To Sum Up...

My spring break can basically be described with three phrases:

1. Family/Jack
2. Bug bites
3. Party Hat

I left immediately after school on Friday and didn't come back until yesterday evening. Nothing could have ruined my trip, not even the hundreds of bug bites I got all over my body while in Florida. Hundreds? Yes, hundreds. I counted thirty-five on the lower half of one arm before I fell asleep in the sun. I look like I just fought off a deadly bout of the chicken pox, with slightly raised pink scars covering my legs, torso, neck, and face. Face? Yes, face. I had a string of about twenty going up my neck and onto my left cheek like a chicken pox hickey. And I had one on my nose.

But, like I said, nothing could ruin this trip. It was a well-needed break from my crazy class AND a reminder of the beginning of the end, a benchmark showing only 34 days remaining.

Bookending the vacation was some time spent in Greenville with Jack. The first weekend really initiated him into South Carolina lifestyle. He got to see genuine Southern hospitality (several rounds of drinks on the jolly Clemson family sitting with us at the Hibachi grill, including Patron shots and hot sake). I made him go to a Waffle House for the first time, where we got VIP seats at the breakfast bar in the smoking session. I was unaware that you could still smoke in restaurants anywhere in the United States (or the world for that matter), but if I had to guess the one state where you could, SC would be the first. I'm also convinced that in order to open a Waffle House, one of the stipulations is that everything in and around the vicinity of the building must be at least fifteen years old- the menus, the waffle irons, the waitresses' wigs.

Greenville is actually awesome. For some reason, I pictured it being more rural and run-down, but it has a cute little tree-lined main street with a lot of good restaurants, bars, and shops. Plus my boyfriend lives there, which gives it a lot of points.

Monday meant goodbye to Jack and hello to ten hours in the car listening to NPR and wondering how much better your gas mileage gets if you turn off your AC. I only tested that theory for about 15 minutes.  The drive down was unremarkable, unless you count part of my front grill flying off for no reason. Or all the truckers honking at me because I looked a little naked wearing a strapless dress. You live, you learn.

My actual vacation, on Hutchinson Island off the Atlantic Coast, is indescribable unless you are a part of or have met my mother's side of the family. The legendary Buffalo Zaprowskis, headed by the Polish and female equivalent of the Godfather, Nans (also known as the matriarch of the family and the mayor of Ocean Village, the development where we were all staying). I'll try my best to capture the highlights, especially given the fact that a majority of the people who are reading this are probably related to me.

• My first Manhattan: made by my godmother's friend, I finally gave the token family drink a try... and loved it. My grandfather's last meal was a Manhattan and a piece of cake, so it had sentimental value. Especially after the buzz kicked in.
• My uncle's drunk dials: college freshman girls have nothing on my Uncle Mark. Any chance he got he was picking up the phone and calling the few people who were NOT on the trip (aka 70% of this blog's audience). This, along with his absolutely delicious pre-noon drinks (Salty Dogs and Bloody Mary's, anyone?), earned him MVP of Spring Break.
• Karaoke at the Jetty Lounge: This place has a liquor store attached to it, one that I've been going to for almost five years before realizing that the second door led into one of the shadiest (and greatest) bars I've ever been to. The group we went with (all Buffalonians and all pumped up about the Sabres) took over, shouting random Buffalo chants into the DJ's microphone so often we almost got kicked out. The best part of the night (if you can pick one) was our 20 person rendition of "Shout," when we tried unsuccessfully to sound like we were at a Bills game. Unfortunately, no one knew the real Bills words and my cousin couldn't pull his weight with the vocals... plus I'm pretty sure the only things Bills fans want to shout are profanities.
• The burgeoning plans for Cousin's Camp 2011: I've written a post or two about Cousin's Camp... but this past week we decided that a new adult Cousin's Camp be founded... at Kristin and Ryan's apartment. Ready? Oh yeah.
• The party hat: I bought a straw fedora specifically for this trip. And I did not take it off the entire time I was there, except when I showered. It was really hard to not wear it to school this morning, even just for a few minutes, to boost my mood.
• Reclaiming my spot as the favorite cousin and grandchild: Maybe it was how cool I am to my high school cousins. Maybe it was my willingness to try a Manhattan. Maybe it was my pious observance of Good Friday while my meat-eating cousins were told by Nana that they were going to hell (this was before she forgot it was Good Friday and my cousin Laura allowed her to eat half a turkey sandwich before reminding her and telling her, "I guess I'll be seeing you in hell."). Maybe it was the party hat. Whatever it was, I'm on top. And I love it.

