The Bloody Banner

Once again, there's a reason I named this blog Just the Write Moment. I write when I feel like it. Unfortunately, I haven't really felt like writing recently - I've just been feeling a little depressed about life. No particular reason why I feel a little depressed about life, I just do. I've had issues with this all my life; the best remedy seems to just try and wait it out. I've been waiting it out for the past two or three months, unfortunately, but I'm finally starting to feel a little better.

Today I bring to you the story of Grace's Rock Star Inspirational Teaching Moment.

I was subbing at one of the nice elementary schools in the area where all the kids are well behaved and the worst problem I had to deal with was talking too much and goofing off. They were the kind of kids that would do what you told them to do without complaining, for the most part.

That day I was subbing for the music teacher. I've never been too fond of subbing music classes. It's not because I don't know music (I can read music, bang some piano keys, and sing on tune), but because the teachers assume that the subs don't know music, which is probably a good assumption to make. And because the music teachers don't trust possibly non-musical people to teach music, I'd usually end up doing worksheets or movies all day, which is totally boring. You know what's more fun than doing worksheets and fiddling with the VCR? Trying to teach a kid how to play the drums without actually knowing how to play the drums, which is what I did one day when I subbed for a music teacher who assumed that I could teach music.

That particular teacher had left a worksheet about the War of 1812 and Francis Scott Key's Star Spangled Banner. I broke the kids up into groups and they worked on the paper together. I tried to walk that thin line between keeping the talking and goofing off to a minimum while encouraging the maximum amount of dawdling on the work, since there was only one worksheet. The kids were done in 25 minutes. Music class was 45 minutes. Ugh.

I called them back to their seats. We went over the answers and scored points for correct answers. Three groups got a perfect score and I told them that they were awesome. We clapped. I successfully killed 5 more minutes. There were still 15 minutes left. Ugh.

The kids stared at me.

I stared at the kids.

Well, I thought, time to bring on the creativity.

"Ok, kids," I improvised, "I'm going to show you how the battle could have happened. I'll need a volunteer."

This short little guy volunteered to be my victim. He looked like he was all of six, even though this was a third-grade class. His name was Adam, he said.

I picked up a piece of chalk.

"Adam, I'm going to need your help. We need to show the class the ship from the battle. Here's the ship and here's the mast. How many sails do I need?"

"Four!"

"OK," I said, drawing the ship, mast, and four sails. "Now we need cannons. Where should I put the cannons?"

Adam pointed to the right side of the ship. I drew two cannons. They didn't look anything like cannons. I can't draw for beans.

"So now we need the British ship. Here's the British ship. Here's the British cannons."

Adam nodded with this confused look on his face. Yeah, Adam, I'm wondering where this is going, too.

"Ok, class, now we need to draw the battle! The cannons are going to start firing. Huge explosions on both sides! Adam, can you draw the explosions from the cannons?"

Adam got all enthusiastic. His explosions looked a little more like mushroom clouds than cannon detonations, but I let it go.

The explosions made the kids start to get into it. A couple of them started yelling to Adam to make the explosions have more smoke and cover more of the board. Adam was directed to make it look like Call of Duty. Sensing possible HR concerns, I told Adam his explosions were very realistic and took the chalk back.

"OK," I said, hoping that this next part would not upset HR too much, "Now we need to show the effects of the explosions." This was a history lesson. That would be my defense. Also, to minimize possible repercussions, I was going to be in charge of this part. I dismissed my volunteer to his desk.

"A couple people from the American ship got shot by the cannons. Here's one of the sailors. Unfortunately, he got caught in the explosion. The detonation threw him off the ship and into the air." I drew a little stick figure flying off the American ship.

Voices came from everywhere.

Who was that guy? Did the cannon really make him fly off the ship? Was he OK? Was he dead? Wouldn't he be bloody? Would he still have arms and legs, or would they fly off too? Could we draw some arms and legs flying off? What about a hospital? Did they have hospitals back then? What if the guy flew off the ship into the ocean? Would he drown? What if the cannon blew the guy into little bits and all his body parts hit the British ship? What if the British guy who was driving the ship was just turning the wheel and all of a sudden a bloody foot just hit him in the face?

So we spent a couple minutes talking about cannons, ship warfare, medicine in early America, and the War of 1812. The kids were entranced. I even decided to thumb my nose a bit at HR and drew the British captain getting hit in the face by a foot. History.

"Wow!" Adam said. "I didn't know that the Star Spangled Banner was this bloody! This is awesome!"

"I can't believe they sing it at my game sometimes!" inserted another kid. "It's American, but it's really gross, too!"

"I know!" suggested a little girl dressed from head to toe in pink. "We should sing the Star Spangled Banner right now!"

The kids were so into it that I told them to go right ahead. I just asked that they keep their voices down so the other teachers wouldn't be disturbed and/or report me to HR.

The entire class put their hands in the air and started singing the Star Spangled Banner. They started swaying in unison and making like they were at a Selena Gomez concert. And they actually kept it down, at least until they got to the good part. Then they got really loud.

AND THE ROCKET'S RED GLARE
THE BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR

"Shhhhhh! Keep it down a little! Shhhh!" No use. Nobody could hear me over the enthusiasm.

GAVE PROOF THROUGH THE NIGHT
THAT OUR FLAG WAS STILL THERE

Then the door opened. In came the learning support teacher.

For a moment, she stood there, frozen. She looked shocked. I could see the HR termination letter wording forming in her eyes. Then she turned and walked out into the hall, closing the door quietly behind her.

OH SAY DOES THAT STAR SPANGLED BANNER YET WAVE
O'ER THE LAND OF THE FREE
AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE

I moved quickly.

"Who wants to be my helper to wipe the board?"

The last severed limb had just been erased as the classroom teacher walked in. Twenty-two kids sitting nicely at their desk, one kid helping the sub clean up the board. How wonderful that the kids had behaved so well for the sub!

"Thanks for your help!" said the teacher. "I hope we see you again soon."

"And I hope that I'll be back!" I responded. It sounded ominous, but just to me, I hoped. It was a history lesson, HR.

"PLEASE COME AGAIN SOON!" yelled the class.

HR did not terminate me, thankfully. I subbed at that school several times after that day with no issues. I thought I was off the hook. Not quite.

Years later, I was sitting at a computer for a job training when the person to my left gave a gasp of recognition. I turned around, hoping the gasp of recognition was not directed towards me, because that would mean I would have to talk to someone, and people are scary.

It was the learning support teacher who had walked in on the entire class singing the Star Spangled Banner.

I cringed. People were scary, indeed.

"You're the music teacher!"

"Yes," I admitted, "I'm the music teacher. I remember you. You came into the classroom the day the kids were singing the Star Spangled Banner." Better confess now, before HR got involved.

But she smiled.

"You know, I have never seen anything like that. I'm the learning support teacher and I've had some of those kids for several years in a row. I've never seen them that excited about anything, let alone a song! Are you a music teacher?"

No, just a rebel sub.

"No, not a music teacher, just a sub. I like working with kids."

"Well," she said, "You should be a music teacher. You have a gift."

"Why thank you!" I replied, giving an inward sign of relief. The secret, apparently, was safe.

Also, maybe sometime in the future, I'll become a music/history/anatomy teacher!

Grace wins a poster contest

When I was in middle school, my mom was all about winning contests. Please note that I said my mom, not me, not my my brothers, not my sisters, and not any other family members. My mom just wanted to see her kids succeed at something, and while that was nice, I really didn't want to be writing essays about who-knows-what in my spare time. Curating my National Geographic collection was much more fun. By 13 I had collected every issue from 1980 to 2002, had been gifted a monthly subscription for Christmas, and had plastered my bedroom walls with the map inserts. I still have all my past issues in boxes in my mom's basement and in Dan's mom's basement, and my mom bugs me every six months to get all those stupid magazines out of her house. I don't subscribe anymore because now National Geographic is less about geography and more about crappy environmentalism, which I don't give a poo about (nothing against saving the earth, it just doesn't tickle my fancy quite like information about the cultural customs of ethnic groups in Northern Thailand).

So anyway, against our collective will, my mom entered us in all these annoying contests. Somewhere there's a terrifying photo of me wearing a fancy Easter hat for the Easter Hat Contest. At the age of twelve I had a gig writing funny essays for the local free newspaper because my mom made me. Don't even get me started on the spelling bee, where I actually did get to the regional level. I was out in the fourth round because I spelled "assess" as "a-s-s-e-s", possibly becoming the first regional spelling bee contestant who actually had two reasons to be booted off the family-friendly stage.

I mean, it wasn't all bad. We did win lots of stuff and were showered in fame and fortune. I mean, I even got my name in the library catalog. I won a write and illustrate your own book contest about an Egyptian kid who got lost in a sandstorm. My prize was library immortality - to this day, you can go check out my book and bring it home for three weeks if you so wish. I still can't believe they rejected my book featuring anthropomorphic cleaning supplies, but whatever. And yes, it was funny. Think Toy Story, just better and with Harry the Hand-Vac instead of Buzz Lightyear. (I actually do have this story floating around on a computer somewhere.)

