Um, I’d just like to point out that we are already through almost 1/12 of 2012. What? Where has this month gone?! Oh right, lesson planning, old episodes of Wings on Netflix, and Words with Friends. And about 50 cups of hot chocolate. I’m having one now as a matter of fact, but I made it with water instead of almond milk because it has less sugar that way, and I want to be asleep by 10 tonight because tomorrow’s a hair washing day. And that, friends, is my life.

I know I said I wasn’t going to make any New Year’s resolutions, but I do want to do a few slightly more exciting things with the next eleven twelfths of the year. But we’ll just call these whatever the annual equivalent of a bucket list would be. Is there a word for that? “Goals” doesn’t seem exciting enough. It’s too corporate, too type A, too…predictable for me.

The Awesomeness Conspiracy

In the pursuit of awesomeness in 2012, I will:

• make videos for the interwebs
• surprise people
• surprise myself
• not be afraid to fail
• go swimming
• flee the country
• make crafty things
• salsa dance
• send real mail
• party like it’s 1999
• stay up past midnight (but not on school nights)
• make rockin’ playlists
• not beat myself up over not finishing the crafty things I started
• frolic in parks
• sing karaoke like nobody’s business
• be grateful
• be sneaky
• tell people how great they are
• go to New York

Word.

Amaris turns 30 today, and in honor of that, I’d like to say (in the voice of the Wilkesboro Western Steer announcer), “Onward Hoe would like to wish Amaris Hames a very happy birthday. Happy birthday, Amaris.” We were up late last night working on several projects, this being one of them. She wanted to make a list of things she wished someone had told her before she turned 30, and since this happened last night, technically, I did tell her some of them before she turned 30. But then she went to bed before being able to put them to good use.

Anyhoe, it’s a good list, and since I came up with several of them, I’m boosting it from her blog and putting it here. Enjoy!

1.  Do not let the words of someone else determine your joy.  Amen.
2.  When you take the lid off a boiling pot of anything, that lid will drip on your toes.  And it will suck.
3.  There will come a time when doing simple things like closing the car door or walking downhill will make your body hurt.  Like a lot.  This time is coming soon.
4.  Take care of your skin. It really, REALLY matters. It will sag in places you didn’t think it would sag. And this is just the beginning.
5.  Invest in a good bra.  It will change your life.  Don’t be afraid to have a great sales woman feel you up to make it happen.
6.  There is no path that anyone SHOULD go down.  Anybody that tells you that is lying.  You have to figure out what YOUR story is.
Everyone’s story is different.
Everyone’s.
7.  However, there ARE some paths that no one should go down. Like, butt implants. Or cocaine.
8.  There will come a day when you are so excited to stay home on a Friday night.  Embrace it.  And stock up on Ben and Jerry’s.  Cuz’ you’s gawn need it.
9.  Learn the Tim Tam Slam.
10. You know a lot less than you think you do.  Don’t assume.  Ask more questions.
11. You know a lot more than you think you do.  Be confident.
12. Create.  As often as possible.
13. Figure out how to use who you are for the benefit of everyone.  Don’t be less of who you are because it inconveniences someone else.
14. Just because something is expensive doesn’t mean it’s better.
15. However, don’t be afraid to spend money on really good shoes.  They will make you much happier every day.
16. Be vulnerable with people who will love and care for you, not just dudes who act like they care so they can get into your drawers.
17. Keep a chocolate drawer to keep you sane.
18. Don’t iron your hair. It does not work like a flat iron.
19. If you’re not sure that it’s just going to be a fart, hold it in until you can get to a restroom.
20. Cancel memberships you no longer use.  Even if you think they’re going to end on their own, double check.
21. Be thoughtful and kind.  They’re more important than being important.
22. When you’re stressed out, puppies really do make everything better.  Go find one.
23. If you can’t find a puppy, The Three Amigos and mint-chocolate-chip ice cream will suffice.
24. Men at 30 have the potential to look DRASTICALLY different than they did at twenty.  You should be aware of this before you make any long-term decisions.
Drastically.
25. Don’t wait on somebody else to give you flowers.  Fill your home with them.
26. There will be a year in your early/mid-twenties that will TOTALLY suck.  But it will get better.  Promise.
27. Do NOT, under any circumstances, believe the following myths:
- You’re not grown up until you have children.
- You’re not married because you’re not “ready.”
- You’re not lovable if you don’t have a man in your life.
- If a boy doesn’t like you, you need to change.
- After you get married, you can’t travel any more.
- If you’re not married, you are alone.
- The older you get, the less likely you are to find someone.
28. It may require you to eat a lot of ramen later, but go. on. vacation.  Your soul needs it.
29. Don’t be lame and don’t be an asshole.
30. Dance it out.

