Ok y’all, I have about a million things to do, and I’m supposed to be lesson planning right now according to the schedule I set for myself last night, but I HAVE to tell you about how I was STRONGLY reprimanded by a very sassy postal worker the other day.

Back story. A couple of weeks ago, I went up to the mailboxes as the mail male was doing his thing. I live in an apartment complex, so the mailboxes are the kind where one large panel opens up about 20 of them at a time. Our panel was open, and I asked him if I could just reach in and grab ours. He said that was no problem, so I took my mail and went on my merry way.

Ok now. The other day, I got to the mailboxes as the mail female was there doing her thing. I was on the phone with Amaris, and I didn’t want to have too much going on at once, so I didn’t say anything to the mail lady. I just went in for my mail.

She whipped around so fast you’d have thought I was stealing her baby, and with a horrified look on her face and a sassy neck swivel, she said to me, and I quote, “NO. Uh-uh. Step AWAY from the mailbox.”

Shocked, and trying not to laugh, I don’t know how long I stood there with my mouth open before I replied, “Oh. I’m sorry. The other guy let me just get my mail before, so I thought…”

But I was interrupted, this time with an accompanying finger waggle, “Huh-uh. Wrong answer. No. Mm-mm.” Seriously, she said, “Wrong answer.”

At this point, I really wanted to try for a grab-n-run, but I was afraid she’d taze me or something, so I went for a more docile approach. “Uhh…ok, can I give you this then?” I said, tentatively holding out my Netflix envelope.

“Yes,” she said, obviously using every bit of restraint she had to keep from saying or doing something that might get her in trouble, “but you need to leave now.”

Oh my gosh, y’all, ask Amaris. I was giggling uncontrollably all the way back to the car. I still can’t believe this happened. It absolutely made my day, but I still haven’t gotten my mail.

It’s amazing how many little kid games I have my students play in class. We play board games, Memory, Cootie Catcher, but my favorite is Telephone. It’s perfect because it incorporates listening and pronunciation skills, and today, I made it use writing skills too. Because I’m the jam.

We were working today on quoted speech. You know, where you tell exactly what somebody else said and use quotation marks. I only just recently realized that not all languages write quoted speech the same. We use a comma to introduce a quote while other languages use a colon. We also put both of our quotation marks up high whereas in other languages, one of them goes down low. It’s crazy times, I tell you.

So I started two messages going in opposite directions around the room. As each student heard the message, he/she had to write it down as a direct quote:

Miguel said, “The fly water is ugly bathtub.”

That way, when we got the messed up one at the other end, we could trace our way back through the mistakes. And I don’t know, but I think that was more fun than just hearing the messed up version at the end.

Well. One of the sentences was, “Maria has a pet monkey in Brazil.” In my lesson plans, I’d written, “__student__ has a pet monkey in __country__,” and I’d planned to see who was there in class today and pick someone with a good sense of humor to put in the sentence. Maria worked out well because she has a great sense of humor, and she was far enough around the room for the sentence to have changed significantly from the original by the time it got to her.

On the other end, it came out, “Maria likes smoking,” but before that, it was, “Maria likes monkeys,” and ,”Maria is a bad monkey in Brazil,” which I’m sure they thought was some crazy idiom I’d thrown in. You know, like Shaft is a bad mon… (Shut yo’ mouth!). Aaaaaand YouTube-ing the theme from Shaft…

Anyhoe, once we traced it back to the beginning and everyone knew what the original sentence was, Maria’s face lit up, and she said, “Yes! It’s true!”

Y’all. The woman straight up had a pet monkey in Brazil. I was so confused, I didn’t know what to do with myself. She thought someone had told me, and I had to show her my lesson plan to explain that it was all a big coincidence. Amazing.

Incidentally, the other message was, “Without geometry, life is pointless,” which they totally didn’t get, but I was amused.

