R.I.C.E.R.

Fancy-schmancy new running shoes, socks that used to be white and are now gray, cankles, and my ever present Ace bandage. You wish you were me.

(Bet you thought, after a prolonged absence of months and months and months, that’d I’d have a much wittier title than that. You’d be wrong.)

Today is a milestone. Six weeks ago, on account of receiving a piece of paper that cost tens of thousands of dollars and claimed I was now a master of teaching (a joke I have yet to recover from), I decided I needed to begin Bringing AnorSEXYa Back™. Again. Since all my shiny new degree did was give me a leg up on my friends if we’re lining up to get into heaven based on the sheer number of degrees we’ve accumulated*, and since it most certainly wasn’t getting me any employment (or even employment prospects), I decided I would make it mean something by letting it be the starting point for yet another war against The Fatness. This time, though, it was serious. I was going to mean business. I was going to take The Fatness™ out back and give it a couple punches to the throat before kneeing it in the groin and leaving it for dead.

So I started running.

Most of my earlier attempts at fighting The Fatness™ and Bringing AnorSEXYa Back™ were unhealthy marathons of starving myself and weighing myself every single day, usually writing the ugly numbers on the bathroom mirror in black dry erase marker, so I could be reminded of how much I sucked on a pretty consistent basis. While I enjoy both of those things (constant self-deprecation and starvation), that don’t really yeild results. Not Bringing AnorSEXYa Back™ results. I wanted people to tell me to eat something because I was looking a little skinny, not because I was passed out on the floor after skipping two days worth of protein. But I’m not entirely anti-masochism, so I began this regimen of walking, tossing in a half mile of running every once in a while. The OCD got hold of it and made it into training, and pretty soon I was putting in some good, solid mileage, most of which didn’t involve me hanging onto the treadmill and wheezing while my feet tried to keep up with the belt.

I came down with shin splints. I didn’t lose any weight. I began Wii Fit-ing it after my runs, in an attempt to add some toning and strength work. I still didn’t lose any weight. I stopped wearing my baggy cut off sweatpants to run, because not only were they unhelpful in the chaffing department**, I was sweating something unbelievable in my crotch region, and I was embarrassed to walk back to my apartment afterwards looking like I wet my pants***. I started running in spandex (very sexy) and Ace bandaging my shins so I looked like some weird mummy. I spent the good part of moving from 1.5 miles to 2.5 miles reading Catch-22. I broke down and created a playlist of music I could run to so I didn’t have to fiddle with my Not an iPod. I went out and bought fancy-schmancy running shoes to wear to help with my shin splints, and got a lecture from the guy at the shoe store about how important iceing my shin splints is.

Maybe it’s worth it. I have trouble saying it is, because I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot. The Goat tells me how much healthier all this is making me, and I have to admit he’s right. When I moved from interspersing my miles with running them straight I was sure I’d end up curled into the fetal position at the end of the treadmill, but I was fine. I have more energy. I’m more successful at getting up and being a human most mornings (though there are days, like Tuesday, that I don’t really ever get into that human groove). I’d love to have something to show for it, though, like be down a pant size or have kicked off at least one freakin’ pound of The Fatness™. Instead I’m busy with the R.I.C.E.R. to treat my shin splints, and I’m looking into running a 5k before summer is out. Seeting achievable goals is good, since my primary Bringing AnorSEXYa Back™ goal is far from being accomplished.

But today, the six week day, is a milestone, because I did a straight 5k for the first time. I shouldn’t have, because I was really only scheduled to move up to 3 miles today, but I felt okay, my shin splints weren’t hurting, the fitness center actually had cool air in it (for a while there the fitness center had no cool air in it, which is why I accidentally ran 3 miles last week when I got so overheated and confused I read the treadmill screen wrong), and I figured I might as well tell The Fatness™ where it can shove it.

Soon I’ll have to move off the treadmill to do roadwork, so I can prepare for a real like 5k. I’m also planning on selling my virginity on Ebay to pay for some much needed liposuction. Eventually The Fatness™ has to be told to go fuck itself, and I’m not too proud to have it done under general anesthesia. Too poor, but not too proud.

*This is only a likely scenario if all my friends and I die on the same day, which, unless there’s some weird cataclismic event like a meteor destroying the planet or someone committing arson on a hotel holding a conference we’ve all been accepted and are presenting at (which is probably much more unlikely than the meteor), probably won’t happen. So the extra master’s degree will most likely be for naught.

**Those who don’t suffer from The Fatness™ may not understand this, but on some unfortunate souls The Fatness™ makes your thighs touch together constantly, creating unpleasantness when running or walking briskly. It also wears out the crotch area of your pants faster than is financially helpful.

