It doesn't matter how fast or how far. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

I went 1.25 miles, same as yesterday, but today I timed myself. It took 22 minutes. Twenty.Two.
I just can't compare myself to when I was in shape. It's counterproductive. I will say it felt a tad easier today than yesterday.
I'm going to keep that 1.25 mile route until my back muscles are not yelling at the halfway point. Then I will extend it slowly. My goal is 5 days a week. I will be working my second job on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. I think I will be the most tired on Thursday and Friday mornings, so I will take those days off.
Yesterday I hadn't eaten before I walked and then when I came home, I pigged out. I ate my leftover Red Lobster from the night before, then a quesadilla and I think a donut. Today I drank a muscle milk a while before I left and I feel hungry now but not out of control hungry.
I'm spending time making a plan for the days I work both jobs. I'm scared to death that I will be hitting drive-throughs and wolfing down big macs and fries every night. So far, my plan is to pack a small cooler of food for each day. I want to have enough food so that I can eat on my way to the second job and on my way home. I'm ravenous at the end of the teaching day. I will need a hearty sandwich and probably a piece of fruit or something like that. Then maybe some nuts and dried fruit on the way home. I'll just have to see. The days will be long and I'm worried about getting my workout done in the wee hours of the morning. There's just no room for a plan B on those days.

I feel it

Just did 1.25 miles with the poop dog. (She poops in the house every chance she gets.) Those shoes are like nothing I have ever felt. All of the strain is in my muscles. I can feel it in my entire lower body. My back muscles started to ache so I made sure to hold in my abdominals and that helped. My right knee is popping a little bit, but it doesn't hurt. Nothing hurts! Just the muscle burn/ache that you feel after a workout and it's a good feeling. So. It's the 7th of January, but I'm going to try to finish the Janathon.

The math, how it burns!!

I am going through an online tutoring program in order to be ready for my job at the local community college, teaching remedial college math. (This means teaching high school math to college students.) It's a second job, and I will be working Tuesday through Thursday from 4pm until 7pm, and Saturdays from 9am to 1pm. Since I have done nothing but 7th grade math for the last 6 years, I need to bone up on my college algebra. So this tutoring program is kicking my ass right about now. The pure algebra is done, and now I am doing applications problems like this:
:
One monorail train travels around the amusement park at a speed of 10 miles per hour for part of the trip. It travels at a speed of 12 miles per hour for the remainder of the trip. If the entire trip is 18 miles, and it takes 1.6 hours, how long does it travel on the second part of the trip?

and this: A jar holds the same number of dimes and quarters. If the value of the quarters is $0.60 more than the value of the dimes, how many kind of each coin is in the jar?

This is the stuff of nightmares for most people. College professors tend to say things like, "This is the exact same problem! It's just that.... (blah blah whatever their reasoning is)." To the untrained eye, they look completely different. They actually are the same kind of problem, but it's not as easy as all that. For the first time in my math life, I am learning why this is true. I am thinking that college professors and other math teachers that make students feel dumb by saying the problems are the same but being unable to explain WHY means that they don't really understand the why of it. And if you don't understand exactly how and why something works, you can't teach it.
I'm slogging through it, bit by bit. I have moments where I think I'll never understand it. I don't have a tutor or teacher to help me. There is nobody in my life that would be able to explain this to me. I just have to get through it. I just have to figure it out on my own. And it's hard.
And this is how I'm spending my winter break.

I got my shoes.

I got these shoes at Famous Footwear for $30.00. I got a pair of shape-ups flip-flops for half price ($12.50) along with them. So it's on, bitchezzzzzzz!!! I'm headed for Roswell, New Mexico at the end of February for the Pecos Valley Stampede. There is a half-marathon, a 10k, and a 2-mile run or walk. I'm hoping for the 10-k but we will see how I do. If I can get my longs up to 5 miles before then, I should be fine. It costs $20.00 to register - cheapest race I've seen in a long while. Plus it's in Roswell!! It's on a Saturday, on the weekend of the Rodeo. I can head out on Friday morning, be rested for the race Saturday, then head home Sunday. Sounds like fun, no? Come with!!

