Tattoos and Tiramisu

Dallas is so lame sometimes. My friend and I spent the last couple of nights looking for any fun places to go, and we couldn't find anything. We walk around and around and around and around and we still find nothing. It's baffling how a city can be so large, yet not house a single place where either of us can listen to the type of music we like and meet other people who like our sorts of music. The night wasn't a total waste, though, because we went to Cafe Izmir and had a perfect meal - we had everything, including both Crème Brulee and Tiramisu for dessert.

Hmm. Anyway, last night before we got all bored and frustrated by not being able to find anywhere to go, I got a pretty big tattoo. It's so beautiful. It's a big, huge C from the Book of Kells. I can't find an image of this particular letter on the Internet. But, I can tell you that it is beautiful. It is so fancy and intricate and perfect. I'm so white and pale that it really looks like black on white paper. It's crazy. It is is about four inches wide, three inches tall. I'll put a picture of it up soon. I don't have a fancy digital camera - just an old-fashioned one so it takes a while for me to get pictures developed and stuff. In fact I don't even have any film now, because I took a bunch of pictures of my students last week.

My allergies are killing me. Today I got up at 10:00 a.m. only to go back to bed at 11:00 because I took so much Benadryl that I passed out. I'm freaking out right now because I have no Benadryl left. I am addicted to it, I think.

Tomorrow is the Clinic/Apples in Stereo show. I am really looking forward to a fun night - Rene, the girl I went to see Belle and Sebastian with earlier this year, is going to go with me. It is at Trees, which sucks, because I would rather it be at Gypsy Tea Room, but I won't complain. I get to see a bunch of good music and forget for a short while that I have to be around the children again Monday. I will be so exhausted. I am going to try to sleep a lot tomorrow too to make up for the sleep I'll be missing on Sunday night. I have so much to do though - laundry, cleaning, grocery store...etc. I think I shall go to sleep now so that I can get up by 10 and get this stuff done.

Frustration

Not too long ago I stopped by the Carnival [a grocery store] on the way home from work to get a couple of things. I, as a very poorly compensated teacher, of course, had very little money to spend, and could only get a very small number of items, so I didn't, you know, bounce a check. So, I got really irritated when, in line in front of me, was this lady getting a ton of food - meat, vegetables, milk, tons of cheese, cereal, and probably $100 worth of baby formula - and she didn't pay a dime. All on food stamps. The kicker is that she had on a bunch of expensive jewelry and, on top of that, was really awfully rude to the checker at the store. I got so mad that my throat was red [this is one of those weird quirks about me - when I get mad, embarrassed, etc. my throat turns bright red] and I wanted to scream at this woman: "Quit having kids, b***h! Get a damn job and stop stealing my money! I just spent the last ten hours working with bratty, ungrateful kids like yours, and I make barely enough to get by because half my paycheck goes to feed jerks like you that can't quit having kids!" I mean, I felt awful thinking that, since I'm supposed to be a good liberal and all, but damn, seriously, why can't people just quit breeding if they can't afford to keep feeding?? I understand that in some religions birth control is illegal or whatever, but that's just stupid. There are too many kids in the world already. It is not everyone's right as a human to create offspring. In fact, there are many people in the world who should be forbidden from having kids. But whatever. I should just quit getting upset about this stuff because there is really nothing in the world that can be done about it. I just don't understand why someone who has no money anyway would want to bring a kid into the world that they can't support. And then have, like, four more just for fun. It's just insane. I will never understand it.

Open House

Tonight was Open House at my school. It was so weird to be the teacher, and not the kid. During the teacher introductions, the principal said my name incorrectly. Come on! The least you can do is know how to say the teachers' names. And my name is easy. I really have nothing else to say. I worked for 13 hours today and my feet hurt. I am tired. I'm going to bed.

I Can't Believe I'm Actually

Bored. I have four hundred and fifty-five thousand things I could be doing right now, but I'm just going out of my mind with boredom. I worked twelve hours today, and one can only do so much, so I cut myself off from doing work. I'm a strong believer in separating work life from real life, so when I leave school, that's that - I'm not ever bringing my grade book or lesson plans or anything home again because it's just not necessary. I want to be able to look forward to coming home, not dread it because there's more work to do here.

The problem is that I don't have cable. See, if I had cable I would be so entertained and happy right now. I could watch any number of programs, and waste the evening blissfully. Yes, yes, I know I could be reading books or writing something of merit or spending time with friends. But - reading books and writing things of merit takes thought and effort, and I'm just about spent in those categories for today. In fact, I'm using my last little bit of energy to write this. Friends, ah, friends. Unfortunately, most of them are teachers too, and the third week of the month is the week when we're all so broke it hurts, plus everyone's too tired to socialize. I'm just tired and poor and emotionally drained from work.

