Touchee

I thought I'd share with you two of the best topics to come out of my recent assignment to my college students. The assignment was to write a short argument piece on any topic of their choice, to demonstrate their best abilities with being persuasive:

1. Pot should be legalized because if everyone were high, there would be less crime, which would ultimately result in world peace.

2. In order to stop overpopulation and provide a solution for caring for the elderly, we should send the elderly into space as untrained astronauts, where they would live in space sattelite stations and be ejected into space when they died.

More Fun from Laundry Day

So I thought I'd include for your reading pleasure a partial transcript of the conversation that took place between the laundry girl and her dad on Skype (see "Criminally Mediocre" below). I wrote this down because...well, I'm a writer, and writers do weird stuff like that:

Girl: Hey, Dad! I'm at the laundromat.
Dad: What? Why are you getting a new doormat?
Girl: Huh? No...laundromat. I'm doing laundry.
Dad: Oh. What's the quandary?
Girl: No...Dad...I said LAUNDRY!!!
Dad: Oh, laundry, right. Hey, I hope you're not washing your underwear there. [**personal thought: I hope she is...or at least washing them somewhere]
Girl: Dad! WTF? Other people can hear you, you know! [**personal thought: of course other people can hear him, you moron, which would be one of the many reasons I would not choose the laundromat as the forum for my Skype convo. Just sayin'.]
Dad: What does WTF mean?
Girl: Dad, I gotta go.
Dad: What did I say? I just asked a simple question.
Girl: I'm hanging up now.

Blacklisted

Over the last year I've been preparing to test for my black belt in Kukkiwon Chung Do Kwan Taekwondo.  Now that the actual test is 33 days away, I'm beginning to have to face some things I thought were long gone.  Stuff I thought I'd successfully buried and repressed like any sane person would.  But over the last few weeks, I've been trying to write my black belt essay (in which we're supposed to talk about why we want to become black belts and what Taekwondo means to us), and in brainstorming for that essay, I've come face to face with some very ugly truths about my own self concept.

People have asked me how I feel about the test -- what I'm nervous about (if anything), what I feel most confident about, etc.  And as I've been about to spout off routine answers, like, I'm nervous I'll forget the moves or I'll freeze up and not be able to perform or I won't be able to break my boards, or I feel really good about the poomsae (forms), I've realized a couple of key things:  

1)  My fears are my strengths; my weaknesses are my wisdom.  That might not make much sense outside my own head, but it's similar to a lesson I learned a long time ago from Pema Chodron (wise Buddhist teacher).  In the last few months, I've had to relearn that lesson over and over again.

2)  The thing that scares me the most -- the thing that stops me in my tracks when I'm going to the gym to build endurance or when I'm stepping up to a set of boards to break them -- is the fear that I don't belong here.  That I'm trying to wedge my way into a milieu, an arena in which I simply don't fit, have never fit -- a party to which I am not, never have been, and never will be invited.

In short, to my great surprise, my biggest obstacle in achieving black belt is...myself.

Criminally Mediocre

So last night I took a look at a friend's blog and noticed that not only does she continuously say witty, clever things, but she also does high-tech stuff like posting pictures and videos and various links to cool sites and whatnot.  And I thought, hey, how come I don't do that?  (A lot of times when I have a thought it starts with hey.)  Which then brought me to another thought:  what is a blog "supposed" to be like, anyway?  And because I basically can't be bothered posting pictures and videos and whatnot, I'm going to go ahead and say a blog is whatever it is.  That leaves things nice and wide open so that success is almost a given.  I like it when success is a given.

At the moment I sit in a 24-hour laundromat wondering why I didn't push for an apartment with washer-dryer connections.  Of course there's the traditional hum and whir of the industrial sized washers and dryers, and at the moment there are people waiting in line to use such things -- it's Sunday, so of course the laundromat's packed.  But just to give a picture of the rest:  to my right sits a twentysomething attempting to talk to her dad on Skype, and by "talk" I really mean "scream at the top of her lungs so as to out-volume the washers and the all-'80's radio playing above us."  Three kids all under the age of five are frantically and happily doing figure 8's among the machines while their alleged parents chastise them in another language.  Very loudly.  My laundry detergent is safely stored next to me -- occasionally I put my arm around it to make sure it's still there.  Last week someone stole my detergent right off the top of the washer where my clothes were.  You gotta wonder what kind of person does that -- I mean, if I were going to allow myself to stoop to a criminal level, I think I'd pick something a little more worthy of bragging rights than Mountain Fresh Tide 2x strong.  Not to mention it was almost empty.

Woman vs. Machine

Wow.  I cannot believe it's been so long since I've posted anything.  I guess I've been busy or something.

Well, in the time since we last interfaced (we being myself, the computer, and the hordes of adoring fans I have out there reading this masterwork of literature), I've had to lay another pair of pants to rest -- this time, Levi's.  Again it was a sad day, but this time more embarrassing than last.  Whereas the last pair ripped clear down the leg and did so at night when I took them off in the privacy of my home, the Levi's in question mysteriously ripped while they were lying on a bench waiting for me to finish my Taekwondo class and change back into them.  I discovered said rip, which extended from the top of one of the back pockets straight down to the center of the butt, when I put them on after class and noticed a "draft."  Seeing as it's unlikely that the pants actually split on their own, during class, my immediate thought was, how long has the city of Burlington been privy to such "scenic" views?  Unfortunately, that is a mystery which will never be solved.  Needless to say, it was not as difficult this time to hurl the pants into the dumpster with an emphatic, "And don't come back!"

