Y’all, I have one more week in this long, long, long, long, long semester. Not bad-long, just long-long. And I’m ready for a break, but what I’m really excited about is organizing all the boxes of class materials under my bed into spiffy binders. And these spiffy binders will all fit into one box, making it possible for me to get rid of all the others. Then, I’m going to adjust my prices and re-list my books on half.com in the hopes that they all sell so I can get rid of that book case. And after that, I’m going to go through all my clothes and sort them honestly based on what I wear and what I don’t. I’m going to get rid of the ones I don’t wear, and then I’m going for a run.

When I get back from the run, I’m going to shave my legs. Both of them. All at once. Then I’m going to catch up on all my stories and take a nap. When I wake up from the nap, I’m going to go to the movies. I don’t know what I’m going to see, but it’s going to be good, and then I’m going to do my Christmas shopping.

After that, I’m going to read. I don’t care what. I’m going to go to the ‘Bou, get the free drink they promised me after making me the wrong drink last time, and read until I’m over it. Then I’m going to look at Etsy and Pinterest while I watch Bones and, let’s be honest, probably Elf for the fourth time in a month. I’m going to lie on the floor and watch the lights on my Christmas tree twinkle while I listen to all my favorite music. And I’m going to talk to people on Skype at all hours of the day and night when I would normally be asleep or at work.

If you would like to join me in any of these activities (except the napping and leg-shaving), you are welcome to do so. It would please me very much. We can make gingerbread houses and eat cookie dough and go ice skating and maybe even hold hands.

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.

I’m pretty much out of words for the month, so forgive me if this is short, stilted, awkward or otherwise unreadable.

New Orleans was GREAT. We had a fantastic time, we had the best cheerleaders ever, we ate a lot of really good food, and we completed all 13.1 miles of the 1/2 marathon. We actually did really well with our running/walking intervals for the first 10 miles, and then we both started having joint problems, so we decided to walk the last 3 miles. However, somewhere around mile 11 or 12, I looked at Amaris and said, “You know we’re running across the finish line, right?” to which she responded, “Oh, yeah. Of course.” So when we got to the end and saw the boys, we picked up the pace, and JBeau was able to catch it all on film. I was pretty pleased to see that you can’t really tell how much pain I was in, and the cheering drowns out the sound of me going, “Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow” with every step.

I came away with a new running shirt, a Mardi Gras medal, a slight sunburn a blister on each heel and memories to last me a lifetime. Plus, I took lots of fun fisheye pictures. Have a looksee:

On Friday, we went to the convention center to check in for the race and pick up our goody bags. We took this one right after we left there while we were waiting for the streetcar to come. We spent roughly 40% of our time in New Orleans waiting for streetcars to come.

Saturday morning, we went to Camellia’s Grill, which is an extremely popular diner on the St. Charles line. It only has about 30-40 seats inside, and there are two small couches for waiting, so the line goes out the door and down the sidewalk. While we waited, the fellas went down to a gas station and picked up some snacks. We finished the snacks, waited another 20 minutes or so, and then finally got into the building where we waited for another 10 minutes to get seated and eat. It was totally worth it.

I feel like I’m finally getting the hang of the long exposure thing. When you’re using this camera inside, you pretty much have to leave the shutter open longer to let in enough light to see what you’re taking the picture of. This one worked out nicely. I just wish we could have gotten one of our waiter, Marvin, whose name tag said, “Word,” as did he.

Once again with the long exposure. We went to this record store on the recommendation of “Al, he sells records” from the Edwin McCain song, “Alive.” My friend/coworker, TeacheRisa, see, is a bit of an Edwin junkie, and she was in New Orleans for a show one time when she met Al. They still keep in touch, and although he no longer sells records, he told us about this place, which was pretty cool. I believe it was called the Louisiana Music Factory. It was on Decatur, just a block off of Canal.

A guy in the park offered to take this of us when he saw us trying to do a self-portrait. The great thing about the fisheye camera is that it takes great self-portraits because you can get SO MUCH in a shot. All four of us could fit comfortably in an arm-length picture (see Camellia’s Grill above). However, there’s a lot more freedom to do what you want in a picture taken by someone else rather than trying to just squish all together to make sure you all make it into the self-portrait. As you can see, though, I still got squished.

My favorite thing about this picture is that the guy who took it took my camera, looked at it very perplexed for a moment, and then said, “What the…? What is…? Is this a FILM CAMERA?? Man, you guys are hipsters.”

I don’t actually have any race photos, but they’ll be along shortly. Amaris is apparently editing them right now, which means they’ll be on facebook tonight, which means they’ll be coming your way soon thereafter. Get excited!