And thus, by the age of 12, I was actually pretty loaded. I had amassed 750 dollars in savings bonds, redeemable at some date in the future. I never did cash the bonds because my dad refused to acknowledge that I had ever received the bonds when I asked where they were ten years later. Fine, be that way.

But every year, without fail, my mom made us enter the most annoying contest of all time. The AAA Traffic Safety Poster Contest. It was the stuff of nightmares.

It should have been easy enough. The deadline was mid-January. They gave you a theme. You made a poster illustrating the theme. You submitted it. Life went on.

But no. We had at least five kids entering the contest in any given year and nobody actually gave a poo except my mom, who insisted that the posters not only be the product of hours of unnecessary toil but that each and every one was unique. First, you had to think of a snappy slogan for the provided theme. Ugh. Then you had to think of an idea to illustrate the snappy slogan. Ugh. Then you had to trace your idea in pencil on the poster board. Ugh. Then mom had to tell you that your drawing sucked and needed more interest and symbolism. Ugh. Then you had to erase it all and start again. Ugh. Then you actually had to make the poster using some untried and untested medium, which was usually untried and untested for a reason.

The year I won first place in the contest (not to be confused with the year I won second place, or the year I won third place, or the year my brother won second place, or the year my sister won third place), the strongly-suggested medium of choice was cut paper. The theme was Road Safety at Night. The snappy slogan, strongly suggested by my mom, was Carry a Light at Night: It's a Bright Idea. The poster itself was a smiling girl standing on the side of a road holding a flashlight so it shined on the creepy slogan floating around in the sky at the top of the poster. Since I normally participated in art only if it involved laboriously tracing and transferring a map of Azerbaijan to my bedroom map wall, I thought I had done my part. But no. My mom said I needed more background interest and symbolism. So I made an owl, which was only one or two colors and fairly low effort.

Then it was time for the most annoying art project of all time. Cut paper. My mom insisted that my poster must not be colored with markers, no matter how fancy the markers, and it must not be decorated with glitter, no matter how sparkly the glitter. No, I had to cut everything from colored paper. Car headlights? Neon yellow paper, two circles, which were not good enough and had to be oval, so two ovals. Girl's nose? Pink paper, which even I admitted kind of looked like a peach cucumber growing out of her ear, so I had to change that too. We worked on this thing for three days straight. I even had to cut the owl's eyes out of paper. Those eyes were almost the death of me. They had to be tiny, because they were owl eyes, but they were so tiny that the glue didn't really make them stick too well. They kept falling off and I kept putting them back on. Pain. But finally, finally, finally, the poster was finished and my mom thought it was passable. We sent them in, two days late, because my mom's always late. Thanks, mom.

About six weeks later, the lady from the AAA Traffic Safety Poster Contest Board of Directors and Torturers rang me up. My poster had won first place and 250 bucks in savings bonds. I was a little happy, just a little.

"We loved your poster!" gushed the Director of Poster Contest Pain. "The slogan was so imaginative. We loved how you used paper to create the scene. You obviously put a lot of hard work into your poster."

If only you knew, if only you knew.

"But do you know what we liked the best?"

"What?"

"Well," said the Director of Poster Contest Pain, in a secretive tone, "We thought that the owl was a great touch. He was winking, just like he knew it was A Bright Idea!"

"Winking?" I was a little confused.

"Yes. You know, how you only put on one eye? It made him look so wise!"

Oh. Those stupid owl eyes. Only one of them had survived the grueling trip to headquarters by mail. And the Director of Poster Contest Pain thought that it was intentional and he was supposed to look wise. Oh.

And let me tell you, I took the money and ran. Well, after the awards banquet. I ran to the eclairs and then I took the money and ran.

Yeah, this would be why I still hate art, to this day. Thanks, mom.

On burping

As I've previously written, one of the reasons I love working in education is the freedom to be insane (within reason and legality) and the freedom to use insanity to get desired results.

This summer, I had six kids, four of whom were boys entering middle school. All awesome kids and all very Aspergery. They did what most boys entering middle school did, but then the Asperger's kicked in.

So all the kids would be sitting there working on something quietly and all of a sudden one of the boys would find it necessary to break the silence with the most epic belch of all time.

I glared. The kid would ask to be excused and be forgiven.

Several moments of silence.

Yet another epic belch.

I glared again. The kid would once again ask for forgiveness. But not before another boy would let his belch join the rising crescendo.

Exasperated, I'd ask why the heck they needed to spend a quarter of their summer burping as loudly as possible.

Oh, responded the Asperger's, because their stomach juices were spinning around and made the burps come up.

Well then.

So the next day, when the first belch broke the still morning air, I turned and faced the culprit and spoke both strongly and sternly.

"Kid, in this room, we have a burp quota. A quota means that you can only do something a certain number of times per day. In summer school, the burp quota is one. Because you just burped one time, you filled your burp quota and are not allowed to burp any more at school until tomorrow."

"Oh, OK, Miss Grace."

Another kid burped. I told him about the quota.

"Oh, OK, Miss Grace."

And from then on we all came to school, burped once, apologized once, and did not burp again the rest of the day. The end.

Pinning overthinking

I believe I've blogged (tangentially) about Pinterest a little bit in older posts. But let me just throw it out there - I heart Pinterest! It's colorful, fun, addicting, enlightening. It also makes me feel fat and makes me notice the flaws in my lack of interior decorating, but according to numerous ecards, those are totally normal feelings for us pinners. Overall, Pinterest is a wonderful thing. Heck, if it weren't for Pinterest, my summer school kids would not be doing half of the crafty junk we get to do, because my "art" consists of stick figures, geometric shapes, and derivatives. Not kidding about the derivatives. I rarely doodle, and the only real doodling time I had was in college, when I was taking calculus, and derivatives are curvy, mindless to draw, and make you look smart.

But of course, being Grace, I also love analyzing Pinterest. Pinterest boards are like the visual representations of the brains of random females (75% of users are women, if I'm remembering the stat correctly). See, my brain is full of random crap. Like this.

Grace's Brain Content

• Food is good
• Traveling is fun
• I sure hope I remembered to take my ADD meds this morning or I'm screwed
• Look at that random barn in the middle of that development
• Kids are awesome
• How can I milk my virtual Civilization cottages for maximum science
• What will happen in football in 2014
• Man I am so angsty about work
• Jewelry is so pretty and I'm such a scrooge dang it
• How can I inch ever closer to my goal of looking fashionable
• Dan doesn't do anything right and I hate him
• Dan is the perfect man and I love him
• I love working out because I can watch NFLNetwork and The First 48
• I hate working out because pain
• Please bipap don't explode
• Wow, the air is blowing way too hard in here
• Analyze analyze analyze analyze
• Sociology blogs
• Trade journals
• JCPenney's profit margin and viability status (no, really)

And according to Pinterest, this is what other people think about.

Typical Pinner Brain Content

• My future haircut 
• My kids
• Maximum mason jar efficiency
• Maximum old dresser redo efficiency
• Cute animals
• Stop abusing cute animals
• Look a cute bunny and a cute puppy ALL IN ONE PICTURE
• Easy crockpot meals
• The healing powers of kale and spirolina
• Working out for maximum efficiency
• Inspiration for working out for maximum efficiency 
• Hot shirtless males
• How to do photography
• Teaching stuff
• Craftivity instructions for maximum child abuse
• I'm so fashionable yet I ACTUALLY CURSE LIKE A SAILOR
• Harry Potter
• Other geeky things like Harry Potter
• Best books ever like Harry Potter

So I look at Pinterest and I analyze. What do women want? How do I become more standard population? Do I really have to find puppy pictures cute? Do I really have to shell out for spirolina? 

But I can analyze only so much with the limited sub-par data set I have (my own observations). That's OK, though, because people have actually analyzed Pinterest in academic journals already, confirming my observations and making me feel smart.

Here's some of the fun stuff about Pinterest that makes you question your motives for pinning that spirolina and kale shake recipe. Seriously, is it really you pinning the recipe, or is it the expression of the binary real/idealized self that's making you do it? (That's actually a thing, I've found).