***It really did look like that. Honest. I have considered actually wetting my pants to see how closely the sweating resembles an actual accident, but I have enough laundry as it is.

It’s like a fun game where the winner gets their spirit beat out of them by the losers.

Guess who got in trouble with her mentor teacher AGAIN for not giving the mentor teacher hard copies of the lesson plans for the day?

Guess who stayed at high school until after 7:00 last night to participate in parent-teacher conferences, only to have her mentor teacher never introduce her to the parents coming to conference?

Guess who went over with her mentor teacher, in ridiculously specific detail, the lesson plans for today during the downtime between conferences she wasn’t apart of?

Guess who’s mentor teacher changed the whole order of the plans she had made for today, because it isn’t how the mentor teacher would do it, which was duly recorded  in the notes being taken to plan the lesson and repeated back to the mentor teacher at least ten times before everyone left for the evening?

Guess who, when her mentor teacher gets back from running to the post office during her planning block, is probably going to get bitched at until she feels like she’s been run over by a truck because she’s not doing stuff the exact way the mentor teacher would do it?

I don’t get it, and maybe I’m so wrong I can’t tell, but I really don’t understand why, if we plan together and I’m obviously writing down everything that I’m being told, and I don’t deviate from the plan for fear of getting ripped a new one after the lesson, that it’s a huge deal if I don’t give her a hard copy packet of the stuff I’m doing that day. If she wanted things two days in advance, fine. But we don’t plan two days in advance, making that impossible, since the packing guide she gave me is sort of impossible to follow, time wise. We plan the day before. She doesn’t get to school early enough in the morning (I beat her here every day) to go over and adjust a lesson plan. I make all my copies of hand-outs and what not I’m using the day before, and I show them to her (well, usually their hers or came out of the book, so there isn’t much to show). Maybe I’m just lazy, but I don’t really understand what good printing her copies of this nonsense does (besides waste trees) if I’m not deviating from the plan that we set up, together, that she has already found fault with and corrected at least twice. Okay, here, I’ll make a concession. If I didn’t have pop quiz time every day where she goes, “What are you doing tomorrow?” and I tell her everything and she asks me dumb questions like, “And how are you going to do that?” or “And what do you want them to get out of that?” (the last one is especially dumb since she told me to plan all my lessons around the material they need to know for the selection test that goes with each piece of literature in the book), spending the entire time staring at me like I’m speaking Martian and don’t have any clue how to teach a room full of students (not true, four years of experience teaching, bitches), then she tells me how such and such won’t work or she’d do it this way and ends up making me feel the only possible option is the way she’d do it (hence the fact every single day the kids have a stupid selection test), if I planned and wrote it down and gave it to her to go over and she made comments and gave it back and I adjusted and she reviewed again, then I wouldn’t be mad. (Yes, that was in fact the longest sentence in the world. Thanks for noticing.) Even when I do make her a print out of what I’m planning, I’m still required to stand there and explain everything on it to her while she reads it, and then if she has changes (and she has never not had changes), she doesn’t make any marks. I’m expected to remember everything she says and go fix it and then go through the whole process over again. I’m a writing teacher. I understand rough draft, mark up the rough draft, return, revise, resubmit. I don’t understand the process I’m currently expected to go through.

Yet again, I could just be so wrong I can’t tell there’s a right way to do it.

I’m also wondering if I can plan my nervous breakdown to happen while I’m teaching. Except the kids would never know she and her stupidness drove me to it, and therefore they wouldn’t hate her like I’d want them to. I have considered breaking down (because when they question the stupid things I’m making them do because she says it’s the only way to get them to do work and learn anything I almost start crying) and saying, “I don’t want you to do this anymore than you do! I think it’s a waste of time, too! I think it’s busy work! I understand why you hate English; I’d hate English, too, if this was the bullshit I had to do every single day for 90 minutes! I want to have fun and learn amazing stuff in this class, but I’m told you can’t handle that and I have to do it this way. It sucks. It breaks my heart that you hate me and that you don’t even know how great this class could be, and it’s all the fault of that bitch of a teacher I’m supposed to be learning from.” I might eventually do it, because I’m so on their side about the crap I’m making them do I almost choke on the isntructions when I hand stuff out.

You.

Dear Terrorist,

Once upon a time, in a land far and away called Ohio, I was trying to make a decision about what to do next with my life. I had been accepted to two MFA programs, one which was offering me money, and the MAT program here at the institution of my choice. I admit, I wasn’t happy when I went to visit the MFA program that eventually found money to give me, but that was partly because they weren’t offering me money, and partly because you wouldn’t agree to come with me wherever I went. It’s hard to think about figuring out a new place while trying to stay close to a boyfriend who is suddenly very far away. That was one of the reasons I decided to give up the writing and go get my MAT. I knew this place. I had lived here before. I liked it. I wouldn’t feel so alone and abandoned.

