totally in the zone when I went to the little add-in station for cinnamon and just a teeny bit of skim milk.

"Aren't you gonna want more than that?" I hear a man's voice say, but, like I said, I was in the zone so I didn't even look up.

"No, I like it black."

Then, when I did look up, I saw an older man... an older black man. He just busts out laughing, cannot contain himself at the fact that I just told a him that "I like it black."

"Baaaahahahh, she likes it black, she says."

He was still laughing when I walked out.

Life is funny, especially when you get to interact with older men who like to turn everyday language into sexual innuendos.

Courage

A quote, courtesy of my father:

"Courage does not always roar; sometimes it is a quiet voice at the end of the day saying,

'I will try again tomorrow.'"

Not on a Six Year Old's Level

On Thursday I was quite irritated by my little ones because they were whining and being lazy SO I told them a nice story about the importance of working hard (courtesy of my dad and one of his runners Bill Starner... I don't even know if what I was saying was true). Anyway, by the end of it I went off naming successful people who worked hard- Obama, Michael Jordan... then, on a long shot, I threw out another name.


"What about Sonia Sotomayor? Raise your hand if you know who that is." In my head, I immediately realized that they would not know who this is. Big mistake.

Long pause, and then...

"You mean Miley Cyrus?"

I wait, and choose to accept that a historic Supreme Court Justice is nowhere even close to their radar, as much as I would like it to be (being a pub pol major who had Supreme Court info jammed into my brain for my senior seminar).

"Yes, Miley Cyrus. She works very hard."

Jordan, the most challenging kid in my class- "Man, Miley Cyrus doesn't do anything."

Little shy girl that hiccups all the time- "She lives in Disneyland!"


Kids are funny.

Shared Misery

The bond of going through hell. I've thought about this theory for a long time, and I can't think of many situations in which it doesn't hold true.

Go through any awful experience with someone and chances are you'll come out of it best friends. When I think about the friendships I've formed over the years, I've realized that they usually stem from some really traumatic event, from the physically trying (3-a-day preseason practices) to the mentally stressful (this whole teaching without experience thing) to the really stupid (surviving champagne hangovers on Wednesday mornings). I think it's because if you can still stand someone after being in excessive amounts of physical/mental pain, you hedge your bets and figure you might as well keep them around. Think about it. It's easy to go to some perfectly lovely event and have a perfectly lovely time with even the most bland or boring person. BUT to be able to survive a hellish experience and be able to laugh about it with someone... now that's true friendship.

Just some thoughts. Maybe this means my kids and I will be best friends by the time May comes around...

In all seriousness, it's only hellish because I am a crazy control freak/perfectionist who hates being bad at anything. The kids are just kids.

Love for Old Friends

This is just a quick update before the week gets crazy (and I get crazy).

I took a little weekend trip to visit one of my best friends from... ever. We met on the bus in first grade, so I know pretty much everything there is to know about this girl. She's in med school at Wake Forest now (I know, impressive!) and we spent most of Saturday working. But it was so good to have that feeling of comfort back. It was like we were in high school again- watching bad TV, eating bad food, laughing about nothing. It's funny how different our lives are now, both really difficult but in totally opposite ways. She made me feel very, very uneducated, especially when her and her roommate discussed some kind of eye muscle pulley (I was seeing whether my kids could write their numbers correctly, haha).

Overall, a very relaxing and good weekend. It was my boyfriend's birthday today and it stinks not being able to celebrate with him. I love birthdays, particularly my own. But it's always such a happy time and I had to miss it. Ugh. Oh well.

Lame post, I know, but I'm tired. Keep checking for updates, the next one will be good... I promise!

Untied

Haven't tried poetry in awhile, so bear with me... I had one particular student in mind when I wrote this one.


Untied
The ragged ends of shoelaces drag on the floor
picking up the dirt and grime
left behind
by the newer shoes of others.

The backs slip off
slap
slap
as soles hit the tile
a steady beat of too big shoes
made bigger by the loosened strings.

He never ties them
just pulls the laces tight
only for them to come loose again
only for the backs to slip off
slap
slap
against the tile
only for the ends to drag
dirty and frayed on the floor
vulnerable
and waiting
to be stepped on.

The Importance of Running

I never liked running. Or athletics. Throughout my life, I have never considered myself to be an athletic person despite participating in sports and working out regularly. Part of the reason was my stubborn resistance to proving my parents right. Both are athletes who became gym teachers, my father a former marathoner and my mother a petite swimmer who sometimes practices her butterfly stroke on vacations, her aging arms slowly churning the water with the awkward motions of the movement. She, like my father, wears sneakers and lightweight sweat suits, mostly navy and black. Their occupations and general outlook on life are defined by this idea of being active, of competing in and following sports of all kinds, something that served as a major source of anxiety throughout my childhood and adolescence.