I feel like I’ve packed two weeks into this week already, what with laundry and writing sub plans and making a sassy Mardi Gras running skirt and movie Tuesday and working out and this and that and the other thing. I can’t believe it’s only Wednesday, but on the other hand, I can’t believe it’s already Wednesday. Holy crap, y’all, it’s already Wednesday night, which means at this time TOMORROW, I will be en route to New Orleans!! I should pack. And print out my e-ticket, and print out the info about where we’re supposed to go and when for the race, and maybe print out a map to the hotel from the airport.

And go to bed. Whew. I’ll try to update from the Big Easy, but if I can’t, keep up with me on Twitter. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of tweetable moments to share.

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.

Hey, remember when I had y’all ask me all those questions on my Formspring page, and then I never answered them? Yeah, woopsie. I sort of forgot about that for a while, which I suppose is fine because some of you told me you didn’t really like my Q&A times anyway. However, I left several of you hanging with no answers to your questions, and for that, I sincerely apologize. I’m going to answer two questions today because I think they go together nicely. The first question is this:

If all your hair turned into snakes, what color snakes would you want them to be? Snakes can be multicolored if that helps.

And the second is:

Would you ever shave your head for any reason? (voluntarily)

I have actually thought before about shaving my head. Back in college, I started cutting my own hair, and it was so darn addictive that at one point, I thought, “What if I just shaved it all off? That would be SO much easier.” And then I realized I’d be bald if I did that, and I have no idea what my head looks like under all this hair, and what if it’s all malformed? And then the hair would grow back, and I’d have to decide to either maintain my baldness or let it go through that awkward growing-out phase where it’s too long to just let it do its thing but too short to do anything with. And what if it didn’t grow back curly? Oh that would just be terrible!

So in the end, I decided (a) not to shave it and (b) to stop cutting it myself. I’ve found that it’s far less tempting to cut your own hair when you have a decent style you’d rather not ruin.

Snakes, as it turns out, do not fall under the category of “decent style” in my mind. If they could be shaved off, that would be the way to go. However, if for some reason they could not be shaved off – if they were attached to my blood stream/supply, for example, and if shaving them off would mean me bleeding to death – then I’d want them to be pink. Hot pink.

Easy question.

One of my students requested that I take pictures of my trip to Asheville last weekend and post them here (hey Sarah!), and although I forgot my camera, Josh has a pretty good one on her phone, so here we go (thanks Josh!)!

We spent Friday afternoon wandering around downtown, trying to find me a new fall look. We went into a lot of stores, this one being one of my favorites. It’s a vintage store that also carries the wares of local etsy merchants, so there’s a lot of fun stuff to play with. But back to my new look. I liked this one ok. The mohawk, the two sets of eyes, the pointy nose, the blush. I think it really works for me, don’t you?

No? Perhaps not. Ok, on to the next store.

Let me just start by disappointing you all by telling you that I did not buy this hat. I know. I’m sorry. I liked it a lot. I love hats. I just feel like there’s no good reason to wear them around here. When I lived in NY, I wore hats all the time because it was cold, and I walked around outside a lot. But here, it’s sort of pointless. You go from your house to your car to your destination and back again. You’re never outside for more than two minutes, and let’s be honest. It’s not that cold.

Maybe if the hat had been a color that I felt like I’d get more wear out of, I would have been willing to spend money on it, but I wasn’t in love with this one. However, if you happen to see a hat similar to this one in a tweed, perhaps, or a felt, let me know.

On Saturday afternoon, we took a wee hike up to a lovely lookout. The leaves weren’t quite at their peak yet, but it was still beautiful, and it was really nice to be out in the fresh air.

You just can’t be on top of a mountain like this and not spin around like Julie Andrews singing, “The hills are a live with the sound of music!” It’s just not possible.

Ok, so we didn’t actually sing, but only because there were other people up there. You’d better believe, though, that if I were up there alone, I’d sing the whole song. I’d also sing “Climb Every Mountain” AND “Edelweiss.” Oh who am I kidding? I’d re-enact the whole movie, and we all know it.

There are plenty more pictures on facebook, but that’s enough for now. We had a great time, and my friend Eden was a wonderful hostess. We got to see lots of friends, eat plenty of good food and frolic in the mountains. What more could a girl want?

As you may already know, The Container Store is opening in Raleigh this weekend. And since I hosted that giveaway a while back, they gave me a ticket to a “private” preview party, which took place last night. L-Josh and I went, and Amaris was supposed to come too, but she got…lost? Yeah, we’ll call it lost.

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