I was mostly wrong.

See, what’s important to remember here is that I didn’t just make this choice based on location, or even really on the benefits of this program over the other, post-graduation job-wise. I made this choice because I thought we would be Together Forever™. I thought getting my MAT would be the best thing for Us. Yes, capital “U.” You and  me. Us. You were going to go start your Ph.D. in a year. When I finished my MAT I’d come join you, wherever you ended up. Teachers are, for the most part, highly employable in many locations. And when, yes, when we got married, I would be able to provide decent health insurance for us. Unlike so many of our friends in grad school, I wouldn’t be forced to use the crappy student health care when I got pregnant. I’d also have a salary. We wouldn’t be living on your stipend and whatever I could scrounge up adjuncting or working some crap hourly job in a coffeehouse or a Target. (Remember Target? Remember how you said you wouldn’t move with me because you weren’t going to spend your year off working at Target if you couldn’t find an adjunct job in the area? Like being with me wasn’t nearly as important as being an adjunct? Like having to take an hourly job for a year was the worst thing in the entire world? Yeah. I remember that.) We’d have an actual income, a real income, an income that would help if we needed car repairs or furniture or, God forbid, wanted to buy a house. I knew I could always work on my Ph.D. when you got a permanent job somewhere, because I’d be able to take classes for free (or a greatly reduced fee) and wouldn’t have to worry about finding a school that would accept me and give me money so I could eat and keep my electricity on.

You never said, “Oh! Yes! That’s wonderful! We will be Together Forever™, and I want you to do this potentially disagreeable thing because it’ll benefit Us in the future.” I want to make it clear you didn’t do that, and you didn’t tell me what to do or encourage me to do something. You didn’t discourage me from one choice or another. You didn’t really do anything. You didn’t say, “You’re a great writer, and I don’t want to see you give that up.” You didn’t say, “You’ll be a great teacher, and yes, if we stay together that would be so helpful.” You let me choose for Us and plan the next few years of my life for Us. It wasn’t until I was here, at the institution of my choice, sad and regretting my decision, realizing this might not have been the right thing, wanting only for you to say, “Yes, we’re going to be together, and yes, this will be good for Us,” that you walked away. You left. You decided I was too needy and too wanting a ring and was too fat and too stupid and too unhappy for you to spend any more of your life with. You walked away.

You left me with this thing, this decision, this program that, even in the early stages, I knew wasn’t right for me. I was stuck. I was so depressed and so terribly disraught that the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with didn’t love me. You were completely over our entire relationship in less than a month. Less than a month! That’s ridiculous. It took me almost a year. It was amplified by the fact the longer I spent in this program, the more I realized I wanted out of this program. Everyone kept telling me I had put in too much time (even before I had put in a full semester) to quit. I crossed my fingers and wished upon every single star in the fucking sky that you’d decide you missed me. That you’d see I wasn’t a psycho, I was someone in a bad situation who really wanted to be given a little hope it was going to be worth it. But no. You walked away. You never looked back. You didn’t care what happened to me. I wasn’t your problem anymore.

Right now I’m pissed. I’m so angry I could hit and punch and kick something, break something, because I got stuck here. I had nothing to look forward to, nothing to be waiting for, no future with someone I loved, no big relief that it would end and I would move forward. And now I’m not moving forward at all. I’m stuck in an internship that makes me angry and sad and hopeless. The job market in the area is pretty much non-existent, especially for someone like me who already has a master’s degree. The higher education job market in the area has also tanked, thanks to the economy, so I can’t even go back to being a lowly adjunct. I have no money, I haven’t had any money, so I wasn’t able to bypass the getting a job process all together and go get my Ph.D. No money for applications and retaking the GRE and all that nonsense. And I’ve completely and totally stopped writing. I’ll never get published or move toward being a Real Writer, because if I do get a job I’ll have no time (just like I haven’t had time for the past two years, no time and no inspiration because my soul has been so crushed doing this program), and if I don’t get a job I’ll still have to get some sort of hourly position (with no health insurance), maybe at Target (how ironic).