One event sticks out in my mind, a time that I'm still not sure if I actually remember it or if I have just heard the story so many times that I have internalized it as a tangible life experience. There I was, a nine-year old with a bad bowl cut, coming downstairs on a weekday and plopping myself down at our kitchen table. I let out an overdramatic sigh of surrender. My nine year old sigh was soaked in desperation, the kind of sigh that begs to be asked about.

“Sara,” my father had said. “What’s wrong?”

Again, the sigh was forced out. “It’s Wednesday.”

He was confused. “What’s wrong with Wednesdays?”

“It’s gym day.” I picked at my cereal. This is probably the last thing a P.E. teacher wants to hear their child to think, much less say out loud. Luckily, I’ve progressed from that day, learning slowly about the merits that fitness and athleticism had to offer.

It has taken me a long time to realize the importance of running. Going into college, I never thought I would be able to call myself an athlete, but a few years and couple hundred hours on the volleyball team forced me to become one. Still, I never got into running, pushing it away because I couldn't handle the type of endurance and mindset needed to be successful at it.

It wasn't until I reached a point in my life where I found myself hopelessly unhappy- unhappy with how I looked, with how I felt about myself, with how others saw me- that I found myself aching for something to pull me back up to a healthy state of mind. That something was running.

I started running while I was studying abroad in Italy, a semester away after a rough year involving my own personal struggles with body image and self-confidence. I didn't run that frequently- two to three times a week around a four mile loop on the Tiber River- but something about that semester changed me. Aside from gaining almost 20 pounds due to the excessive amounts of pesto, pizza, and red wine, I came back feeling completely different about myself. I was convinced the running had nothing to do with it, that the transformation came from the laid back Italian lifestyle and feeling of independence I cultivated while I was there.

But the running part stayed with me, increasing to five times a week. I ran my first race that summer. During all those miles I put in, I finally started to get it.

As long as I had thoughts to fuel my wanderings (and I have a lot of thoughts), I felt like I could run for hours. No wonder runners are so crazy. All they have to do on those outings was THINK. Just think. The only thing with you on those runs are your thoughts. And while running, I finally sorted my thoughts on the subject to figure out why it was so important. Here they are, as random as they came into my head:


-Sometimes there is merit in running away from things. Negativity, norms that hold you back, mindsets that keep you from loving yourself- there is no shame in running away from these things, so long as you are running towards things that are good for you.

-What a difference purpose makes. Run to a destination, and you always have to run back. Always. Run randomly, in circles, following back in steps you've already taken- you will never run as far, or as long, as when you run with a purpose and a destination in mind.

-You can always go faster. Or farther. Or longer. Very rarely do we push ourselves to our limits, and running reminds me of that. I just keep thinking, "A little faster. A little farther. A little longer." And usually, if I'm willing to put in the effort, I can do that.

-Running gives you balance. It's the one time in a day where it's just you, nobody else. You determine your pace (or lack of pace), you determine how hard you work. It's not that you can't make excuses, because frequently, you do. But every time that happens, you know it's an excuse. Every little "I just ate" or "I didn't get a lot of sleep" or "My leg's bothering me" lets you stop, but deep down you KNOW you're making excuses. I find myself doing that, justifying why I'm stopping or slowing down or going back home. But the bottom line is that I am in full control of whether I accept those excuses or overcome them, and that feeling of power allows me to gain confidence in myself when other parts of my life seem hopeless.


It would be dangerous if I could run and write at the same time. This entry would be much longer and more sporadic if that were possible. The bottom line is that I value running more now that I haven't been able (or willing) to do it. I miss that feeling of sweating out troubles, or just letting my mind go crazy while my feet hit the pavement. Even though I never ran all that fast, or fast at all, I have never given it enough credit in changing the way I thought about myself. That's where I found the importance of running.

A High Amongst Many Lows

One kid in my class can NEVER sit still. His legs are up, he's making fighter plane noises, banging pencils in his desks, wiggle-dancing in the halls, talking. Not a huge problem, but definitely an annoyance when others are being problems. After starting my new rewards system, he was AWESOME. Straightening up whenever I asked, shutting his little mouth and not making a PEEP. He ended up on the highest color today and when I called his mother to tell her what a great day he had, she told me:

"Oh trust me, I've already heard about it... in the car on the way home it was all, 'Mama, look at the paper, look at the paper, look at the paper, look at the paper. I was good!'"

So cute!

Another Blog from an Airport

This time it’s Bradley International in Hartford, a much less enjoyable airport to be in for a few reasons. First of all, there aren’t many people in it to people watch, and the people that are here are grouchy because they live in Connecticut. Then there’s the fact that the airport itself is a pretty bleak place, with bland gray walls and torn up generic carpet. There are still Fourth of July decorations up, cheap translucent American flags strung out on frayed plastic ribbon, their ends curling upward from too much time in storage. The employees aren’t much more cheerful than the airport’s sad décor. It’s times like these when I see the real difference between social interaction in the South and in New England. It just feels a lot colder and less welcoming than the places I go in Charlotte.