Stuff About Pinterest That Makes You Go What

• Pinterest is by-and-large a female domain - seventy-five percent or more of all users are women.
• The prototypical pinner is a college-educated woman ages 18 to 49 (like me!).
• Although pinners are heavily female, male pinners are more likely to have their pins shared.
• Words expressing positive emotions are common in Pinterest descriptions (love, happy, etc.). Words expressing negative emotions are rare.
• When compared to other social network sites like Twitter, Pinterest users use a lot of action words (do, need, want, should), while Twitter users use words suggesting immediacy (morning, tonight, right now).
• The most common words found in Pinterest descriptions include love, make, chicken, Christmas, cute, cream, chocolate, made, wedding, recipe, best, butter, ideas, and want.
• The most followed boards are travel, education, health and fitness, and home decor.
• Five percent of pins are original, uploaded content. The other 95% are repinned from existing sites. Google Images and Etsy are the most popular.
• I've seen a lot of pin descriptions that go something like "I love this site for house design! Must pin and read later!". This is actually a thing. A good hunk of pin descriptions rely on first-person language. 
• Data analysts have found the perfect Pinterest picture, and it's everything you probably thought it would be - delicious-looking food arranged artfully in a dish and photographed off-center (I don't know the photographical name for this technique).
• If you want your pin to be repinned 23% more than everybody else's lame pins, make sure you crop out your head when you take pictures of your fashionable self grabbing a Starbucks. Case in point:

• Follow me on Pinterest if you want to be subjected to pins about highway on-ramp designs appearing in your news feed.

Everything Is Awesome: Housing 1

I think, sometimes, that graduating college and not taking any classes for a two-year period (but now I'm baaaaaack!) was one of the best things that happened to me in terms of understanding the world in a Grace kind of way - the way where I analyze the social constructs that led us as a nation to think that grabbing a coffee at Starbucks is fun. Paradoxically, that's also how I have fun - analyzing social constructs at Starbucks while drinking... Starbucks. You know how you make a tall-decaf-skinny-cinnamon-dolce-latte-please taste so much better even with the empty calories? Corporate social responsibility and America's search for the communal third place. Oh yeah.

About two years ago I read a book called The Warmth of Other Suns. It's 640 pages of beautiful writing by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist about the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North during the 20th century told through the life experiences of three people. This book literally changed the way I look at the world, which is ironic, because usually I try to avoid books by journalists because they're often pretty sensationalist and not backed up by footnotes, and I always avoid books with a terrifying page count because ADD doesn't usually let me read beyond 250 pages without losing interest and moving on. This book explains a major reason for the present composition of our communities, and manages to do that in a way with incredible emotional impact - and remember, I'm half Vulcan. A two-word sentence doesn't usually make me cry, but this time it did. You all should seriously read this book. I promise they don't mention corporate social responsibility anywhere in the book.

But anyway, Warmth of Other Suns sparked one of my vaguely-creepy interests in housing. (It also made me a huge fangirl of the author, and I actually got her to autograph my copy, something I've never felt the need to do previously.) The spatial composition of America (translation: where we live and why we live there) is so important to your opportunities, your economic status, your social status, your perspectives, your life experiences. OK, now I'm just going off on a tangent.

Houses are fascinating. A little more than a hundred years ago, only a third of the American population lived in or near the cities. Cities were not especially fun places to live in the 1800s. Basically, there were a lot of people squished together, and there was no trash service, no indoor toilets, minimal public hygiene, and no separation of functional buildings, which meant you could live right next door to a 24-hour textile factory. Summer in the city was rarely fun due to the yearly epidemics of a variety of deadly diseases. To be fair, though, rural life wasn't much fun, either. If you lived on a farm, and you lived on a farm prior to the development of modern agricultural technologies, you were normally a subsistence farmer and could starve or lose your home if it didn't rain for like two weeks when it should have been raining. And while you weren't living in a city of half a million and didn't have to deal with piles of trash in your back yard, you also weren't living in a city of half a million and didn't usually have access to people like doctors. It was a lose-lose situation for lots of people, and if some health magazine starts going on about how we've polluted the earth and everyone is sick and unhealthy and we need to get back to the days when everyone respected the earth, I'll see you a failed potato crop and raise you a cholera epidemic.  

And here we are, 150 years later. I think, don't quote me on it, that the last statistic for the urban/rural balance was 80/20. How the heck did that happen?

Tune in next time for the exciting conclusion!

Grace the motivational speaker

One of the reasons I love working with elementary-school students is because I can, within the limits of professionalism and human kindness, mess with their minds to coax out the desired results.

While I certainly have a very dry sense of humor, it doesn't really make an appearance most of the time. I think slowly in situations that require a lot of verbal interactions, which is why I generally suck at life and socializing. I'm often jealous of Dan and his perfectly-timed zingers. He's drummed up quite a reputation at work for being, well, hilarious. I normally can't pull this off unless my meds are somehow working in high gear and everything is going in high gear. Most of the time somebody will make a comment or ask me a question and I'll start stuttering, make some kind of feeble non-remark ("Wow!" "That's cool!" "Really?"), randomly insert the wrong sounds into common words ("I love to raid! No, wait, I love to road! No, I mean I love to read!"), or, my favorite no-no, I'll stumble over my own monosyllabic utterances to such an extent that I accidentally spit at the other person, mercifully ending just another awkward episode of Grace making friends. Thankfully, I have strong writing skillz which allow me to be as dry and sarcastic as humanly possible on paper. I have heard that the writing process is channeled through a different segment of the brain than the verbal awesomeness part, which is good for you, as otherwise you'd be reading an awful lot of yeahs and uh-huhs on this blog.

But when it comes to kids... I'm much better with the verbal sarcasm. A very good part of this, I'm sure, is that I'm a lot more comfortable with those of us ages thirteen and younger. Kids don't have fully-developed social acuity yet and usually chalk up my failed stuttered sarcastic jabth to my advanced age of grandmotherhood (I know I'm not fat because no child has ever told me I'm fat. I'm not sure, however, how old I am because one child asked me how many grandchildren I had.). Also, thinking quickly in kid time is like thinking slowly in adult time, so I can really hold my own with the second-graders.

So I eventually learned to use my sarcastic weirdness for good in the school setting. Depending on the student population of the day, I'd set the limits, turn on the charm, and then just go nuts. My formula was generally this.

1. Tell kids what to do.
2. Veer into insanity.

This formula worked especially well with those kids who were a little harder to crack than the others. For some kids, you could ask them nicely to do their math problems, and they'd do it. No need to go to step two. For some kids, you could tell them to answer question three on their paper, and they'd tell you to go jump off a cliff, or at least out a second-story window.

One second-grade student, who we'll call Jaden because just about every other second-grader in that particular school was named Jaden, became my poster child for my formula. I was subbing for the learning support teacher and was trying to complete a reading lesson with Jaden. Jaden had other ideas.

It's not like I missed a step. I did tell Jaden what to do. Questions one through five in lesson five. It'd only take him five minutes to do, if he actually sat down and did it.

Jaden gave me a withering look. I was a sub. He was eight. It was clear who was winning out in this game.

"Miss, I ain't doing reading today."

"Oh?" I said.

"Yeah. I did my reading yesterday. You're not the teacher, so you can't tell me what to do."

I couldn't really argue with that logic, but I was the adult here. It was time to implement step two of The Plan.

"Jaden," I said, trying to be all secretive and confiding but probably just coming off as really creepy, "Trust me, you want to do your work."

"No."

"Well, you want to know why you should do your reading?"

"No."

"I'll tell you anyway. If you don't finish your reading, then I'm going to eat your lunch tomorrow."

Jaden looked a little shocked.

"You ain't gonna eat my lunch. You ain't gonna even be here tomorrow. Miss Smith will be here tomorrow."

"Exactly! Miss Smith will be busy in here. You'll be doing the reading you missed with her, so I'll be able to go on down to the cafeteria and get your lunch and eat it."

Jaden was wavering. I could see the terror rising. The threat of chocolate milk deprivation could do that to you.

"Miss, I know you ain't gonna eat my lunch. You don't even know what we having."

"Pizza, pineapple, and corn. Chocolate milk." Thank you, Miss Smith, for having a very messy desk topped by the lunch menu. But seriously, sub plans go at the top of the pile, not the bottom.

"Chocolate milk?"

"Chocolate milk!" I said, enthusiastically. Time to come back from the edge a bit and get some work out of Jaden. "Although, I don't really like chocolate milk too much. I might let you have the chocolate milk."

"Miss," chided Jaden, "You should like chocolate milk. Everybody likes chocolate milk."

"Well, I'll try it. I used to drink it when I was a kid, but it really tastes too sweet for me now. In fact, maybe I won't eat your lunch tomorrow if I can have a taste of your chocolate milk when I come back some day."

"Sure," said Jaden, now totally thinking about chocolate milk and not about work refusal, "I'll give you some, Miss! It's really great. I love it. Sometimes my mom, she buys it for me, but I always drink it for lunch. I wish I could only drink chocolate milk for the rest of my life."

"I'm looking forward to having some! Look, though, we've only got fifteen minutes before you have to get packed up. Let's see if we can quick get through your reading before it's time to go."

Would he bite?

Jaden sat up straight and picked up a pencil.

"OK, miss. Which questions again?"

"One, two, three, four, and five."

"Oh!" he squealed. "I did five questions yesterday, too! That was easy. This will be so easy."