I hate you for leaving me, and I hate you for letting me get stuck. I do. I hate you so much I almost can’t stand it, because I was just trying to do something for us. For you. I wanted you to be happy, I wanted you to have a good life, and I wanted to do everything I could to make that happen. I would have done anything for you. If you had told me to stay in Ohio with you, adjunct another year there before you left for a Ph.D. program, I would have said yes in a heartbeat. I didn’t have to leave. I left to try and make a better life and all I got was two wasted years. I have wasted two years of my fucking life here, in a fucking program that hasn’t benefited me at all. I have nothing to show for it, and now I’m now that I’m struggling through the last bit and wanting, with every breath in my body, to just fuck it, I realize there’s not even the reward of a job. And I blame you. I fucking blame you for my depression and my anxiety and how horrible I treat the people I love.

I’m sure you’re fine. I bet you’re happy. I bet you have an incredibly attractive and thin and smart and funny girlfriend who you’d do anything for. I bet you have everything you’ve always wanted. I wish I could make you feel what I feel for one day. I wish you could have this fucking monster in your head for one day.

Love always,

Me

The anger is simmering.

I’m not exactly sure that’s how you spell “simmering.” I suppose it’s right, because Firefox didn’t underline it in red when I just typed it. Nice to know I’m still somewhat competent at something, even if it is remembering which words have double letters in them when you add -ing and which do not.

It’s good to have something.

I’m angry today. I’ve been angry all week, actually, which isn’t at all the way I like to roll, but the anger is a change from the sadness and the general anxiety over how my life is headed in the complete wrong direction. The anger started on Monday, when my mentor teacher told me I was being disrespectful, but after making me feel like crap and then leaving for all of 3rd block so she couldn’t tell I fixed/adjusted any of the teaching things she told me I was sucking at, she came back and became my bestest friend in the whole wide world. We chit-chatted for forever, about my RA and having children and weird things that your body does when you’re pregnant. Inconsistency makes me angry. Had she come back and apologized for making me feel like crap, said she was having a bad day or whatnot, then the friendliness wouldn’t have been so, well, angering. If she had come back, still acting pissed at me, and remained pissed for the rest of day, that also would have been acceptable. At least be consistent. Anyway, I got home and thought over the whole thing, which made me angry again. I probably said mean things to the Goat on the phone when I talked to him. I know I was yelling. All of the sadness and anxiety and upset turned into anger. I yelled about being a bad mummy to the dog and about being so fat I almost couldn’t leave the apartment in the morning and about hating my internship and not wanting to be a teacher and not having the guts to just walk away. He was trying to listen, to be supportive, but he really can’t. Well, he can, but it isn’t going to help. We haven’t been dating long enough for him to say “You can get through this” or “You can walk away if you want, I’ll support that decision,” because he’s never been through a really rough patch like this with me. He doesn’t know my default is to say I’m going to give up and then never really do anything about it, but he also doesn’t know that this situation is extremely different from all the other times I’ve said I was quitting and never did. I feel wrong depending on him or asking him to do things, because we aren’t married/living together/been together very long at all, and there are things I’ve asked him to do that he hasn’t done. It isn’t that he’s not dependable, it’s just that he’s got his own life. He’d argue this with me (probably will, actually), but I think that subconsciously he’s struggling with the amount I’m asking him (literally and figuratively) to deal with.

Anyway.

Yesterday I was angry that I was at high school until quarter to six, and angry I was hungry and stopped at Sonic on the way home. I’m terribly upset with myself that I haven’t been taking care of the puppy, so when I get home and she’s climbing on me and she wants me to play with her and pet her I just have this tremendous guilt.

Today I’m angry because I went to the education job fair at the institution of my choice, only to find there really aren’t any jobs for me in this area. There are probably jobs for me in this state, but they aren’t within commuting distance of Goat. I’m all tangled up inside over this whole thing anyway, and it’s difficult to realize either I might not have a job in the fall or I won’t have a boyfriend. People at the job fair, representatives from schools I suppose I want a job at (not that I really want a job teaching high school), glanced at my resume, saw that I’m coming to the table with the second highest starting rank on the pay scale (master’s plus 30), and quickly tossed my resume aside. I got no interviews, I got no one who seemed remotely interested in me, and I got a bad taste in my mouth for job fairs. Apparently many of the schools are having their own job fairs, so they were happy to say “Our job fair is on [insert date here]. You’ll need to come to it,” and place the resume they’ve been handed in the huge stack of resumes they’ve already been handed. I assume there was a lot of recycling going on this afternoon when those representatives got back home.

I’m so angry, in fact, I need to write a letter.

Boats

You probably don’t know who The Lonely Island is. You might know who Andy Samburg is. You also might live under a rock. Anyway, the Lonely Island is basically Andy Samburg and his comedy buddies, Akieva and Jorma. They have last names, but I don’t feel like looking them up. It’s mainly the stuff they did before SNL hired them and made Andy Samburg a household name (not that I want to acknowledge that SNL has the power to make anyone a household name anymore). My person™ introduced them to me lo these many years ago, through a little something we like to call Episode One of The ‘Bu:

(The only other episode of The ‘Bu it’s essential for you to watch is Episode Eight.)