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.

Ok so now that everybody pretty much knows, I guess I can talk about it.

I might be moving to Europe. It’s weird to type it out into the world like that. So far, it’s just been discussed privately among a few close, trusted friends and people I knew would understand and be excited with me. Honestly, I have no idea what’s going to happen. I’ve been taking things one step at a time, and really, at any point, the whole process could just be over, and that would be it. We’ll see. But for now, we press on.

I’m applying to go with World Team either to Italy or Spain. This is the same organization I went to Italy with back in June, and so far, this process has been…quite thorough. It’s been very cool – I’m learning a lot about myself as I go – but it has also been taking up lots and lots of time that I might have otherwise spent blogging. Or (let’s be honest) watching every episode of Bones (again) on Netflix. The application alone was at least twelve typed pages, and then they sent me the personality tests, the spiritual gifts test and the Bible tests (one of which I told you I flunked miserably, the other I haven’t been brave enough to take yet).

Then they sent me the official invitation to join them for a week of information, evaluation and mutual assessment, and suddenly things got really real. First of all, I need about $700 to make it happen, which is the first real commitment I’ve had to make. Until now, it’s all been literally on paper. Just theoretical. Just a really, really amazing dream of a possibility. Just paella and/or pizza, European public transit, Romance languages and adventure abounding on every side. But when it hits your pocketbook, it hits home.

Then, speaking of home, I started thinking about all the things I’ll miss if I leave. Weddings, birthdays, family reunions, my godchildren growing like weeds, Baby Josh, maybe Moravian Sugar Cake in my PJs with my family on Christmas morning. I don’t know what I’ll miss and what I won’t, but I know I’m asking my family and friends to make as big a sacrifice as I’d be making in going.

But then I started thinking of all the things I’d miss if I didn’t go, namely the chance to do something awesome, something bigger than myself, something impossible, something I’ve felt compelled to do for the last seven years. I don’t know the details of what’s in store for me. I just know that if I don’t at least try, I’ll always regret it and wonder.

I think y’all would too. You know me. You know I’ve got this crazy pull toward Europe. I honestly think if I didn’t at least try to go, some of you would be disappointed. So I’m asking you to sacrifice with me, but also to share in the awesomeness, knowing that your letting go is fueling something incredible.

I didn’t intend to make this a fundraising post, so you can stop reading now if you want it to not be about money. But if you’re still with me, and you want to give a little bit to help me get to the assessment week, please contact me. Comment, call, email, text, smoke signals, carrier pigeon, dream invasion, note in study hall, whatever. But maybe don’t send me a pigeon. You know how I feel about birds.

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.

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?

The next thing I’ve been up to that kept me occupied all last weekend is I went up to northern Virginia to visit my friend Rachel and my godchildren. Yes! There are now TWO!! And oh how precious and adorable is the wee babe, Ben. He’s two months old and super-chill. He just hangs out, chillin’. He doesn’t even really cry that much. Just sits. It’s very cute. It will be very interesting to me to see the difference between him and his sister as they grow up. Annabelle’s FULL of energy. Homegirl was playing a Wii game while I was there, and as she was playing, she never stopped jumping up and down. Not once. Meanwhile, Ben was chillin’.

I’m sure he’ll grow into a rambunctious little boy, but it’s hard to imagine a child with as much energy as Annabelle. Even the pregnancies were different. Rachel was really active with Annabelle right up until she was born, but with Ben, she had to go on rest for the last couple of months before he arrived. It’s just fascinating to me. Anyway, here he is. Precious lil punkin.

I mean dag, y’all. I suck at this. I’m sorry. Here’s what’s been happening.