Thus did the power of humor triumph over the power of eight. The battle was won. Jaden did his work. I never did, unfortunately, have the chance to pretend that I actually was going to drink chocolate milk, because I never subbed in that classroom again. Which is part of the sadness of subbing, but that's for a future post. This post is all about the funny.

Seven

My student, like many autistic kids, repeats a variety of words and phrases throughout the day. It's some kind of self-stimulation, which is great for the kid, but not so great for those of us who don't like to hear AND THEN, THOMAS THUNDERED BY for the 832nd time that day. It can get pretty annoying after a while. Occasionally, at least, you'll get the kids who repeat such random stuff that I can't help but laugh. Like the kid who would make his voice the deepest, growliest voice you ever did hear, cover his mouth with his hand, and then start belting out Frosty the Snowman. Or the kid who would repeat the Microsoft Windows voice-assisted start-up menu. Or the kid who would repeat the DVD menu options... but only in Japanese. They're hilarious. Except when their stim is leaning over really close next to your ear and giving out ear-curdling screams (like my little guy used to do.).

Anyway, my current student doesn't have much language, and what he has is usually unintelligible to those of us who don't watch the television shows he must be watching on a daily basis. Some of what he says I can make out, like I'M JESSICA. No, you're not Jessica, I'll remind him. He usually stares at me, shrieks in annoyance, and tells me I'M JESSICA once again, just louder and that much closer to the don't-tell-me-no-or-I'll-attack-you mood. Ear-curdling screams were so much more my thing.

But more than anything, I really can't stand when my kid repeats one word in particular. He'll say "seven" throughout the day, but he accents the second syllable and drags it out, so it comes out as SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN. It just lacks the entertainment value of demonic Frosty, frankly. It's also killing my summer.

I like Sudoku. In my ever more fervent quest to find relaxing activities that do not involve food and/or vassalizing virtual civilizations and taking their dyes, all the dyes, I try to do Sudoku, but there are numbers in Sudoku.

So, I've put all nine sixes on the grid. I have a four here, and an eight here, so this box must be a SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN.

No, Grace, concentrate. It's summer. Everyone retains at least one item of clothing on their bodies at all times. Your biweekly trips to get your glasses fixed are no longer necessary. You can let your work go and just relax.

So here's the eight, and this much be a sev- SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN.

Seriously, kid? December through June, and you only missed school one day. Let me have my summer.

SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN!

At which point I let loose several words that are not appropriate for a classroom environment, throw down my Sudoku puzzle, and go do something else. Like play Civilization.

Oh look, I just met the seventh civilization on the map!

SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN!

Shut up, you. I'm playing Civilization right now and it is 770 BC and I'm having fun.

SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN!

You're enjoying this, Grace. Just focus on making a trade with Shaka for his dye. It's a good one, he's offering you 7 gold per turn!

SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN!

At which point I throw the computer, cry, and go hide under the covers and try to sleep.

But sometimes, when I can't get to sleep, I count from one to one hundred in my head.

SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN! SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN! SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN! SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN! 

No! Go away! No! No!

SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN! SEVEEEEEEEEEEEN!

And slowly, ever so slowly, I slip further into oblivious insanity.

Grace accidentally overdoses on....

So, here's a picture of me in a hospital bed looking disturbingly chipper. If I recall, I was happy and smiling because Dan had arrived to cheer me up. The medical staff had also just decided to kick me out of the hospital, which was also quite cheering. I had gone by ambulance to the hospital and had survived, which was probably the best thing that had happened to me in the past 24 hours.

The story begins way, way back when I was very young and my mom was trendy before her time. My mom was all-natural, raw, and organic before 95% of the civilized population would even touch plain yogurt with cream on the top. I have terrified memories of mom's special smoothie that I nicknamed Hair for its hair-like, mangled threads of an unknown green vegetable. A few of my siblings were even subjected to cloth diapers. They functioned like regular diapers, except with pins and periodic visits from the diaper truck (I'd love to know if they still exist) to remove the stinky diapers and provide mom's victims with clean diapers. Long after my mom realized that American mothers overwhelmingly swore by Pampers for a reason, the clean diaper extras hung around our house as cleaning rags. Yes, our dining room table was wiped down for years with diapers. Ponder that statement for a moment. There were other awful things, too, like cod liver oil at breakfast. I'm surprised I lived past the age of twelve.

At any rate, for many years, unfortunately coinciding with most of my childhood, my mom was so hardcore healthy that she didn't do other important things like Tylenol. Actually, I'll qualify that. She did do Tylenol, but only when we were sick, like fever and chills sick. We didn't do Tylenol for, you know, pain. Headache? Pain. Twisted ankle? Pain. Muscle aches? Pain. She told me one time that Advil was bad because it altered your DNA, or something wonky like that. (For the record, my mom saw the errors of her ways after she took Advil once for a migraine and it did things like take away pain. She no longer engages in most of the questionable practices detailed above.) MomLogic was such that meds were bad and would kill you. Pineapple juice infused with two cups of kale was magical.

Understandably, when I was 18, the first thing I did was buy some Tylenol. Then I registered to vote, and because I'm boring, that's all I did with my legality. I'd pop those pills whenever I hurt for more than two or three hours at a time, which was actually pretty rare (no, it wasn't the power of cod liver oil). But I must have popped the pills often enough, because....

In my senior year of college, I had cramps. I took Tylenol. Tylenol did zilch. I took two Tylenol. Two Tylenol did zilch. I was in the library at the time, and I sat down on a chair and just started crying because it hurt so much. I was in quite a bit of pain, but I managed to get myself up to the campus health center. The nurse gave me some kind of pills for the pain. I don't remember what they were, but they worked very well! No pain! The nurse told me to take them every few hours as needed. And so I did, remaining pain-free for the rest of the day. I went to sleep as happy as a clam.

I woke up at 3 AM with my heart beating very rapidly. I was sweating and shaking. I am generally healthy (as in I don't usually get sick, but I do have a lot of fatigue/physical issues) and I didn't know what the heck was happening. I called the ambulance on myself and got a free ride over to the hospital (thanks, insurance that lapsed soon afterwards!).

Once I was admitted, I started to get very anxious. I usually experience anxiety physically before I become anxious mentally. But once I start getting physical symptoms, my mental anxiety goes through the roof. I was so nervous at the thought of kicking the bucket right there and then that I felt like I was crawling out of my skin.

I've found that there are two ways to calm myself down a bit if I am anxious. I can try to out-logicize myself and determine the actual versus the perceived dangers of the situation. Since I was currently possibly near death, I couldn't use that technique. I can also try to distract myself by talking. Sometimes it makes me feel better to just talk about the situation; sometimes it helps to talk about something totally random. And that's how the hospital intern got a quick overview of the development of feudalism. I hope he enjoyed it. Serfs up!

So while I was precariously balancing on a tiny footpath spanning the Great Chasm of Life and Death, they ran a few tests and took an x-ray. After what seemed like an eternity, wait, no, I wasn't there yet because I wasn't dead yet, so after what seemed like very close to an eternity, the intern came back to deliver the death sentence.

Long and short of it, I had accidentally overdosed on the generic pain meds from the health center. At the same time, I hadn't actually taken more than the prescribed dose. I was kind of mystified. How had I overdosed? Well, explained the intern, the pills contained caffeine. I had way too much caffeine, and it had made my heart race.

Let me reiterate. 

I had overdosed. On caffeine. Because I had apparently put the equivalent of a Red Bull into my system.

Caffeine.

Caffeine!

On the plus side, I'm sure I couldn't have been the only person out there who mistook the symptoms of too much caffeine for the symptoms of a heart attack. And I was already the weirdo who coped by spouting random information about feudalism, so the intern probably thought I was just a little kooky, not a hypochondriac.

I blame this little episode on my mother. Caffeine was not good for children. Soda with caffeine was particularly evil. Up until that point, my caffeine intake was probably the equivalent of two cups of coffee per year. I just had no idea what too much caffeine felt like.

I was discharged shortly thereafter, but not before Dan snapped my picture as a commemoration of my discovery of the highly popular stimulant of caffeine. The intern told me that next time I should just take an Advil or two because it worked differently than Tylenol.

I went home and I bought some Advil. While it's probably not news to the rest of the world, I'd just like to say that I do take Advil for most aches and pains, and it works quite well. I do ration the stuff like crazy, though. I have no wish to built up a tolerance.

I also started drinking coffee from that point forward. I discovered I liked coffee. I drank decaf and regular mixed together for a while, but I'll now drink a fully-caffeinated cup as a coping mechanism for my energy-draining job. Hopefully I won't die, and I hope that if I ever get carted off again, I'll have overdosed on something a little less wimpy than caffeine.

Summer vacation begins!

So this is it, guys! I'm finally on summer vacation!