In other news, my car has developed another idiosyncrasy worth noting.  But before we get to that, let's just review the Land Shark's existing personality quirks (note:  my license plate is LNDCHRK, which spells out Land Shark -- well, actually, it spells Land Chark, but LNDSHRK was taken so I had to get creative.  For those of you who are dying of curiosity, allow me to prevent your untimely demise:  it's a reference to my favorite Saturday Night Live skit from 1977.).  Now, many of us have forgotten what it's like to drive a car without power steering.  What's the big deal? you might say.  And you'd go on:  I've driven many a car without power steering in my day, and I'm no worse for the wear -- it's not really that much different.  I might have even agreed with you at one point.  But I think when you have to raise yourself up off the driver's seat in order to put all your weight on the steering wheel so you can make a left turn, that's a problem.  I mean, I recently got a gym membership, not so I could get in shape or be healthy, but so I'd one day be able to parallel park.  Maybe as a side benefit I'll also be able to roll down my windows.  And let's talk about not having air conditioning.  Yes, it's inconvenient in the summer, and yes, it definitely kept me from taking a road trip to Georgia in July, but that's not really the main problem.  It's the caveman defrost system you have to execute when you don't have AC:  a delicate balance of blasting hot air (on the highest temperature) on the front windshield and cracking the driver's side window just a smidge.  This process is especially fun when it's raining, which, incidentally, increases the need to defrost.  But the latest quirk is especially entertaining:  the lever that controls the windshield wipers has apparently loosened its hold over the years, so that now whenever I travel over bumpy stretches of road, the lever naturally falls into place and the windshield wipers automatically start wiping at full speed.  I mean, I guess I could look at it as a blessing -- you know how difficult it is to reach the wiper lever when you're trying to steer over bumpy roads and such, so really this is just a kind of "autopilot."  Certainly gives new meaning to the descriptor "intermittent."

Top 15 Movies

I was asked by a friend to post this list on my blog, so here it is:

1. The Princess Bride

2. Star Wars Trilogy (original)

3. Karate Kid

4. Mr. Mom

5. Young Frankenstein

6. Murphy's Romance

7. Pretty Woman

8. Dirty Dancing 

9. What a Girl Wants

10. Breakfast Club

11. Miracle

12. Dead Poets Society

13. Mr. Holland's Opus

14. Searching for Bobby Fischer

15. Goonies

p.s.  this is not an open invitation for film-preference harassment 

Life is Fair

I now have two followers, so I feel a responsibility to my audience...

Unfortunately, I have nothing earthshattering to say at the moment, so I'll just offer a few observations and notes on life in Burlington (here after, BTV) as of late.

As many of you know, I returned to school this week as a paraeducator at Burlington High School (BHS), and while I spent my days learning all the new rules and regs for various English and Social Studies teachers, my dog, Indy, spent hers playing and cuddling with her Back-to-School Cow.  At the end of the week the BTS Cow had sustained major injuries and is now coalescing in the corner of the living room, hoping to avoid further attention.  This troubles me somewhat, because BTS Cow (which is how Indy and I refer to him) looked so durable in the store -- like he could live forever -- but alas, his plush skin and cotton stuffing succumbed to the wrath of Indy the Fierce in a matter of days.  Minutes, actually, if we're being completely accurate.  

But never fear, because even in the animal world we see karma in action.  When not consuming BTS Cow, Indy has been tormented and taunted by a mischievous and brave squirrel who likes to run back and forth across our little porch.  Sometimes Squirrel looks in the window at Indy and shows his two front buckteeth, as if to say, "You ain't no diva, girl!"  Indy responds by rocketing herself back and forth across our living room floor, stopping occasionally at the door to see whether she can break through.  That's something that amuses me about dogs -- no matter how many times they run smack into a wooden door, they always seem to forget its density the next time they pass.  Then when we go outside, Indy searches frantically for Squirrel, who by that time has scurried up a tree.  Frustrating, I'm sure.

Meanwhile, for my second job, working for Kaplan test prep, I had the pleasure and privilege of spending three days at the Champlain Valley Fair, sitting at a little booth, trying to get people to sign up to take a free SAT, ACT, or test of their choice.  Now, everyone knows that fairs are excellent places to do people-watching -- talk about seeing the world go by!  But if you really want to see some amusing parts of humanity, try combining the types of people who generally populate fairs with the idea of choosing to take a standardized test.  I saw everything from annoyance to shock to horror on the faces of people passing my booth.  Often people who had previously been moving at what I'd call a meandering pace stepped it up to a full trot and suddenly became extremely interested in the Vermont Pure water booth directly across from me.  Older people -- every older person, actually -- said, "Whoah -- I'm well past that nonsense."  A few people told me they couldn't even score a 100 on the SAT, which I find hard to believe since you get 200 points for simply filling in your name.  Teenagers who passed by were cool about it -- no running, no purposely avoiding eye contact, just a simple snort or chuckle and a, "Yeah, right."  I managed to say hi to a few people and got a split reaction of either sheer relief that I was speaking but not asking them to sign up to test or polite but guarded communication which clearly said, "Don't even think about it."  

I did talk to one woman who wanted to know if Kaplan did any kind of classes for preparing to be a farmer.  I said that I didn't know there was a test for that; she said, There isn't.  I said, Well we do test prep; she said, Exactly.  I nodded my head in large, sweeping movements and said, Ah-hah!  She did the same and said, Ah?  Ah-haaah.  I said, Unh-hunh.  This went on for some time until I began to feel we had just created a language right there, on the spot, although I had no clue what we were talking about.  In the end she flashed me a toothless grin, tipped her hat, and mosied to the next booth.

I think the best feedback by far, though, was the ten-year-old girl who was being dragged by at a fairly rapid pace by her parents, but who stopped in front of me long enough to stick her tongue out, make that raspberry sound with it, and punctuate it with, "homework!"