Step One: Get your house in order.

By house, I mean intestines. Picture eating tamales for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for about a week. On second thought, don't picture it. Just trust me. It takes a lot of metamucil to undo that shit. For the last 3 days I've been making a conscious effort to eat fruits and vegetables. Even if some of the eating them is actually drinking them. It's a start.


Now that I have hope of being able to go walk/run without causing a lot of pain to my feet, ankles, and knees, I am thinking I will be able to get back on the proverbial horse. I just need to get a pair of walking shape-ups like these. I bought some shape-ups because they were on clearance and they were cute, even though I had sworn to myself I would not buy into that disgusting trend. However, I changed my tune rather quickly when I wore the shoes and found that my joints, feet, and back no longer hurt, even after a few hours on my feet. It's a friggin christmas miracle, I tell ya.

So I'll be back in the saddle soon, folks.

The Time, it Flies!

I spent an hour Saturday morning grading notebooks and then another hour before work on Monday. Sunday I spent about half an hour finalizing the lunch detention list for Monday.
Weekend: 2.5 hours
Monday: 7:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. = 9.5 hours
Tuesday: 7:00 a.m. - 4:45 p.m. = 9.25 hours
Total hours: 198.75 (150 contract hours)
Total days: 20
Average hours per day: 9 hrs 56 min
Today we have our short school day and 2 hours of "professional development" after school. Then a parent meeting which hopefully won't take long, and we're leaving straight from there. I'm slowly getting some papers graded. I think it's finally safe to re-do the seating charts and have them last for a while... the schedule changes are done, I hope. I have the kids taking a test on Friday. I will have to try again to grade notebooks now that I led the classes through the process of writing their first and last names, the period, and the words "math notebook" in permanent marker on the outside of their notebooks. It's pure babysitting sometimes. Two of my classes are being sufficiently naughty that they don't get to work in partners. They just have to sit and listen to me lecture, take some notes and then try to struggle their way through the problems, since they won't let me teach. I will have to keep doing that until I see some sign of maturity from the boys and cooperation from the girls. It makes teaching easier but man, is it bad for their learning. Hopefully it won't last long.

Friday Night and I'm Blogging

I have 139.75 hours as of Monday. On Tuesday I worked 7:00 - 5:30 = 10 hours and Wednesday 7:30 - 5:30 = 9.5 hours. Yesterday (Thursday) I worked 7:00 - 4:00 = 8.5 hours, and today 7:00 - 4:45 = 9.25 hrs. I had to push it to get out by then because my carpool buddy would have stayed longer. We packed up our things and left, knowing we would finish on the weekend. I am grading notebooks, despite the upcoming schedule changes, because I need to give the kids some feedback. I guess I will have to spend time re-entering grades for the ones whose schedules change, but it's been 3 weeks and they need a grade on something!! Anything!! I am planning a test for Friday, so between the notebook grade and the test grade I think I will be putting out a pretty accurate progress report, which is due at the end of next week. I'm not sure how the other teachers are dealing with grades because nobody I have talked to has yet to enter any. It's a mess.
Total hours: 177.5
Total days: 18
Hours per day: 9 hrs 51 min