Nailed it.

That's all for tonight. Today really brought me back to reality, but it's going to take more than a pouting 7 year old (or two, or three) to bring me down from this kind of happiness.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Or at least it is now. I'm sitting in the Philly airport, enjoying my lengthy two and a half hour layover (that isn't sarcasm... I really do like layovers), so ready to be HOME for the first time since July. It's funny, because there's always such a love-hate relationship with where you're from, especially when it's a small town. You grow up conditioned to hate it, cutting down the people that stick around and vowing to pack up and get out after high school and never come back. But I think once you leave, it becomes easier to see how important that place was in defining the person you become in adulthood. Or really, defining the person you DON'T become. In some ways, my hometown had a more decisive role in helping me understand who I wasn't. Plus, when I think about all the incredible relationships I came out with- friends mentioned in my 2nd grade journal, strong family ties- I can't help but take back all the criticisms I have from when I was younger. Then again, those things are hard to grasp when all you think about is the endless gossip chain and the lack of things to do.

I say this with all my 23 years of wisdom (THAT was sarcasm). Maybe the moment I finally embraced my hometown came when I could start drinking legally, because as anyone from there knows the bar life is one of its redeeming qualities. I think I'll stick with mushy, sentimental reason. And with that, my flight's boarding!

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).

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.

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.

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.

In Denial

A good theme for this weekend, because I'm choosing to ignore a number of things about my life right now. Denial #1: the fact that I sat outside by the pool today for a good hour, even though it was cloudy the WHOLE time with ominous sounding thunder rumbling in the distance. It didn't really stop me from lounging in my bathing suit as if it were 80 degrees and impossibly sunny.

Denial #2: reading this cartoon book "French Milk" that my aunt gave me and telling myself that I'll go back to Europe soon and chronicle it in the same way. I actually planned out in my head that I'll go to Rome during spring break and stay in the Hotel Aventino with Franca and her creepy cats just like when I was living there. I don't even want to go for any of the museums or the sights or anything. I just want to eat. And maybe run my little 4 mile circuit I used to do through Testaccio and along the Tiber River. That would be a big maybe. The more probable outcome would be that I would subsist solely on pizza from Dar Poeta and Remo's, with occasional breaks for Giaccomini's panini with homemade pesto. Yum.

Which leads into Denial #3- that I haven't been paid in four months and have about $20 to my name. This one is the reason for my self-proclaimed "chill" weekend, since I had to leave the TFA monster dance party Friday night early after running out of money and stay in Saturday night in order to be able to eat for the next two weeks.

And finally, the BIG BIG denial that I am totally prepared for school starting... which I'm not. Although I'm not sure if this is denial as much as just acceptance that no matter how much I plan and examine the curriculum and clean my room it will probably all be stomped to bits by my little students. Either way, I'm not really feeling all that stressed (yet). Come the night before school starts, though, and I'll probably be calling my mother from the fetal position and lamenting about my failure as a teacher, planner, and human being.

Along those lines, I ordered the book "Big Plans" by Bob Shea from Amazon yesterday. Even though it's meant for those under the age of 8, I loved it. Especially the skunk hat. It prompted me to search Amazon for one of those as well, which is probably why I am so broke (and unprepared. I mean, of all the things I need to do for my classroom, I choose to search for a "stinky luck" hat). Oh well.

I guess I'll just go back to the stage of denial by searching for flights to Rome.