It took sooooo long to get to this point. I know I've probably run this subject into the ground by now, but it's worth repeating, one more time. I had a very long, tough year, where I was put into the (not very fun) position of having to advocate for the kids within the classroom. It really tore me up inside, which is why I keep blabbing about the topic. And I still really, really miss my Little Guy. I hope he's doing okay (I've heard some conflicting reports.... and many non-committal reports... I get the distinct feeling nobody quite knows how he is because nobody's quite thought to look into it). I hope he's retained some of his communication skills (again, I've heard conflicting reports). I think way too much about what I could have done better for him. I think I did all I could, but when you get attached to one of these kids, it never seems like it's enough. I'm not sure where I'll be next year, but I do know that I'll be a very different person from last year, in many ways.

On the plus side, I did get the Little Guy to the point where he had a "vocabulary" of about 20 words (using PECS), which was up from the two words he had when I met him (using signs and PECS). When I left, he could say puzzle, marshmallow, bathroom, fork, spoon, napkin, TV, pillow, blanket, locker, lunchbox, bagel, gym, playground, Potato Head, playdoh, drink, bus, book, and shoes. When I got him he could say marshmallow and bathroom. I really wanted to teach him yes and no, but it was way too abstract for him at that point. But there was definitely progress, at least...

But back to summer vacation....

We just came back from a really wonderful trip to Los Angeles. Well, technically it was a wonderful trip to San Gabriel, which is a suburb of LA with much more affordable hotel rates. And technically it was a Chinese ethnoburb of LA, which was AWESOME. There were dozens of Chinese restaurants within a five minute walk of the hotel, all very good and all very cheap. We spent a huge amount of our time eating everything in sight. I came back much more lumpy than usual, but that's okay, because at least there was jook and scallion pancakes. We went to a few wineries, drove to the beach, went to the California Citrus State Park, went to a few aircraft museums (Dan went and took all these pictures of random airplanes; since I don't know or care I nodded and smiled and said "That's nice, honey," when necessary), went to museum with a replica of a Roman villa and tons of Roman art, met up with relatives, and drove way too much. It was really, really great. Oh, and we had cable television!

Now it's on to the rest of summer vacation, where Grace is ecstatic for about two weeks then dies of boredom until the middle of August. I do teach summer school during July, so I will have some of the structure required for being Grace. I have big plans for this summer, including decorating the house and going to the library regularly, but since I'm Grace, most of my plans will probably not happen due to attention span difficulties. I think I'll be pretty happy if I do get some house stuff done. Our walls are still blank and we've been here a year. I'll also be trying to, well, relax. I know I've mentioned in previous posts that I have huge difficulties trying to relax (and I am very aware of the paradox - if you have to try to relax you're already pushing the issue, which kind of doesn't make it relaxing), and it's really the area of my life where I need to focus, strangely enough. I tend to swing towards extremes - either I'm lying on the couch in a catatonic state for six hours watching football games from 2012 or I'm doing stuff for every minute of my waking hours. Neither of which is good for me. Since my attention span is so short, I start feeling anxious after I've been doing one thing for more than about an hour at a time, but because my attention span is short, I have trouble organizing my time. Yes, relaxing is tough.

The child beatdown

In today's entry, I'm going to give the lowdown on the child beatdown.

I'm not a parent. I wish I were a parent, because then I would finally understand what everyone is talking about when they tell me "Well, when you become a mom, you'll understand". I don't like being clueless and in the dark about something, because then I feel stupid. I'm also convinced that being a mom will make me a better manager of life in general, because I've heard it to be so. I've also heard that the daily expulsion of the bodily emissions of most young children rivals the daily volume of water spilling over Niagara Falls. Having been one of the three lucky people elected to do diaper damage control with a non-verbal, very low-functioning, very large girl whose mother had laced her milk with laxatives, I think I might be ready for that part.

But I think, hopefully, crossing my fingers so I don't look stupid in five years, that I will be a good mom, because I have been well-schooled in the child beatdown.

I've been privileged (?) to experience the gamut of classrooms in the past five-plus years. All kinds of kids, with all kinds of needs, personalities, and attitudes. And unless the child has really severe issues, they all are able to follow directions, shut up, listen, and otherwise avoid being a huge pain in the rear.

And I've been in a lot of classrooms where the kids are all huge pains in the rear. They don't listen to the teacher, or the aide, or whoever has authority in the classroom. They do what they want, and little more. This can happen for one of several different reasons, but one is incredibly common, and it has a quick solution.

Problem: Children do not stop when they are told to stop.
Solution: Child beatdown.

Problem: Children do what they are told, but not before the fifth time they are told.
Solution: Child beatdown.

Problem: Children do whatever the heck they want.
Solution: Child beatdown.

The child beatdown is an ancient method of child control. Not only is it ancient, it's rapidly becoming a lost art. Many people believe they are using the child beatdown and it doesn't work, when instead they are using the child tenderlovingpatontheheaddown, which doesn't work. It's not rocket science, especially to you parents (I'm assuming, since I'm not a parent), but I'm shocked at how many teachers don't use the child beatdown. Heck, I didn't really know that I was supposed to use the child beatdown until about two years ago.

The child beatdown is the fool-proof method of getting kids to listen to you (disclaimer: "kids" meaning small people twelve and under, because after they turn thirteen, they're not kids anymore, they're just surly people who sleep and eat at your house). The beatdown is based on the premise that kids don't give a hoot about what you say, but they do care about what you do. Here's the method.

Scenario: You are working with a child at a table. You are sitting in a chair. The kid is supposed to be sitting in the chair, but instead he's fooling around and is only half sitting on the chair. You want him to sit correctly.

You: Sit nicely. Bottom on the chair, feet on the floor.

The kid keeps wriggling around.

You: Sit nicely, or you will lose your chair and you will have to stand.

The kid keeps wriggling around.

You: You are not sitting nicely. Now you will stand.

The kid stops wriggling around, because he is now standing.

Congratulations! You have just applied the child beatdown! You have told the child you will do something, and you have done something. Depending on the kid, it might take a few more times, but for many kids, they will never again wriggle around on the chair in your presence. And if they do, no sweat, because then they lose the chair and can't wriggle.

This is the step-by-step method of the child beatdown as illustrated above. It can be applied to many common situations where the kid is being a pain in the rear.

Step One. Tell the kid what you want him to do. Tell him exactly what he should do. Niceties are not necessary, and may actually hurt your case (so please, please don't say "Sit, please"). You also have to use the I Mean Business Voice, as described below.
Step Two. Repeat what you want the kid to do. Tell him that if he does not do what you ask, pain, suffering, and beatings (hence the child beatdown) will follow. Be specific about the beatings, too. Things like "If you do that one more time, you'll be in a lot of trouble!" is not specific enough.
Step Three. Tell the kid that he did not do what you asked, and you will now administer the beatings, or whatever it was that you specifically mentioned in Step Two.
Step Four. Relish the look of dawning realization on the kid's face. The child now understands that you are not to be trifled with. He will think twice before crossing you again. Muahahaha.

I could say a lot more about the child beatdown, but I won't. I will simply encourage you to find out for yourself, by administering many beatings. Detailed to the kid before the actual beatings, of course.

And, of course, there's the I Mean Business Voice, which is a wonderful tool to use in conjunction with the child beatdown. I literally practiced talking in this voice in my kitchen, and it works so well it's scary. I work with kids with very limited cognition and receptive language, and they still respond to the I Mean Business Voice. There are only two parts to the Voice.

Tone. Since I taught kids with emotional problems, who comprise one of the few groups of kids with whom you do not want to use the I Mean Business Voice, I kept my voice very light, even, and friendly when trying to use the Voice for quite a while. See, with the behavior kids, they say "F--- you!" and you ignore it until they're calmer, or say something noncommittal, because if you sound threatening in any way shape or form, they will say "F--- you!" about fifty more times in the next five minutes and also possibly try to run out of the building into traffic. True story. Anyway, I digress. When you use the Voice, you do not talk in your normal everyday tone. You shouldn't sound like you're talking to your sister about the movie you saw last night. When using the Voice, use the tone of your everyday voice as a reference, then go about an octave lower. When you speak, enunciate your words clearly, and with oomph. Try to push the child beatdown out of your soul into your words. Speak like this is serious business.
Words. Just... tell the kid what to do. Again, don't add niceties. If you go down an octave and say in your deepest, strongest, most impressive tone "Sit in the chair... thank you", it really loses something. And don't thank the kid for complying. They didn't just do something nice for you that you need to thank them for. They're doing what you asked them to do, which is what you expect anyway. (But if they're sitting nicely in the chair and you didn't have to tell them to sit nicely, by all means, tell the child he's sitting very nicely). AND... just in case you do feel the need to thank the kid for complying, don't thank them for sitting nicely.... while they're not sitting nicely.

So that's what you gotta do if you teach kids. It's probably good for parenting, too, although I wouldn't know. But it really does work. It was always interesting doing this when I was subbing because I only saw the kids periodically. I remember the one kid I had in a group at the beginning of the year. He refused to do his work and fake cried for the half an hour I had him, thus, I did not give him his smiley face for the period. I worked with him about two dozen more times through the rest of the year and never had any kind of problem again. Child beatdown works.