Working Dumb

I'm not working smart. I can't say I am entirely to blame, but if I was doing more thinking ahead, my life would have been easier the past few weeks. The principal at my school is very disorganized and makes decisions on the fly, which leads to a lot of chaos. However, I know this about her, so usually when she sends down a mandate I ignore it until I'm sure someone is following up on it. The problem has been with grading. I had set up my gradebook and was trying to enter enough grades so that the kids would have an idea about how they are doing. Feedback is really important for the kids because they get a feeling for how much effort they need to put in. I had entered a test and 2 assignments. Almost all of my students failed the test. Most of them did well on the assignment. Then, schedules started changing. The principal is trying so hard to balance the classes and make every class less than 30. This is a first for me and I support her 100%. But when she said she was going to do that, I ignored it as so much bullshit. I entered grades, and invested time in the seating charts. Incredibly enough, it is actually happening. It's absolute chaos. I never know who is going to be on my roster. Taking attendance every day is such an adventure, and the time I have invested in grading and seating charts is lost forever! I threw all the papers away and gave up on the grading. (The grades don't follow the kids when they change classes, so it's an exercise in futility to try.)
Instead of spending time on that, I have been cleaning my room, organizing materials and all the stuff that keeps popping up in my box, some of which I need and most of which I don't. My room and my desk are a lot more organized and clean. That's a good thing.
Yesterday the attendance clerk sent out an email saying the master schedule was going to change, which means teachers' schedules are changing. One of the teachers was crying in the office after school because she has to stop teaching reading because she is not qualified, so they are moving her to 8th grade science, for which she is also not qualified. (They are trying to make her quit.) Teachers are having social studies and math and reading classes added to their day just like that, and everyone is pretty upset. Teachers like me are the ones that benefit... all of my classes are below 30 now, for the first time in my 7 years of teaching.
I have my hours written down but will have to log them later. It's time to get ready for work.

I'm OK!!!

One of my 2 readers pointed out that paid vs. unpaid hours is a very negative way of looking at things, and I have to agree. I will start referring to contract hours vs. non-contract hours.
It's not that I expect a 7.5 hour workday. I think 9 hours is reasonable. I don't think that more than 9 hours combined with work on the weekends is reasonable - not for what I'm being paid, anyway.
One of the things I am after is finding out exactly how many extra hours pile up during the school year. Are they enough to make up for 2 months of vacation? If I average all the hours out at the end of the school year, how many 8- hour workdays will there be? That is one of the questions I want to answer.
All that being said, I am not unhappy or bitter. That is not why I am keeping track of my hours. I tried like crazy to find a job in the public sector this past summer. It didn't work out. I was so dreading going back, and I find that I'm quite happy to be back with my team and spending my day with kids again.
I can enjoy the good parts of teaching and distance myself from the parts that are frustrating. Part of letting go of my anger at all these extra hours is keeping track, so that at the end of the year, I can find out if my anger was justified. In the past years I have really been frustrated and angry at the end of a really long week. Putting it down on the blog and seeing it in writing helps me look at it and say, wow! That's a lot of hours! Then let it go.
Now, I have spent all morning farting around instead of working on my seating charts. Maybe I'll just pile the desks in the corner and have them sit on the floor. haha!!

Best day ever!!

Today I learned that the district won't approve another teacher for our school, and there is no way to get my class sizes down to manageable unless we put the SPED kids with the SPED teacher, in her own classroom. This is good news because I've been doing her work and my work because she has never taught middle school OR math. I'm pretty much drowning in work! So she will have to sink or swim and now I can get caught up. I should probably feel bad since she is going to be struggling and her students will not have a fair chance at success, but I can't keep doing everything for both of us.
Tuesday 8/23 7:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. = 8.5 hours, 1.5 unpaid, 30 minute meeting after school with parent about kid who isn't doing any work and is robbing the rest of the class of at least 10 instructional minutes every single day, and an hour doing seating chart and rearranging the desks.

Long day.