Amaris‘s brain doesn’t always work. I don’t know if she needs more sleep or if she’s got some kind of vitamin deficiency or what, but sometimes she just ain’t all there. I can say these things about her because she knows it, and I’ve said it to her (though she probably doesn’t remember), and well, she’s just not ashamed. She is who she is, and we love her.

Well, this morning, I got a tweet from her that I should go look at Mary’s feed because the content of one of her tweets was a direct result of me and my awesomeness. So I went, and I looked, and I did not get it. Then, as I thought more about her most recent tweet, a tiny, vague and very hazy memory began to creep ever-so-slowly and sneakily into the very back corner of my mind. It said, in part, “[my husband] is singing along to Billy Joel, which is just awesome.” And I thought, Did I turn Karl on to Billy Joel? That feels kind of familiar.

So I asked Amaris, and she told me this WHOLE long story about how I told Karl that any man who likes music should have a basic appreciation for Billy Joel, and how the women in his life, and maybe even his future wife, would love it if he liked Billy Joel, and on and on and on.

Y’all, I have no recollection of this whatsoever. So I told Amaris that if we don’t have husbands when we’re old, we need to just move on in together so we can try and help each other remember to put our teeth in and wear clothes when we leave the house. I don’t even care if they match. (Well, I want my teeth to match my mouth, so I hope I don’t put hers in, but as far as my clothes go, I’ll still be so urban that it won’t matter.) Clearly our mental capacities are already failing us, so now is the time to prepare.

So if any of y’all want to get in on this, let me know. We can buy a big ol’ house somewhere and form our own old folks home. Surely somebody will have a kid who’s a doctor who’ll come over and check on us once a week. We’ll hire a college kid to do all our grocery shopping, and when he/she comes over with our rations, we’ll say things that are totally inappropriate and unexpected for old people. We’ll play games in the back yard, but we’ll cheat, of course. We’ll go on early evening walks through the neighborhood, smiling and waving at all the families out playing in their yards. We’ll sit out on our porch on Sunday afternoons and wave at passing cars. We’ll always have candy in our pockets to give to the kids at church. We’ll have surprisingly good Halloween decorations. We’ll dance as much of a jig as our hips will allow when Christmas carolers come by. We’ll drink wine on the porch at 10 in the morning just because we can get away with it ’cause we’re old. And when we wake up at 3 in the morning because we went to bed at 7 the previous evening, we’ll take the opportunity afforded to us by the cover of darkness to go skinny dipping in the community pool.

Won’t you join us?

Oh y’all, this semester is going to be FUN! First of all, I’m going to be teaching a new class (that I’ll be inventing as I go) on phrasal verbs, idioms and slang. Now, for those of you who are not total grammar nerds, a phrasal verb is a verb composed of two or more words which, when put together, convey a meaning different from the meanings of the individual words. For example, “hang out” can be literally hang + out as in, “I hang (action) my towels out (where) on the balcony railing to dry.” Or, “hang out” can be a phrasal verb as in, “Ryan Gosling and I were hanging out in his hot tub last night…”

Ok fine, so that last one might have a possible double entendre, but you get the idea.

Anyhoe, that class is going to be awesome. But my other class, my morning class, is also going to be lots of fun. I’ve recently discovered some new podcasts that I’ll be using for listening practice. All from HowStuffWorks.com, we’ve got Stuff You Should Know, Stuff You Missed in History Class, and my personal favorite, Stuff Mom Never Told You. Well, I was listening to a Mom Stuff podcast just now in preparing my lessons for the first week of class, and as I was writing down a few vocabulary words from it, I began to wonder whether I should also use this podcast for the slang class.

The terms in question were “guyliner” and “manscara,” but they also got me thinking about “manscaping,” which made me curious as to how many other such words exist. So I looked it up and was not shocked to find the following:

• guylights
• boytox
• manbag
• brozilian

I WAS, however, both surprised and very, very amused by mantyhose. Yeah. Just you go look that up and enjoy. Feel free to come on back here when you’re done and leave comments.