I’ve been working. We’ve been in class for three weeks now, and my students are fabulous. As always, I love them to pieces. I’ve been having about 15 every day, and yesterday, at our 2nd registration (out of 3), I got EIGHT more. Holy crap. We literally had to change classrooms in the middle of class because we would not all physically fit into the room we were in. And the church where we have classes is doing some work on our two biggest classrooms, so those are currently out of commission. All I can say is God help the workmen to finish those rooms before the next registration, or I’ll be teaching in the sanctuary, and I’m pretty sure that would weird everyone out.

My afternoon classes have been having pretty decent attendance considering we’ve only had the 1st registration. I think they’ll pick up significantly next week with this new batch of students, and the slang/idioms/phrasal verbs class is FUN. It’s actually pretty hard work for the students, but I had them do some writing for me the other day, and they’re really getting it. I wish I had some samples to share with you, but alas, I gave them back already.

Oh! I do have a pretty amazing story for you, though. I was having dinner with some friends last night (old and new), and one of them was Italian. He’s here studying at NC State for a semester, and he was telling us about a mistake that he’s been making in English for the past month that no one bothered to correct him on until recently.

In Italian, you can ask someone for a favor by saying “per favore,” or you can ask someone more politely for a bigger favor by saying “per piacere,” which, literally translated, means “for pleasure.” So this guy has been asking people “politely” for “big favors” by saying, “Can I ask you a pleasure?” or, “Could you do me a pleasure?”

Well, his friends have just been letting him say this in coffee shops and gas stations all up and down the eastern seaboard, but to make the story even better, he gave us an example that was supposed to be completely innocuous, but he didn’t know that the thing he was requesting could also have another meaning. He wanted to convey that he’d been asking people for “pleasures” and then just ordering simple things in a coffee shop, but his example was, “Excuse me, could you do me a pleasure? Could you give me a muffin?”

Oh my, how we did laugh! And then we ate crepes.

I’ve been doing more things, but to tell you all of them in one post might be a tad overwhelming, so I’ll save them for another post (which I’ll go ahead and write and then set up to post itself next week some time so we don’t go this long again without having some sort of update). Ciao, y’all!

Did I really not blog all last week? Hmm. I meant to. I thought about it on several occasions. What was I doing anyway? I certainly wasn’t lesson planning, and I wasn’t doing other things on the internet because we didn’t have it yet. Maybe I didn’t blog last week because absolutely nothing happened worth telling anyone about. I remember going to work on Wednesday evening, and I remember saving 20% on my Kohl’s purchase by applying for a credit card that I will probably never use again. I remember checking out The Girl Who Played with Fire from the library and having to get the large print edition because they didn’t have the regular one. Somehow I recall buying lots and lots of food. Why did I buy so much food? And I remember watching lots of movies.

Man, that had to have been the most boring week ever after a really, really good weekend in Asheville, which I’ve just realized I never told you about. Ok, so basically, I hung out with lots of friends, ate at all my favorite restaurants, did a little too much shopping, bought a FUN new camera that takes eight pictures and puts them on one print kind of like a photo booth, and went funyaking.

Funyaking (or duckying), by the way, is GREAT. We had so much fun, and now that I’ve used one, I can tell you more about it. So the funyak is made of the same material as a white water raft, and it’s inflated like a white water raft, but it’s in the shape of a kayak and only big enough for one person. They have two-person ones, but we just used the singles. It’s a little harder to maneuver than a kayak because it’s heavier and doesn’t cut through the water as easily, but that’s ok because if you run into something, you just bounce off. I ran into a bridge, for example, but I just bounced off and kept going. It also feels a little safer than a kayak because it doesn’t roll at all. It could flip over given the right (or wrong I suppose) circumstances, but mine never did, and anyway, if it did flip over, you’d just fall off because you’re not sitting down in a hole with your legs trapped like in a kayak.

In short, two thumbs up on the funyak. I highly recommend it for anyone with any kayaking experience whatsoever. Even if you just have a very realistic imagination regarding the mechanics of a kayak, I think you can do a funyak. And the folks at the Nantahala Outdoor Center were fabulous. Give it a go the next time you’re up that way.

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.