My neighbor is playing some kind of fighting game on his Playstation and it's really loud. It's funny to have opera playing in here, and then to hear Tekken 4 or whatever through the oh-so-thin walls. Feels a bit cinematic. I need to figure out a way that the VCR, DVD and Nintendo 64 can all be hooked up to my TV at once. Also, I should buy more than one movie to watch on the DVD machine.

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I had a rough time sleeping last night. See, this girl got murdered over here the other day. My apartment place owns a bunch of buildings all within a few blocks of each other, and at one of our places this girl got stabbed to death this past weekend. By her boyfriend. So it's not so much that I was scared for my own safety, which I normally would be since I'm so, so, terribly afraid of all things homicide/death/rape related, but really I was just so sad for this poor girl. They put a letter on all our doors telling us that there was a 'homicide - domestic abuse' in one of the complexes, which totally freaked me out - almost as much as when I saw my leasing office on the news with cops and police tape all around it, and talk of a murder. Then, when I was in class last night, the professor had the newspaper there and I read the article about it:

Man arrested in fatal stabbing of ex-girlfriend
09/16/2002

From Staff Reports

A 31-year-old Dallas man has been arrested by police investigating the stabbing death of his 23-year-old ex-girlfriend early Saturday.

Police officials said Alexander Ortiz broke into Racquel Barrientos' Old East Dallas apartment about 4:15 a.m. and stabbed her repeatedly. During the attack, Ms. Barrientos' roommate fled to get help from an off-duty officer who lives in the complex in the 5100 block of Live Oak Street. The officer spotted Mr. Ortiz and arrested him.

Ms. Barrientos was transported to Baylor University Medical Center, where she died.

It just broke my heart to think that this girl had to die like that. I just kept thinking about the fact that the last thing she saw was probably a knife coming toward her and a look of hate in the eyes of someone she used to love. You never know when somebody's gonna snap on you. People are crazy.

I couldn't stop thinking about it and was up a good part of the night jumping at every little sound and feeling sad for a dead stranger. Why do people have to be so mean? If this guy was mentally sick, why didn't someone try to help him? That poor girl. She won't get a chance to live her life now, a young life destroyed just like that all due to anger, insecurity, jealousy...whatever this man was feeling at that time.

Gone

I lost another one of my kids today. This little girl's mom just up and withdrew her right at the end of the day. She didn't even get a chance to say bye to her friends, and barely got to empty her locker. I am so sad and scared, because this is the child who came to school hungry each day, because her parents don't feed her breakfast. She is a very sad, troubled little girl. I had so many plans to help her and improve her life, but now I won't get to at all. The upside is that I'm down to 19 kids now, which makes it a lot easier to help each of them. We had a birthday party for one of the boys today - his mom brought cake and sodas and everything. It was fun. She also offered to volunteer in the classroom; I'm really excited about this because she is one of the few parents that are bilingual. I can get her to translate stuff for me.

SMASH

Can I just give all my kids Ritalin and be done with it? Or Xanax? Anything? They are so incredibly wild! I swear. To be eight and have tons and tons and tons of energy. We had a sort of good time for part of the afternoon today. The boys all had to go to the auditorium for some lame Boy Scouts rally [they all came back excited about guns! fishing! camping! etc.] so it was just me and the girls. We all looked at each other, and all noted how nice and quiet and lovely it was without the boys around. I said, "What do y'all want to do?" and they wanted to play games, of course, and cheerleaders, so that's what we did. We sat down to play hot potato, but of course it turned into Papas Caliente since they prefer Spanish, and that got old pretty fast so they showed off the routines they're learning in cheerleading.

I went next door to this other teacher's room, just looked at her, and she said, "So, I want to go work at an all-girls' school now. How about you?" I totally do - it was so fun with all the boys [read: behavior problems] gone. I wrote GIRLS CLUB on the whiteboard and let them do whatever they wanted. It wasn't getting too out of control, so I took them next door so they could do the cheers with the other teacher's class.

Now here's where the file under: Another Example of how Much my Students' Lives Suck category - A couple of our girls were playing MASH. [For boys who might not know, MASH is a fun fortune telling game where you find out who you will marry, how many kids you'll have, what kind of car you'll drive, and, what type of residence in which you will reside. Mansion, Apartment, Shack or House.] They weren't playing MASH, though, they were playing SMASH. I asked what the extra S was for, and without even looking up or pausing or anything, a little girl simply said, "Shelter." How crazy out of hand is it that shelter as a type of residence is totally normal to these children?