True Confession #1

When I think about planning lessons, my whole brain shuts down, and I have to convince myself that it’s a necessary thing to do. Then I have to think about how long it will take me and what else I have to do that day, and if there’s any time at all to spare, the lesson planning gets bumped back. I like the actual teaching, and I love hanging out with my students every day, but the planning part is so draining. The only things in life I like planning are trips and parties. That’s it. Everything else can be improvised.

True Confession #2

When I’m walking alongside a single guy friend, I always want to hold his hand. Always. It doesn’t matter if I’m interested in him romantically or not. It just seems to me like the natural thing to do, and I have to constantly remind myself that we are not dating, that I’m not actually interested in dating him, that if I were to try and hold his hand, it would be weird, and that nothing good could come of it. It would make everything awkward and not be worth it at all. So if you are a single guy friend of mine and you notice that my conversational skills are lacking when we walk, it’s because I’m having to concentrate very hard on not weirding you out. You’re welcome.

But if you want to hold my hand, go for it. I won’t think anything of it.

I’m not sad that Osama bin Laden is no longer with us. I do not mourn his absence from our world. But the general response to his death has disturbed me, and I just have to say this.

I am generally pretty nonpolitical, mostly because I’m not confident enough in my ideas to take a stand on them. I know no political jargon, and I’m pretty sure Sasha Obama could easily defeat me in a debate on any global issue. But what I do know is that Jesus died for Osama bin Laden just as much as he died for me. And although he was a horrible, horrible, terrible, awful, murderous man who will not be missed on Earth, God mourns the death of his soul.

Earlier this afternoon, I put a Martin Luther King Jr. quote on facebook that said, “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” No one has commented on it directly, but I have seen some folks talking about the difference between hate and justice as if to say that bin Laden got what he deserved, and rejoicing in that justice does not qualify as hate. Perhaps. If that’s what you’re doing, then I absolutely agree. Justice is always right and good.

But let’s be careful not to justify hate by calling it something else. And let us not forget the justice that has mercifully not been done to us.

To those who found and brought earthly justice to Osama bin Laden – thank you. To the men and women of the United States armed forces – thank you for your tireless and selfless service. I cannot say enough how grateful we are for you, and I wish you safety and success in everything you do for us. I mourn the loss of those who have given their lives to protect us, I grieve with their family members who are trying to pick up the pieces and carry on, and I pray for those in the field and at home.

But I do not rejoice in eternal death, even in that of an enemy. I’m glad that bin Laden can no longer harm anyone, but I wish he’d known a better way, and I feel sorry for him that he never did and never will.

Yesterday morning, I heard a radio commercial for a boat show in Greensboro this weekend where everyone’s favorite waterskiing squirrel will be performing LIVE!! I got a little excited and then a little nostalgic about my own encounter with Twiggy, but not quite enough to make me want to drive to Greensboro and pay money to attend a boat show.

Little did I know that small, furry, woodland creatures would be a theme for the day.

I later entered into an email conversation with Mrs. Emily Furr Hogan that turned at some point to the topic of transferring VHS videos to DVDs – something neither of us is capable of. She then made the following statement:

I’m pretty sure Matt’s grandma knows how to do this. I need to call her. And yes– I did just admit that a lady in her 70′s knows perhaps more about technology than I do. I think she uses the VHS / DVD thing when she’s making videos of her chipmunks. I’ll find out details.

Now look, friends, you cannot say that someone’s grandmother makes videos of chipmunks like it’s a normal thing and just leave it at that. It is not a normal thing. Please acknowledge that. Since Emily and I had not previously established that things of this nature must be adequately presented both for their creativity and incredulity, I requested more information. Here’s what I got:

It’s all true.  She sets up these dioramas on her back porch and lures the chipmunks that live in her yard to come into the dioramas via a little trail of sunflower seeds.  Before you know it, you’ve got a scene that features a chipmunk driving a covered wagon.  Or hanging laundry out behind its teeny tiny house.  Or “wearing” a santa suit in a little Christmas scene.  (She props up the outfits & as soon as the chipmunk stands perfectly behind it, she snaps a photo.)