The Lonely Island did a pilot for a sketch comedy show on Fox called Awesometown. I like the theme song.

I consider “Just Two Guys” the opus of The Lonely Island:

If you don’t like it we can’t be friends anymore.

The following showed up in a post in my Google Reader. While it isn’t nearly as amazing as “Just Two Guys, ” I think it’s pretty fabulous.

There is never a bad time to decide you want to be Angelina Jolie.

The Huffington Post posted this brilliant commentary on the crazy Octomom, pointing out she is looking more and more like Angelina Jolie: Does Nadya Shuleman Think She’s Angelina Jolie?

“Both women are 33 and are mothers to arguably, at least for now, the two most famous broods in the world. They also survived divorce, longed for children and chose to become single parents.

Consider this: In photos of Suleman pre-octuplets out Monday, she looks noticeably different. She has had what appears to be lip implants or filler injections to pump up her pucker. She’s also evidently had a nose job. Both nose and lips now mimic the features of Jolie, as others have pointed out. Scroll for photos and a closer look. Suleman already had brown eyes and has now grown her dark brown hair all the way down her back.”

I know that when I decide to spend all the money I don’t have on unnecessary fertility treatments to expand my already expansive broad, I will follow it up by unnecessary plastic surgery to help me follow in the physical as well as motherly steps of Angelina Jolie.

I hope I have everyone’s support.

Totally outrageous

One of my favorite professors at OU was Dr. Jeremy Webster. Not only did he encourage us to call him by his nickname, Jem, which led to many a singalong in the office of the M.A.’s (as well as many a singalong over e-mail), but he showed me a way to legitimize my love for whores by combining it with the study of literature. In fact, I’d have to say that my love for whores was exponentially increased by one of the best classes ever taught at OU, “God and Sex in Literature,” a class Jem explained to us on the first day was going to be a lot more Sex than God. He also won our hearts by admitting to enjoying the view of the male undergrad butts when he walked around campus, and a moment that will be burned in my memory forever, “I don’t know what y’all’s porn is like, but that sort of thing doesn’t happen in our porn.”

Anyway, Jem has a blog that I subscribe to, where he features songs he likes and movie reviews of obscure films I didn’t know existed, as well as recaps of amazing trips he takes. He provides us with the Hottie of the Month, a new and exciting way to look at the movers and shakers of the 18th century. One of his more recent posts, though, was about his theme for the year. Instead of making some sort of New Year’s resolution or other such nonsense, Jem has decided to do the following:

“First off, it’s been really good having a theme for the year. It’s given me an immediate gauge to help me decide whether I’m going in the right direction or getting off track. All I have to do is ask myself two simple questions:

1. Is thinking about or doing X, Y, or Z living in the here and now? and
2. Is X, Y, or Z what I really want?”

I’m not going to lie to you: I obviously cried when I read his blog. Then I thought about it. Maybe I cried some more. I don’t remember. The point is that this plan makes sense. I feel like I’ve gotten off track, terribly off track, and I need to figure out when I got off track, how far off track I’ve gotten, and what I need to do to rectify the situation.

Once upon a time I wanted to be a writer. I seem to have given that up. Not just the wanting to be a writer as my Full Time Job, but the writing itself. I don’t even know what I’d want to write about if I sat down and wrote. I don’t even know what genre I’d like to write in. I do know that I watch John Green’s video blogs and I’m struck by several things:

1) John Green is totally on my list of 5 people I get to sleep with if the opportunity presents itself, even though I’m not sure I really want to waste any quality time I could spend with him on something as pointless as sex.

2) I lust over the bookshelves in the background of his video blog, and I lust over the fact he has a book on how to arrange a home library that he used to arrange the books on his bookshelves. (The Goat has promised we’ll have bookshelves like that, but I completely and totally believe that you can’t have books like him on bookshelves like his unless you’re a Real Writer.)

3) I have read his newest YA novel, Paper Towns, and I’m pretty sure I could do that. Back in that once upon a time when I wanted to be a writer, I really wanted to write YA lit. Reading Paper Towns made me stop and think about how I’ve never even tried to do something I think I could do.

4) If I ever get to be a real teacher, I would make sure to show John Green’s video blogs (and his brother’s, for that matter) to my class, because he’s interesting and funny and smart and dorky and a writer, and I would hope it’d entice them into reading and writing and being interesting, funny, smart, and dorky.

5) Why am I not being a writer? He’s a Real Writer, with books and a contract with a publishing house and whatnot, but he wasn’t always a Real Writer. At some point he was just a Writer, and before that a writer.