What's your talent?

Everyone, it seems, has talents. But some people, however, have a talent, and then they have a talent. It's like how everyone is special, but some of us are more special than others.

And Nobody Ever Forgot The Date

So how do you remember your wedding anniversary? The first date? The special times?

Grace Updates: April Version

Grace's busy season is thankfully coming to a close. Grace is also currently laid up at home post-oral surgery subsisting on ice cream and Vicodin (it's actually the Vicodin that's incapacitating me the most... it makes me too groggy to do much of anything besides eat ice cream, but if I don't take the Vicodin, I'm in pain). Grace concludes that this is an excellent time to catch up on blog writing, which has been too inconsistent for the past two or three months. Grace will now proceed to write a blog post. Beep. End transmission.

Everything Is Awesome: Zoning Ordinances

I'm weird and I like weird things. Because I am a narcissist with a blog, you probably know this by now, but I'll repeat it, just because I'm that self-obsessed.

When you are the lone resident of Grace World, Everything Is Awesome. I'm sure I've mentioned the awesomeness of fruit history before, and the awesomeness of school architecture, but there are many awesome things to be experienced in Grace World. Like highway rest stops. When I was in high school, I told my mom that when I grew up and because a photojournalist, my first project would be to document the intricacies of life along the interstate, complete with close-up photos of disgusting bathroom tiling and roadkill squashed flat in the parking lot. Having experienced the pain of upstate New York "rest stops" with no AC or sewage facilities, rest stops are no longer quite that awesome, unfortunately. Traffic congestion is still pretty fascinating, though.

Kohl's Kills

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I get overstimulated easily. This could be a part of ADD, this could be my hypothesized borderline Asperger's, or it could just be Grace being Grace, the ultimate Oversensitive Princess. But it does give me at least one more excuse to stay home and hide on the weekends.

Shopping for clothing, although I love it, is hard.

Shopping for food is also hard.

Noisy restaurants are hard.

The Search: Trials and Tribulations

I consider myself a casual academic. Basically, I love learning and thinking about the kinds of involved, obtuse subjects written up in research journals, but I don't have access to the data or resources to actually conduct my own research. Like I'd love to research supermarket scanning data (what goes into shoppers' carts at the checkout line), but do you really think Nielsen is going to let me have that information for any less than $100,000 and an academic research grant? Yeah, OK. I probably should have gone into a doctorate program to satisfy my lust for information, but it wasn't until recently that I discovered where my Aspergery interests lie (economic and spatial sociology... the study of how economics influences why we live and work the way we live and work in the areas we live and work). Also, the couch is comfy. I like my comfy couch depression. I can't believe I created a rear end depression in the couch in only nine months.

An Ode to Facebook

Facebook and I hit freshman year at the same time. I was awkward and eighteen, Facebook was unpolished and geeky. The both of us were insular, too; that year neither of us stretched our horizons any farther than the main campus drag. But Facebook, with all its growing pains, opened up a whole new world for me, myself, and I. Facebook showed me that there were people out there, hanging out and probably drinking or doing some other unspeakable act with enthusiastic debauchery, living only a few hundred yards away from my adopted library nook. Facebook showed me that even if I wasn’t pretty, even if I wasn’t an extrovert, I could still stalk people with wild abandon.

Various updates

Here's your bi-monthly Grace Updates and Thoughts Post.

• For Lent I am giving up all fun food - in my definition, all food that is sweet. In theory, this is not that hard for me to do. I'm not a snack person, I'm not huge on packaged desserts, I'm usually too lazy to make my own desserts, and I don't have to buy ice cream every time I'm at the store. The problem is that Dan keeps buying me chocolate on sale. I have a couple bags of Ghirardelli chocolates, 5+ bars of Endangered Species Chocolate (my favorite due to the absolutely random name), an entire commercial display of chocolate truffles, and a sample of everything Walgreens had to offer in the aftermath of Valentine's Day. So basically I have to avoid chocolate like the plague for six weeks, which is mighty difficult, considering I have an entire cupboard cabinet exclusively devoted to storing chocolate. I have endured three full days of the torture. Last year I survived three weeks before giving in. Let's see how long this lasts.
• I'm taking two accelerated classes at DeSales this semester towards my Accounting degree. I just finished taking Legal Environment of Business, which is the we're-unique new new new updated Business Law. As is happening more and more often through the confluence of age and meds, I was more relaxed during this class. Little pressure to excel or study my day away. I was like, you know, a B+ is not that bad. I've survived a B+ before with my perfection complex intact (although that happened in freshman year of college... shhhhhhh!). I didn't actually make a decision to try to fail, but I did tell myself I was OK with it. So I didn't study too hard, browsed Pinterest on my phone during class, and tried my hardest not to care about legal terms and arbitrary grading. Unfortunately, just as I had tried my hardest to fail that one quiz in Roman History class because it only counted for 2% of my grade and I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't that much of a nerd, I got an A. Darn.
• Work is coming along. The whole mess in the classroom earlier this year did a lot to sour me towards education. There really is a lot wrong with the system, and it's very frustrating to work within the system and kind of bang your head against the way day after day after day. My new classroom is full of people who really do love the kids and want to do their best for them, but it still has its (thankfully normal) classroom problems. It's OK. I was successful in beginning the process of making Small Girl do things like sit and listen and work, partly through the Power of Me, and partly through my coworkers realizing that, oh wait, Small Girl does have the ability to sit for more than 15 seconds at a time. But truly, I just miss my little guy in the other classroom. I keep asking everyone who goes into that classroom on a regular basis about how he's doing. I get a lot of generalities, because to them he's just another kid in just another crazy classroom. Just not to me.
• I am suffering through the NFL offseason. Seriously, I need football to sustain my attention span. I marked the beginning of free agency on my Google Calendar and drive Dan nuts by wanting to watch all the condensed games since the beginning of September. He wants to watch movies, not watch the Raiders and the Jets flail around and fumble the ball, but I need more more more. Four days until free agency. :-(
• I continue in my quest to be more feminine and hott, read more fashion magazines, browse more Pinterest, obsess over more recipes, and drink more sugary coffee drinks (I've especially enjoyed that last one). Ooo, and Etsy. I think I made some disparaging post about how people sold absolute beep on Etsy for exorbitant prices. I still think that's true (one day you find this beautiful bracelet on sale for forty bucks, then the next day you find the charms for that beautiful bracelet on sale for twenty cents a pop), but heck if I've realized that there are many exceptions! I stumbled upon the awesome work of glass bottle jewelry, where people make and sell stuff like this. Now that's something I can get into. 

I now leave this post to study the state of the dairy industry for my marketing plan. You never know when those random trade magazines that are totally not written with your everyday consumer in mind will come in handy.

Grace off the schedule

Well, it's been a while.

I don't have any particular excuse, except maybe the snow. As I age, I'm becoming more and more reliant on a very scheduled day to maintain my sanity, a quirk I'm sure I'll get over within then next five years or so. So the snow cancels plans, it screws up my daily whiteboard schedule and forces me to lie on the couch and do nothing all day. And by nothing I mean wipe out Isabella and Genghis Khan before 10 AD, build ten different wonders, accidentally build my Palace in some random little ex-Spanish tundra city I forgot to raze, curse Sid Meier to the high heavens, and then get overrun by Mehmed and his 1000000000 cavalry units and die a horrible death. Oh, and then my final score enshrines me in the annals of history right smack dab next to Dan Quayle. Stupid Civilization. Stupid Dan Quayle.

But I have obviously digressed. Basically, if I get off the schedule, all hell breaks loose, although I've been dealing with it a little better recently. I get anxious and grouchy when things do not go according to plan, which is often. Which is also why I don't travel well, because there's no schedule and things like traffic.

And what's one of the ways Grace copes with anxiety? Hint: it's not with alcohol or hott yoga.

Well, one time, when I was in college, I was in the library one day and got cramps. Very bad cramps. VERY bad. And my preferred medications were not working.

I dragged myself over to the health center, literally crying the entire way there. I told the staff nurse that I had very bad cramps and they were not going away. She gave me some meds that wouldn't interfere with what I had already ingested and sent me on my way.

The meds worked, and I was terrified of feeling things like pain, so I just kept popping those pills all day long and all night long. I don't remember how many I took, I just remember that I didn't hurt for the rest of the day, and that was totally awesome. I went to bed as happy as a clam.

I woke up around three in the morning with my heart racing and sweat pouring down my face. Something was obviously quite wrong. I'm strangely very calm in emergency situations, it's just the whole I-have-to-go-to-the-bathroom-and-there's-a-line type that sends me over the edge. Thankfully, I did have (crappy) college health insurance at the time, so I called the ambulance on myself. I read a lot of medical encyclopedias growing up (this was in the 90s and pre-MedlinePlus), so I was not taking any chances with a possible heart attack.