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Wow, I just got a phone call from my old boss at the cleaners. She's doing alright and is going to be starting nursing school soon. It was nice to talk to her - I've lost touch with a lot of people from that wacky time spanning from November of last year to March of this year. We talked about which customers we'd seen around town [in Tyler - I swear I saw like fifteen at the Country Club July 4th soirée] and other ex-dry cleaners employee gossip.

I haven't watched any TV today at all. Well I did this morning, but that doesn't count so much. I haven't turned the TV on since I got home from work. I can't really say what exactly I have been doing, because I can't remember. Laundry, um, some other housework, maybe talked on the phone some? What have I been doing for the last three hours?

Tomorrow is Friday! Hoorah! No children for two days! And I get to see both Sleater-Kinney and the Piet Mondrian exhibit at the Kimball this weekend. I might even dye my hair too. Phone's ringing. Bye.

Math

I have to talk again about just how amusing my eight-year-olds are. Today I was informed that I am "not an adult" and that I'm "just a kid" like the rest of them. Now. If you are eight, and you have the impression that someone is a kid like you, are you going to obey them? No, of course not. I can't even get my cat to mind, much less 21 [two got transferred to another class...it's great having numbers that actually meet state requirements] children.

One girl, after my repeated attempts to quiet the class, said, "Miss! We're just little kids! We don't know how to be quiet!" And it's true. They don't. Not yet, anyway. I'm going to keep trying.

After school let out, I went to tell my friend across the hall bye, and he was all flustered because he couldn't get one of his girls to understand 1/5. He asked if I would help, and after relating the elusive fraction to a C-note and five separate shirt purchases at the mall, the child totally understood, and I felt good for half a second about my competency as an educator. Half a second, mind you, because then I remembered that my kids had to ask what frozen meant today, and can't follow the simplest instructions.

One Year Later

It's weird that it's been a whole year. Nationally and personally, that week in September last year was a pretty trying one. I spent the week of and two weeks following September 11 living in a hotel in Austin because I'd been kicked out of my apartment after I broke off my engagement. Watching the coverage and nothing else on my hotel TV was so mind numbing. I remember the first morning after, driving to work and seeing a bunch of people doing patriotic stuff like waving flags and collecting money for the victims. I felt weird about all of that then, and I still do now.

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That morning I was at work at the newspaper and my circulation guy called to tell me right when he found out - I'd just gotten to work so I'd say it was about 8:30 CST. That whole day was insane because Tuesday was our deadline day [weekly paper], and all the planes that we'd normally use to transport our discs to the press were down, and everyone was just a disaster. I felt good about the fact that I got to write for a newspaper about what will probably be the single largest news event of my life. I still have the clip, and it's small and lame, but it is there for me to show to my children someday or whatever it is that people do with all the pointless things that they save.

I'm glad I got to at least go to the World Trade Center before it was gone. I met a friend there when I was visiting NJ/NYC a couple of summers ago. I was so impressed with all the stores that were down there in the underground part, and just the sheer ridiculous size of the buildings. When the attack happened, all I could keep thinking about was the nice old fella I bought a pretzel from out front when I was waiting for Matthew to meet me. I wondered if he'd been there that day and just how much it screwed up his life, if he survived. It's so weird to think that all that stuff is just gone.

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Anyway, that said, I'm preparing myself for a day of sappy media coverage and fake kindness that should exist all the time, not just on the anniversary of what is essentially a huge mass murder.

I guess I don't really have anything else to say about this. It sucks. That's obvious and true. It sucked because a bunch of people had to die too early, and it sucks that there are people who would just blindly kill strangers and themselves for some religious mission or hatred or whatever it was. It also sucks that there are things that make the US a country that would inspire people, crazy or not, to hate it enough to do something like this.

Yeah, So -

I really don't like teaching grade school. It's a really painful job. So, again, never take any job teaching children. It's two weeks into the year and I already want to quit. But I refuse...I will make it so that I can have two months paid vacation next year, not to mention all the breaks between now and then. I'm also determined to at least try to make these children learn something.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention last night that I got my Psycholinguistics professor to talk about pot in class. That was funny. Also, it was funny when we were talking about infixes, and since I already took a class about them, I knew that "f*cking" was the only fairly common infix in the English language, so I had to laugh when he brought it up, then after telling the class there was only one, he wrote it on the board...it was funny. Example of f*cking as an infix: unf*ckingbelievable, inf*ckingcredible, etc. His example was "Alaf*ckingbama," which brought special delight to me as I thought of my friends and family who live in that state.

Keep in mind - this is a class I am being required to take in order to obtain my teaching certification. Questionable...