So I sort of want to follow Jem’s formula for the year, and I want to stop acting like everything in the world is conspiring to keep me from being a Writer. Or at least a writer. It’s hard, though. I keep hearing that I can’t quit school and student teaching because I’m so close to being done. I’ve actually been told that since my first semester at the Institution of My Choosing, and I’ve heard it so much it doesn’t mean anything anymore, even though now it’s true. True-er. I’m also having the “I can’t get anything done because I’m not taking any medication for the crazy and therefore every single little thing makes me distracted and stops me from actually working” disease. That’s a horrible disease, by the way, because I really can’t settle down and get school stuff done. I also can’t get anything non-school related done. I can literally  get stuck turning in a circle (it happened Sunday night), not sure which direction to go, because I can’t make a decision on what I need to do first. The sucky thing is that I can do non-essential, procrastinating things (i.e. play Diner Dash: Flo Through Time) for hours. I’m so stressed out and anxious and confused over what to do in order to get the right things done, and sometimes the only thing I can do is pick none of the things I need to. (That could be solved by trying to get some more drugs for the crazy, but the longer you don’t take the drugs for the crazy the less you want to because the more crazy you are, which can only make sense to those who either have the crazy or take drugs for the crazy.)

On my way home yesterday I planned my evening, which involved walking the dog and Wii Fit-ing it up, but I also included time for doing homework and writing lesson plans. But then the dog played with another dog and didn’t need a walk, I was initially too tired to Wii Fit it up, and then there was a presidential address and the dog threw up and needed cuddles (in the middle of my Wii Fit-ing it up). I did get my homework done, but as it was due last Thursday I’m not too sure it counts as me doing a good job. I haven’t talked to my mom in forever, because that’s at least an hour of my night, which I can’t foresee losing without getting all anxious and guilty, even if I don’t do anything worthwhile in place of it.

How am I supposed to fit trying to write in there?

(In case you’re wondering, I’m totally blogging illegally while at high school being a student teacher. But if I don’t do it now, I won’t do it. And people need me to blog. I can also blog in sections, or look up and pretend to be paying attention, or switch to real work if someone comes too close. I can’t foresee writing-writing in this situation, though, because I don’t write very well if I can’t just write.)

25 billion reasons why I don’t like Facebook

Everyone seems to be doing that inane “25 things you don’t know about me” meme on Facebook, and the annoying thing is that they’re tagging everyone on their “Friends” list to be “Included in this note.” I’ve been tagged about a dozen times now, and I’m not really sorry to admit that I haven’t read any of them. I love my friends, my real friends, my near and dear friends who are no longer so near and probably don’t consider me very dear because I’m not very good at the whole “being a good friend” thing, and I’d love to learn new things about them. I’m not exactly sure why it’s fun and entertaining to read about those things in list format, specifically a list of 25 things, but so it goes. I haven’t jumped on the bandwagon, mainly due to the fact I assume the reason people don’t know the 25 things on I’d put on my list is because they don’t want to know them. Or I don’t want them to know them.

(To be included on my list of 25 things if I ever make such a list: Multiple pronouns in the same sentence drive me crazy, especially when it sounds better to use them, but contextually it could possibly be confusing.)

I suppose the number one thing that would go on my list of 25 things you don’t know about me (”you” being some sort of mass personal pronoun meant to make everyone reading the list feel like they’re intimately involved with the person writing it) is that I have rheumatoid arthritis. I was diagnosed when I was 24 years old, but I became symptomatic when I was around 19. That means I spent five years having no idea why my body was seemed to be giving up, and my view on life changed a lot. When you think you’re going to be in a wheelchair before you’re 30, and you’re becoming so severely limited in how well your hands work at 21 that you’re pretty sure you’ll never be able to pick up a baby if you were to ever get around to having one, looking forward to the future isn’t as simple or as exciting as it should be.

There are a lot of things that are rolled up in my RA, things that don’t really need to be discussed right now, but the main thing is that I was diagnosed with a disease. A real, live disease, one that is permanent and debilitating. One that, if you’re lucky (and I am well aware of how extremely lucky I am), can be stabilized with medicine. Expensive medicine. Expensive medicine that has to be prescribed by expensive doctors, specialists, and has to be monitored through expensive things like frequent blood work and x-rays. I am lucky, I know I’m lucky, because my medicine was able to stop the progression of the disease and even reverse some of the damage that had already been done. I’m lucky because I have wonderful parents who have gone above and beyond to support me, keeping me on their insurance long after it was legal to do so, risking ridiculously large penalties if anyone ever does their research and sees that I’m not truly dependent, that my parents are really just beating the system so I’m not stuck on some crappy insurance plan with some enormous deductible (or, worse yet, student insurance) that doesn’t cover all the things that need to be covered for me to be healthy.