So after they carted me off to the hospital and I was stuck in bed doing nothing but thinking about cardiac arrests, my anxiety started going through the roof. What was the matter with me? Would I die? Would this be my last night on earth? Could I get someone to bring in my homework for my 7:55 AM class pre-coma?

I was trembling, I was sweating, I was a nervous wreck. I had to do something, and I had to do it quick.

"Excuse me," I asked the nice young tech dude, who probably had no idea what he was getting into. "Could I ask you something?"

"Of course. What would you like to know?"

"Do you mind if I tell you why the practice of feudalism took hold in Europe before the Medieval Period?"

"Uh.... OK, sure!" Poor nice young tech dude.

And for the next twenty minutes I discussed the historical development of feudalism. I had to think pretty dang hard about it to come up with a fairly cohesive monologue, and all that thinking effectively drowned out all the thinking about possible death. I chilled out significantly.

So that little episode showed me one way to deal with anxiety. I just have to think harder about something else, which is why I wiped out Isabella ten different ways over a three-week period. Civilization is the cure for all evil. All of it.





Oh, and what exactly was wrong with me?

The health center meds contained added caffeine equivalent to six cups of coffee. I didn't start to drink coffee until after I graduated college. No, I was not dying, I had simply overdosed on caffeine. I didn't even know it was possible to overdose on caffeine. Live and learn, live and learn.

Grace gets hott hair

Sometimes, when Dan comes home from work after an abnormally warm day, he'll have a question for me.

"Grace, why is it that whenever it goes above 70, all the Lehigh girls hang out outside the library all day doing homework in their bikinis?"

"I have no idea, Dan," is my canned answer. "You'll have to ask a girl that question."

I'm an odd bird, and I know it. I also flaunt it, possibly because I have a inferiority complex and an innate, desperate need for attention and affirmation, but possibly because I'm comfortably out of the finding-yourself stage and have chosen to obnoxiously trumpet my awesomeness. Normal People are a dime a dozen, but I can truly boast that there aren't many other people out there like me who welcome the sunlight on a regular basis. Who else is gonna be your friendly neighborhood font of dairy industry trends, anyway?

One of the (many) things that make me unique is that I am a very, very late bloomer. Imagine, ladies, that you didn't discover your feminine qualities until you were 26. That's me. Before I was 26 and was ushered into womanhood through the combination of the life-changing experience of teaching incarcerated middle school kids and the daily consumption of Concerta, I was a person of quarters. One quarter tomboy, one quarter Vulcan, one quarter reclusive Aspergers-lite, and one quarter female (then dormant). The Aspergers-lite quarter didn't understand how to be feminine, the tomboy quarter felt that femininity was for girls, the Vulcan quarter said that femininity was illogical, and the dormant female quarter was dormant. I think the Vulcan quarter had something to do with the dormancy, but I don't actually have the facts to prove it.

Lots of very enlightening things occurred when I was 26, only one of which is going to get today's write-up.

I was sitting in my bedroom, gazing at my frizz-bomb, unmanageable hair in the mirror, mourning my total lack of genetically hott, smooth, non-frizzy hair, and feeling generally sorry for myself, when I suddenly had a Feminine Revelation.

Wait a second!

Hott girls have hott hair. Even many non-hott girls have hott hair. Lots of girls spend lots of unnecessary money on hott hair products. Those hair products can't just be sitting around doing nothing but emanating hott!

So in order to have hott hair, you have to use hott hair products to make your hair look hott!

My Vulcan quarter, although scoffing at the illogicality of my thoughts about hair, also scoffed at my inability to make a logical connection between hott hair and actually, you know, doing your hott hair to look hott. I have no clue how I missed this. What did I think, were those bottles and bottles and bottles of hair whatever on my sisters' dresser just for show?

So then I tried to do my hair.

I identified four things about my hair that I felt were weird/ugly/not hott.

1. My hair is frizzy. Really frizzy.
2. My hair has a natural part. In the shape of a Y. What did I do to deserve this?
3. My hair looks flat half the time, and the other half of the time it looks like I was just electrocuted.
4. I have an Elizabethan hairline, which is the 16th century way of saying I have a high, slightly receding hairline. Kind of like this just not as 16th century.

I wanted my hair to do four things.

1. I wanted limited frizz. Frizz in the summer was OK, frizz in the dry air of January was not.
2. I wanted my hair to have a nice part in the shape of a lowercase l. Preferably in the area of my head that I wanted.
3. I wanted my hair to have a good amount of fluff. I did not want my hair to look like I was losing my hair.
4. I wanted my hairline to move about 450 years into the future.

And I was also willing to do pretty much whatever it took to get to happy hott hair, as long as it took under twenty minutes to do.

My first plan of action was to hit up a stylist. I walked on in and asked what I should do with my hair.

"Oh, you could take some mousse and some smoothing oil and use a diffuser and a round brush and some extra-hold hairspray and you'd be fine," she said.

"OK," I responded, uncertainly. "What's mousse?"

The poor hairstylist didn't even know how to respond. What was I, nine? I think she just assumed I was joking. Who didn't know what mousse was when they were... 26?

So that didn't help.

Next, I asked my sister.

"Oh, you could take some mousse and some smoothing oil and use a diffuser and a round brush and some extra-hold hairspray and you'd be fine," she said.

"OK," I responded, even more uncertainly. "What's mousse?"

She didn't know how to respond, either. I have a master's degree and can discuss the intricacies of the development of the social order of the South and how it lead to the social stratification in the North. Didn't Southern belles use mousse? Or something kinda like mousse? Maybe made from, like, dead squirrels or something? What was I, nine?

No answers there, either.

So I finally turned to YouTube. YouTube told me that if nothing else, I needed a hairdryer. Yes, me, the girl who never dried her hair, ever, and as a result would routinely walk into the early class in college with frozen hair (literally). But this was the year my hair was going to be hott. I bit the bullet and bought a random hairdryer at Target.

For a couple of weeks, I dried my hair with the hairdryer, but I had no clue how to dry it, so I would end up with bits of hair sticking out all over my head. When I tried to smooth my hair down, it would just pop up again.

Back to YouTube. The hott British video hairstylist said I needed a diffuser attachment.

Ah! I knew I had one of those! It came with the hairdryer!

So I dried my hairdryer with the diffuser. Success! Now my hair was curly and less messy, but it still was frizzy and kind of fell flat two hours into the day.

Lots of experimentation later, I've stumbled onto a general hair routine.

1. I wash my hair. With humectant shampoo. I spent more than a dollar. Go buy your lottery tickets now, because luck this obvious might never happen again.
2. I condition my hair with some kind of moisturizing conditioner. It smells funny. I don't even really know.
3. I get some gross-smelling mousse. I hold in the vomit reflex and put it in my hair. (I have always been very grossed out by shaving cream and other products with similar consistency.)
4. I push my hair around with reckless abandon. This is supposed to make my hair wavier. It usually just makes me look stupid.
5. I flip my hair upside down and dry it with the diffuser attachment. Much more success with this step after YouTube told me I was actually supposed to put my hair in the diffuser for maximum awesome.
6. I flip my hair upside up. I arrange my hair so I look less electrocuted and/or close to death. I dry the hair on the side of my head flat against my head, so it's not all sticking out.
7. I take my glasses off and lose them on the floor.
8. I spray my hair with hairspray, invariably hitting myself in the eye. Hence the glasses on the floor.
9. I pat around on the floor until I find my glasses, praying that I don't squash them in the process.
10. I look at my hair in the mirror and ask myself if I would look terribly out of place at Loft or Starbucks. If I think I'd kinda fit in, I'm good to go.

More Adventures of a Socially Awkward Amateur Academic coming up soon!

Getting in shape like I'm in Shape

It's a bright new day in a bright new year. And you know what that means, right?

It's time, once again, to throw myself, again, into the Couch to 5K program!

This is probably my tenth or so time trying to complete the program, on a treadmill, of course. (I'm afraid of dogs, so running around the neighborhood is not an option for me, but I will run on a school track occasionally). In my heydey, when I was a senior in college and had a lot more time than I do now, I was able to complete all the way up to week eight of nine weeks. So, so close! I was actually running a consistent 25 minutes on the treadmill several times a week.

Unlike many of the hott people I envy, running is not something I necessarily enjoy doing. Part of the reason is that I'm Grace, and I have Wimpy Disease. The other part of the reason is that when I first started (trying) to run, I didn't get anything resembling the Running Zone, which the hott people writing for Shape magazine tell me is "that high you get when you're running along being hott and leggy and not breaking any kind of a sweat and everything is awesome and all your troubles instantly disappear and you're caught up only in the Zone and the beat of the newest Pitbull-Whoever hit musical compilation". No, Grace just slogged and slogged and slogged, all the while becoming increasingly less hott. And when I run, I sweat buckets, almost like a guy but worse, because at least two buckets of sweat are coming from my head. Seriously, who the heck secretes perspiration from their head? Thankfully, ADD meds worked wonders for the evolution of my Running Zone. I actually can get into the Running Zone nowadays, it takes about ten minutes of warming up and BOOM - I'm hott and not sweaty and kind of enjoying my run!