This stuff is AMAZING, and I’ve been dying to get my hands on some of it.  She’s got video and ALBUM UPON ALBUM of these types of photos.  I remember her expressing genuine, deep excitement upon finding the tiny covered wagon.  “And I told the store clerk that this would be just PERFECT for my chipmunks!!”

Y’all, this story expresses so many things I love about Emily:

• She knows someone who builds dioramas for chipmunks and then lures them into tiny covered wagons with sunflower seeds.
• She is related by marriage to this person.
• She sees both the humor and the amazingness in such an activity.
• This sort of thing comes up in the course of a normal conversation for us.

I must see these photos/videos, but more importantly, I must find a single cousin of Matt’s to marry so that I too might join this family.

1. The title of this post comes from Pride and Prejudice. The mom is always going on and on about her poor nerves and how no one ever thinks about them. They’re always stressing her out, and she’s always having to lie down or put her feet up or have smelling salts administered to her or something. That’s how I feel right now.

2. I always tell my students that although class starts at 9:00, my brain doesn’t turn on until about 10:30. That’s why they often do a lot of work that doesn’t involve me first thing – writing, vocabulary exercises, reading, etc.

By 10:30 this morning, I’d already had to turn a student away who was not eligible to come to class. He missed the first day, see, and because of that, he has to wait for the next registration day to come back. Now the next registration day is next Friday, so he doesn’t have to wait that long, but he basically threw a hissy fit and said that if he couldn’t stay today, he just wouldn’t come back at all. I think he was trying to call my bluff. Only I wasn’t bluffing. We’ll see if he shows up next Friday.

Then, still before 10:30, another student fainted in class, and we had to lower her to the floor, revive her, call her husband to come get her, walk her downstairs, and make sure she didn’t fall over again. It’s kind of hard to decide what to do in situations like that. How serious is it? Does fainting require a 911 call? If an ambulance comes to get her and take her to the emergency room, will she be able to pay for that? She said she’d been sick all week with the flu, and I think she just wasn’t well enough to come to class yet, but she felt bad about missing the whole first week, so she came even though she wasn’t ready. And then she fainted.

So we got her to the floor and the other students raised her feet and fanned her while I ran upstairs to get her husband’s number from her emergency contact form. I called him, he said he’d be right there, I got her some water and wet a paper towel for her face, she sat up to drink a little bit, looked a little better, and then fainted again.

Eventually, when she seemed to be able to stay awake and wanted to try and get up, we got her downstairs to wait for her husband. He came and got her, and we went back to class.

Once again, all before 10:30.

Should we have called 911? I still don’t think so. You just never know what people who are unconscious would want you to do. Can they afford an ambulance ride and emergency room care? I don’t know. How would a Muslim woman who covers her head feel about waking up to strange men taking off her head scarf to make her feel less constricted or worse, unbuttoning her shirt to listen to her heart/lungs? How would her husband feel about that? Especially if it wasn’t that serious. She didn’t hit her head, she wasn’t bleeding or throwing up, nothing was broken. She just fainted. Sick people faint sometimes. It’s happened to me, and I didn’t go to the hospital.

But of course now that it’s over, I’m analyzing it all and hoping I did everything right. I think I did. And I was surprisingly calm the whole time. But just for good measure, if y’all ever faint when I’m around, what would you like me to do about it? Do you want to go to the hospital? Do you want me to call 911? I don’t have any smelling salts. Perhaps I should invest?

I know it’s not quite as Capra-esque as a visit to Washington, but having Mrs. Emily Furr Hogan herself here in my very townhouse was definitely a highlight this week. Mrs. Hogan, it seems, booked a trip to NC, was very excited to have nearly two whole weeks with her family, then got to WILKESBORO!!!!! and realized there’s only about a week’s worth of visiting that can be comfortably done there. After that, without some buddies with whom to get into some mischief, it’s just boring. Plus, I think the snow covered up all the sidewalks and driveways she might have wanted to sidewalk chalk, so she had to get out. And I am just honored that she chose to come visit me!