The thing about this disease, and the stuff needed to take care of me so I’m not being beat up by the disease, is that it has chained me down and forced me to make choices I would never have made if I was a healthy adult.

I wouldn’t have gone into the M.A.T. program. If for some strange reason I still did, I wouldn’t have stayed when I realized it wasn’t what I wanted.

(Even though this was prediagnosis and a long time ago) I would never have spent so much time with MS, hoping for him to decide he wanted to marry me, hoping I’d get a chance to start a family before I physically couldn’t.

I would never have decided it was so damn necessary to get married and have a family RIGHT NOW, which would have made most of the relationships in my life so much easier (both for my friends and my boyfriends).

I wouldn’t have come up with the crazy “I’ll get my M.A.T.!” plan, because it wouldn’t have mattered if I was on crappy student insurance (or no insurance at all).

I wouldn’t have pushed The Terrorist to make a commitment, to get engaged, because I wouldn’t have been adding up the years in my head and worrying about the time I wanted to spend married and settled before thinking about children.

(As a side note, something else in my list of 25 things you don’t know about me, I can’t just up and decide I’m ready to have kids. I have to carefully plan out the entire thing, because I take medicine I can’t take while pregnant, medicine I’ll have to have out of my system for a good bit of time before trying to get pregnant, and this is medicine that keeps me mobile and functioning. I also need to not only plan carefully for what is going to be going on in my life when I start that process, I have to make sure there’s money if I can’t work and good insurance that will be able to provide for the entire ordeal, like the good bit of draining gross fluid out of my knees I anticipate happening constantly. I have to make sure this goes into motion before I reach an age it could be difficult to get pregnant at, and an age where not taking the medicine could do worse and lasting damage to my body. Let’s not forget the added math if I might want to have more than one child, especially if I want to do something responsible and space them out appropriately.)

I wouldn’t worry that I’m moving too fast with the Goat. I probably wouldn’t be moving so fast, and therefore there’d be no worry. I wouldn’t keep thinking, “Oh my God, if he isn’t the one, I’m screwed.”

I would have up and quit when I realized nothing, absolutely nothing, about this student teaching experience is making me want to be a teacher.

I’d have submitted Ph.D. applications to try and get started in a program this coming fall.

I wouldn’t feel so guilty about saying all this or being upset by it, because I feel guilty about it all the time. There are so many people so much more worse off than I am, and they’re not as unhappy with their lives as I am. They aren’t letting their problems stop them.

I’d heal faster.

This is why I haven’t created a list of 25 things. They’d all be like this. And let’s be honest with each other: no one wants to know this.

And then there was a bright spot.

My mentor teacher had a table found and delivered to her room for me. I hate it, because it’s some sort of geometric shape I don’t appreciate, where one part is wider than the other, and it hurts my OCD sensibilities. But I have it, which is better than trying to work on a corner of a perfectly rectangular table covered with nonsense that I assume is just recycling waiting to be recycled. It got moved to the other side of the room from my little corner I was stuck in, and this wall had a junction box on it that suspiciously looked like it might be an internet box. I grabbed one of my many trusty ethernet cables lying around my apartment (and by “lying around my apartment” i mean “stored in a box labeled ‘cords’ and stacked neatly in my storage closet”) and, praying to multiple gods who might have some sort of interest in me being connected to the outside world while stuck in high school, I plugged it in. Hooray! Internet! Sure, Facebook is blocked and half the things you might come across when you search on Google are blocked, but I can check my e-mail and write in this blog and generally keep myself from crying while I spend my fifteen minute lunch regretting all the choices I made in my life that have led me to this point.

Now all I need to the ability to leave and go retrieve coffee from a nearby coffeeshop run by hippies that sells only fair trade coffee and My Person™ right nearby for adventures to buggies (also run by hippies) that sell burritos and former alleys turned into restaurant’s that serve delicious bagel sandwiches (again, made by hippies).

Never really thought I’d actually miss Athens…

Remember when I didn’t think I’d ever cut it as a teacher? I miss those days.