But again, it's a new year, a new opportunity, a new Grace. This year, I can - no, I will - run at least thirty minutes at 5 MPH on a treadmill! If I can get used to sleeping with a Darth Vader mask strapped to my face, I can definitely run thirty minutes in one go!

So earlier this month, when I was gifted a minor windfall for a resume I wrote for someone (yes, I do write and edit resumes for the low low price of $35 a pop, shill shill shill), I successfully completed the first, most awesome step of sweating buckets - hott gym clothes. Pre-spree, I wore the following to the gym, in different combinations every day:

• Terrifying purple wide-leg gym pants
• Terrifying very faded blackish wide-leg gym pants
• Terrifying boy's track pants with stretched-out elastic waist that I bought for ten cents back when the thrift shop was actually cheap and not invaded by hott people
• Terrifying tees in faded yellow, bright yellow, and faded black with some jazz musician on the front leaning over a piano and looking like he's dead
• Terrifying tees with holes, stains, and more stains

In my defense, I do own dedicated gym clothes. However, for some reason I bought moisture-wicking capris and tank tops. I don't wear things that show excessive body parts/excessive beads of sweat to the gym, so I have no clue what I was thinking here. These gym clothes live in my banished clothing box in my closet and are one step away from being donated to Goodwill.

I decided that my new gym clothes would be hott gym clothes (and let's face it, gym clothes that are also very functional and look like gym clothes). I bought a couple of athletic tees and yoga leggings from TJMaxx, and I've actually been wearing my ensembles to the gym. Go figure.

So now I am really ready to tackle that 5K. I've got the clothes. I've got the meds. I've got the only pair of earbuds that actually seem to fit my ears. I've got a pocket for my phone in the waistband of my new yoga pants. I've got NFL Replays and The First 48 on the treadmill TV screen. What more could I want?

Well, three things.

First of all, I really need to figure out why the back of my head is cramping up when I run. I think this happens because my glasses keep sliding down my nose and I keep wrinkling my nose to push them back up, but I'm not sure.

I also need a lock for a gym locker. I've always been too lazy to use a locker and just stick my purse and my coat on the treadmill handle. This has led to my coat falling off the handle and flying off the treadmill within inches of my feet, which is a potential hazard that could lead to amputation and/or death, so I should get right on that lock.

Finally, I really need a treadmill that's specifically engineered for really short people. This is, of course, wishful thinking. But wow, I would truly love for someone to build a treadmill with a TV screen that's low enough that I don't have to crane my neck upwards to watch Frederick "Fatty" Jones get interrogated by Miami law enforcement. That would totally make my day.

Well, I'm off to sit on my rear end for a couple more hours. See you at the gym. Later.

The easiest most involved recipe you ever did read!

About six months ago, I was being fat and getting all comfy on my behind depression in the couch reading Yelp reviews of Chinese restaurants, when I had a momentous, shocking realization.

Somewhere between the time in my life when I refused to eat chicken outside my house because it could contain e. coli and the time in my life when I ordered, ate, and enjoyed a Taiwanese stir fly of tofu, bamboo shoots, and congealed duck blood, I had become an amateur foodie.

I can thank Dan for most of my palate development. We ate at a lot of restaurants in college, grad school, and beyond (and this may be the reason that my doughiness continues even to the present). We've eaten the good, the bad, and the ugly, and along the way, I've actually learned to recognize and appreciate good food.

"How's the fries?" Dan asks. "Natural-cut sea-salt, correct?"

"Sysco, unfortunately," I sigh.

I don't care what you call your fries and how fresh-cut and fancy you tell me they are. You can't pull the wool over my eyes. I know the taste of institutional food-service conglomerate fare better than you.

So now that we both have the liberty of being hip and trendy and turning our noses up at any restaurant we want (and, in Dan's case, can detail the pros and cons of said restaurants over on his uproariously funny Yelp account), I sometimes try to recreate some of the food that I've enjoyed at places where they charge you fifteen bucks for a tiny plate of tuna carpaccio. And that's, like, two and a half meals at McDonald's, not three, because inflation hurts us all.

Which means I have to find recipes, usually online.

Unless you're talking AllRecipes or the Food Network Online, finding a recipe for the perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the Internet is truly the challenge of separating the wheat from the chaff. Because many recipes, many of the recipes I want to make, are buried deep on.... food blogs. Which is usually the code word for food photography blogs.

Now, I like pretty Pinterest food as much as any other white female between the ages of twenty-five and sixty. But when I'm just trying to find that perfect peanut butter and jelly recipe, I do not want to be wading through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of off-center photos of the perfectly-plated PBJ sandwich with a superfluous mason jar with a fancy straw somehow photobombing the poor sandwich. And yeah, when I get to the actual recipe, I am not grinding my own peanuts.

*****

Happy Weekend, everyone!

Lazy, lazy Saturday over in the Huang house today! Dan and I woke up around eleven and kind of lay around watching some Law and Order reruns. That big snowstorm that's supposed to come through finally started around noon, so we got to watch the snow fall out our big living room window. So cozy, I love it!

For lunch I decided to whip up this beauty of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

Who doesn't love a real home-made PBJ? I remember when I was young, when we'd go out in the snow to play, my mom would make us all some hot cocoa and peanut butter and jelly when we came in. We'd sit down and eat while we played some board games. Great fun!

So yummy!

And yes, I finally got to put my peanut-grinder to work! It's such a great buy. Soooo easy to use, perfect peanut butter!

So without further ado, here's the recipe!

Grace's Best Most Awesome Most Not Labor-Intensive Ground Peanut Butter and Raspberry Jam Sandwich!

Ingredients

1/2 pound of organic peanuts, shelled

Natural loaf of bread (you can use your own, but I bought mine... Spelt! So yummy!)

1/2 pound fresh-picked raspberries

Cane sugar

Gelatin

1. Shell the peanuts.

2. Put shelled peanuts into peanut grinder. Pulse for ten seconds at a time. I had success when I pulsed for ten seconds and stopped for ten seconds. Fifteen minutes should about do it.

3. Peanuts should be a creamy consistency. Remove peanut butter from peanut grinder, set aside.

4. Wash and drain raspberries. Put raspberries into food processor, blend. Add sugar to taste. Add gelatin.

5. Put raspberry mixture into the fridge and let set for about an hour.

6. Spread butter and jelly on bread. Enjoy with a big glass of milk.

*****

So yeah, I'm bitter. All I want is a recipe that gives me the correct peanut butter/jelly proportions for a really good sandwich. I don't want to grind anything, saute crap, make a pate, or use a mason jar. Just no. No.

A look back at 2013

In one of Grace's kinda boring self-discovery posts, let's take a look back at 2013. Because you're just dying to know.

1. In January, I started classes at Desales. Frustrated by the lack of job prospects in education in the area, I decided to get a BA Accounting as both a possible second career and a way to see the world through the eyes of the world, which is money. Also, it can lay the groundwork for graduate work in economics if I so choose.

2. In April, we bought our first house. We got a nice house for market price, a doable mortgage, and needing minimal upgrades. It's also located within twenty minutes of just about everything.

3. In April, I got my first permanent job in education. Yes, it did turn out to be kind of a doozy of a job. But it also provided a paycheck, benefits, summers off, and teaching the little guy how to communicate as an added bonus.

4. In June, we went on vacation to Poland. International travel. Food. Cathedrals. Zlotytech. More food. Berlin-Tegel. Enough said.

5. In July, I taught summer school. I loved my students, and judging from the numerous smiles and general lack of screaming and punching, they loved me too.

6. In August, we went to Canada. Unfortunately, I probably have less love for Canada than I had before I went to Canada, because in Canada, it takes way too long to cross the border, and there are no bathroom stops along the way. Niagara Falls was fantastic, however.

7. In September, I got awesome new meds. Possibly more about this in the future. But they're awesome meds and have made my life take a complete 180 for the better.

8. In October, Dan was offered a full-time librarian position. Birds sang. Angels smiled. I got to say I-told-you-so. I knew it was only a matter of time until someone realized that Dan could be an irreplaceable asset, but he didn't believe me until it actually happened.

9. In November, I left my job for a new position. This was a hard thing. It was very significant for me and left a deep impression on the wide-eyed innocence of my psyche. But I think that it was actually a good thing that I went through that experience, trying though it was, because it taught me several need-to-know life lessons.

10. In December, there was Christmas break. And Christmas break was pretty awesome, if you ask me. My over-active brain, for once in its life, was quiet. All I did was eat, sleep, lie on the couch, visit people, and watch football. It's always been impossible for me to just relax, so I am so thankful for the mental ability to procrastinate and do nothing over break.

What will 2014 hold for Grace?