So we had a little reunion last night at dinner – Emily, Julie, Jessica and myself representing Wilkes County – and Amaris and W-Josh rounded out the group nicely. Knowing as much as they do about my childhood and adolescence, they fit right in. We could flow easily in and out of conversations about our current life situations, Matt Hagaman, travel, the Wilkes Skippers, manties (man + panties), and the Wilkes Central Madrigal Singers without anyone missing a beat. Well, Emily and Jessica had never heard of manties, but we caught them right up. Besides, I think I made up the word manties back in my days at American Eagle SoHo (flagship store 81), so clearly it just needs some time to sweep the nation properly.

By the way, regarding Mr. Hagaman, Emily Furr Hogan tells me he was recently sighted wearing a sweater vest. I never thought I’d see the day.

Anyhoe, after dinner, Emily had a little surprise for me. Right there in downtown Raleigh, she pulled out of her trunk…

Tippy the 2-D Dog!

Now, if you are unfamiliar with Tippy, let me just explain (and this will give you a good idea of what all of high school was like for us even though it happened in grad school). When we were both living in NYC (Emily at Columbia and I at NYU), I had…a vision. At the time, I called it a 1-D dog until someone pointed out to me that that would just be a line. But I wanted a flat dog. I don’t know why. Don’t ask. It doesn’t make any sense, I know. Maybe I felt left out seeing all the people walking dogs around the city. Maybe I wanted a pet I didn’t have to take care of. Maybe I’m just super weird. But Emily was on board with the idea and set to work straight away.

What resulted was an image of a dog, printed once, then reversed and printed again. The prints were then mounted on cardboard and foam core and glued together with a yard stick in the middle. The yard stick comes out at such an angle that when you hold the end of it, it looks like Tippy is walking in front of you on an unusually thick leash.

We walked Tippy all over the Big Apple. We even took him to a dog park, where Tippy “played” with other dogs, which basically meant that we poked strangers’ dogs with our pieces of cardboard and foam core. I still can’t believe we got away with that. But good memories. Good memories indeed.

So Tippy now lives in Raleigh, and he is currently perched in the window by our front door, “keeping watch.” He’s a good pup.

Emily also brought me a Puerto Rican woman’s driver’s license, but that’s another story.

I have always said that in order to be a good ESL teacher (or probably any language teacher, for that matter), you have to be at least a little bit insane. You have to be able to roll with whatever comes at you, ready to answer no matter what questions come up, ready to explain things by way of demonstration, ready to liven things up should they get too boring. In general, you have to be willing to make a complete idiot of yourself. I think that’s why I like teaching ESL so much. It allows me to utilize the skills I might use on stage, but I never have to audition. Win-win.

But what I’ve just discovered is that teaching also keeps me just barely on the sane side. When I’m not teaching, you see, I get myself into trouble because I have no schedule. And when I have no schedule, I stay up later and sleep later. And when I stay up too late, I sign up for online dating services, and that is just no good at all (I deleted my account the next morning, thank goodness). And when I don’t have things to do during the day, I spend way too much time wandering around Target. And that’s when I accidentally try on nursing bras and consider buying them. And apparently that’s not good either.

I don’t mean to pick them up. I’m just looking at styles and sizes. I don’t notice the little snappy hook things on the front until I get back into the dressing room, and then I think, “Well, as long as I’m here…” And y’all, I’m not kidding. They are SO comfortable. I tried on a regular bra yesterday, and I hated it. It was all rigid and itchy, and it corralled my bazooms in a most unflattering manner. Then I tried on a soft, comfy, cute bra that also just happened to snap open in the front. What of it?

I didn’t buy it, but I do need to go to Target again today, and I’m not making any promises. If I buy it, I won’t tell you about it, and you’ll never know I’m wearing it. That is, unless you notice how unprecedentedly comfortable I am. Then you’ll know.