I probably haven’t mentioned it here, but this whole student teaching/becoming a real, live, grown-up high school English teacher isn’t turning out to be my cup of tea. Part of it stems from the fact that I’ve spent the past four, no, five years not knowing what the heck I was doing, making it up as I went, and doing my very own thing in my very own classroom. Sure, at the beginning I was scared out of my mind and wished upon every single star in the sky someone would tell me what I should (or, in my case, shouldn’t) be doing. I complained about the system and about the emphasis placed on college writing teachers to “change the world, one freshman at a time,” and I swore up and down freshmen composition courses that are left to the whims and whiles of the instructors aren’t really doing what freshmen composition courses are supposed to be doing: preparing students for four years of writing on the college level. I wanted to teach writing, to invite my students into discussions that challenged them by reading things that challenged them, and to get them to put themselves on paper, whether it was in a research paper about the use of steroids in baseball or in a personal essay about the experience of coming out. Sometimes what I wanted to happen in the classroom, what I planned and prepared and dreamed about, failed miserably. Sometimes the thing I figured out thirty seconds before I left the office (usually thanks to My Person™ telling me what she had done in her class, until she moved away and I had to ask Mitch, which wasn’t nearly as helpful or successful or even useful) went brilliantly. I often referred to myself as The Worst Teacher Ever™, but I didn’t often hate it. Rarely did I wish for different students (though I did spend a good part of my first year in the M.A. program wishing for a different book to teach from), and as much as grading papers sucks, there was something immensely satisfying about it.

Those days are gone.

I’m under the instruction and supervision of a mentor teacher and university supervisor. My university supervisor doesn’t really have any doubts about my teaching ability, and except for coming to Jesus every once in a while, she’s rather enjoyable. My mentor teacher isn’t the mentor teacher I feared. She hasn’t asked for formal, eight part lesson plans with stated objectives and the corresponding state standards done up in triplicate and submitted a week in advance, although that sort of behavior might have me just expire on the spot. She hasn’t told me I need to lose fifty pounds (I know that was an unreasonable fear, but I do need to lose fifty pounds, and I have this secret wish I’ll finally find someone to actually acknowledge this to my face) or dress better. Instead she’s scattered (I can’t find her desk for all the papers and folders and books and whatnot on top of it) and non-committal. She can’t provide me with reading schedules or lesson plans from her previous experiences teaching this course, and most of my “What have you done in the past with [insert piece of literature here]?” is met with “Um. Well, What would you do?” Whether it’s just her face or her demeanor or the fact she’s really too scattered to follow my line of thinking, those pop quizzes rarely end well for me. Instead my ideas, thrown out off the top of my head, are questioned further, critiqued, and handed back to me sliced, diced, and over salted. I know better than to walk into a classroom full of high school seniors completely unprepared, and I know that no matter how clear something is or how specific the requirements, there will be kids who need their hand held. Despite my experience, or, rather, because of it, I don’t have a bag of tricks to whip out when I come to a some new material. I believe that on some level, you just have to sit them down and make them talk about it, and sometimes you need to sit them down and make them write about it. There isn’t a reading guide for every book/story/poem/novel/play. There probably won’t be any at all in college. Not every single assignment has a rubric or a right answer. I can’t tell a student what to do if they don’t have ideas of their own. Teaching students to ask homogeneous questions, like the ones on study guides or graciously tucked in the margins of their text book in blue ink so they stand out, isn’t teaching them to think. It’s teaching them that there are right ways and wrong ways to look at a text or a movie or life, and that there are answers.

There aren’t always answers. Everything isn’t black and white. Reading and writing is about a whole hell of a lot more than comprehension.

I feel trapped. All the things I believe about writing and critical thinking, pedagogical things if you want to be all higher education about it, don’t seem to have a place in high school English language arts. I want to know what’s important to my students, what moves them, what they want to know about. I want to peak their interest, not by showing Batman Begins, but by getting them to think and feel and discuss texts that, even if they don’t realize it initially, are important to them. I want them to write, pages and pages and pages of writing, about themselves and the weather and their family and that asshole who won’t return their calls and what they’re reading and what they saw on TV last night and how they feel about what’s going on in the world and everything else. I want them to run out of letters they’ve written so much. I want ah-ha moments and complaints they’re being forced to do to much and failing grades and papers that have been revised ten times and finally get an “A.” I want them to know they can feel, that what they think and say is important, just as important as the Hebrews who wrote the Old Testament or whoever wrote the screenplay for Batman Begins.

The Goat suggested, if I decide to not be a teacher, that I could get a job at Ikea. Some people might say that I have a passion, and chucking it in the nearest recycle bin and going to work selling Swedish modular furniture would be a waste. I’m not sure that’s true, not only because Swedish modular funiture is amazing, but because it’s more than a little bit difficult to see what you want to do but not be able to do it because it’s just beyond the scope of what you’re supposed to do. This is why I stopped writing. I couldn’t stand working and feeling like I was supposed to say something, reach someone, when the opportunity to do that had passed me by, gotten just beyond my reach.

What would you do if you were me?