The main reason it’s less enjoyable is because I know that I’m leaving. I know, I know, Connecticut makes people grouchy (especially my father, who vowed never to return after I graduated), but being away this weekend was something that was much needed even if it was in CT. I’m realizing now that most of the good friends I got to see while in Hartford were former teammates of mine. When I was a freshman my coach told us to look around the gym at the people we were with, that they would forever occupy a special place in our lives, above friends and roommates in a special kind of family. She was right (although I don’t think she said it that eloquently). My best friends in the world are girls I played with, sharing the pain of early morning workouts, sharing cramped bus seats on buses as we traveled, sharing sweat, tears, and laughter. It’s the kind of bond that forms because you make sacrifices for and with each other. Now, those sacrifices seem petty—trading the Welcome Back dance for a team movie night, Halloween for an early bedtime before a game, sleep for sprinting drills—but in the end those things form a connection that I don’t think I could find in other places.

But being with my boyfriend was what I really needed. There’s the whole element of lacking physical closeness that makes distance so hard, because a lot of times what people need most isn’t the comforting words or laughter from a badly made joke (although I love those moments). It’s a hand on the back of my head, or a pat on the arm, or just the proximity of his leg to mine that seems to have the most calming effect on me. And now that I’ve had that for two days, I feel like I’m right back where I started, going into withdrawal because of my isolation from those very small forms of physical contact. It makes the week of work ahead feel daunting in a way it didn’t before, because now I’m stuck readjusting once again to this huge loss of support that I had this weekend, if only for a short while.

It brings up the question of whether seeing each other makes it better or, in a weird way, harder, because it just reminds us of how much we’ll be missing once we go back to our respective homes. Of course it’s worth it to me, otherwise I wouldn’t have bought a plane ticket and shipped myself back up North, but it’s a tough place to be in once it’s over. It’s more that I leave with a feeling that it’s all very unfair, that I’m being robbed of something that I should have, a feeling of happiness and contentment that belongs to me but is being kept away in a box on a shelf that I can’t reach for an undisclosed amount of time.

It doesn’t help that in twenty minutes I’ll be getting on a flight taking me farther away, most likely while sitting next to an overweight man who’ll unbutton his shirt from the bottom to make himself more comfortable and everyone around him significantly less so.

Thoughts from the Airport

It’s about time that I blog about something besides teaching. There’s no way that my throngs of fans want to hear ONLY about my experience with six-year-olds who throw up on themselves (true story). So I’m taking a break from it for a moment—after all, it is a vacation weekend.

Currently I’m sitting in the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport, Gate C17. I flew out of this same gate when I left for training this summer. I am a full two hours early for my flight. I tell people that I get to the airport so early because I don’t want to miss my flight, but in truth, I really just like hanging out in airports. I talked to the security guard at the checkpoint, the barista at Starbucks, and the bathroom attendant for about ten minutes each. I love it. I love sitting outside of Pizza Hut Express wondering if one of the workers could smuggle in a knife when they come to work. Overall, it’s pretty useless and stupid thinking, but I can’t help it.

Another thing I love about airports is the babies. Notice that I said babies in AIRPORTS, not airplanes. I sat next to the sweetest little baby on the shuttle bus from parking. He had a gigantic round head and huge blue eyes. And some drool crusted on his mouth. He was so cute. I wish I could let naptime drool crust over my mouth and still be cute. But, come departure time, and I’ll have done a total 360, but inside the terminals they’re my best friends. I like to give their parents that look of “How cute!” that also says “Good luck on the flight where everyone will curse your existence.”

People watching (and baby watching) in airports is top notch. Where else do all these people HAVE to come together and interact? You’re spending at least an hour together in these tiny tubes flying through the air, close quarters for even people who know each other well. I always try to guess why people are in here. There’s a woman in yoga pants Facebooking on a Mac. The guy in front of me at security had a huge skateboard in his carry-on, a black and red mural stenciled carefully on the bottom that matched his hat and his shoes. How cool! It made me want to learn how to skateboard.

And just now I’m watching a woman get off a plane from Florida with a HAT BOX. A hat box. I didn’t know woman actually still wore the kinds of hats that required a hat box. I’d like to think she just liked the look of it, strapped over her shoulder with its gold foil casing reflecting off of the stark white lights, but then what do you actually put in a hat box if there isn’t a hat box in it? Jewelry? Scarves? I’d love to go ask her, but I get a weird feeling from ladies who wear hats.

My normal routine for airports is to get a coffee and a trashy magazine, plop myself down in my terminal, and just stare at people. Now that I’m an adult, I made myself get a New Yorker instead of an Us Weekly but my routine is the same. Looking at military people usually takes up a large chunk of my people-watching because of all the stories they probably have. I picture them getting deployed, flying helicopters, taking shooting practice. I wonder if they like the luggage that their respective branches make them carry when they come to the airport.