Yesterday (Sunday) I spent about 5 hours on grading and organizing test data so I can group the students effectively. I finished the data sorting this morning and started importing it into the seating chart software I bought. It cost $6 for the first year so I'm going to try it. Once I input all the student information, the program will take the information about the students and group them according to my specifications. I can put relationships in there, so say I have two kids who talk constantly and need to be seated apart. I can put a negative relationship between the two of them and the software will make sure that they never sit together. I can put positive relationships between kids who work well together as well. I can make sure kids get seated in the front or in the back, and I can "glue" kids to the same seat if I want them there permanently. (Comes in useful for the naughty chair.) Setting up the program is time-consuming but it's an investment because when I need to change the seating chart, for the rest of the year I can just push "place students" and get a new one, with all the rotten eggs still separated from each other.
Sunday: about 5 hours throughout the day
Monday: 7:00 - 5:30 = 10 hours, 3 unpaid grading, cleaning, doing seating software and answering emails.
Running total: 93 paid, 38.25 unpaid. 

"But what do you DO all day?"

That is a question that comes up often for a teacher. They want to know what we DO that we have to spend all this time unpaid doing things. It's an easy but long-winded question to answer. These are all the things required for the gradebook:
A minimum of 1 grade entered per week
A minimum of 3 assessments per quarter
Specific, meaningful feedback on every student's paper
Now you might think 1 grade per week, big whoop. Here's the thing: Students need to do math homework every night. Not much, just think about what they learned that day for 5 minutes or so. I give them one problem a night. Every Monday, they turn in homework with answers to five questions. These are thinking questions, which require complete sentences and showing work for their examples. About half my students turn in homework, so that is around 75 papers to grade. I would say it takes about an  hour to grade all the homework. That's 45 seconds per page.
Students need to have more than 1 paper returned each week in order for them to know how they are doing in class. So in addition to grading the homework, I need to grade classwork too. The kids keep a notebook with their bellwork and classwork, so I grade the notebooks. There are around 150 notebooks to grade, one for each student, and that is pretty quick because it is graded on completion, not accuracy. However, when there are 150 of them, that's not quick. It takes at least 20 minutes per class, so that's an hour - about 24 seconds per notebook.
We have a quiz or test about once every 10 school days. These are the biggies. They take FOREVER to grade because multiple choice is OK for about half the questions, but the others need to be performance-based answers. This means reading what they wrote, checking their work, and providing specific, meaningful feedback. It takes about 30 minutes to grade each period's quizzes, times 5, so that's 2.5 hours - 60 seconds per quiz or test.
Then, after the grading is done, the grades need to be entered into the online gradebook so that parents and students can access their grades (required). This is quick but it adds up when you have over 150 students.
All together that is an average of about 4.5 hours a week, just grading and entering grades.That's not counting having to look up the periods and last names of the kids who are too clueless to realize they are probably not the only Jose or Maria I have in my 5 class periods. (They get dinged points for that. It's so freaking frustrating they can't bother to write out their last name and by 7th grade they haven't got in the habit of doing it.)
I mentioned in my last post that we have 1.5 hours per day to do things not related to actual teaching. That's 7.5 hours all together per week. Four of them are gone - just grading.
One day per week we are required to spend 50 minutes with our content area, planning. There goes that.
We are required to make 5 positive parent contacts per week. I do postcards because if I try to make phone calls, parents want to talk and talk. Every day, there are probably 2 students who display behavior sufficiently stupid enough to warrant a parent phone call. (Last week a student dug a hole in the wall probably 2 inches long , an inch wide, and a half inch deep. The student was in time out for answering a math question I had asked the class by calling out "Doo doo.") Parents call in or email every now and then to find out how their kid is doing or complain about my homework/classwork policies. Those have to be attended to within 24 hours, required by the principal. I would say about 30 minutes per week is spent on parent contact, and that's a lowball estimate.
That leaves 2 hours and 10 minutes to do everything else. We have to write the daily objective on the board every day, along with the vocabulary and language objective. We have to write the bellwork every day. (Bellwork is absolutely required.) We have to make copies. We have to do 5 days worth of lesson plans, and lesson planning alone takes at least 4 hours every week because the template we are required to use is ridiculously long and detailed. We have to find resources for the lessons because the textbooks are woefully inadequate and don't meet the state standards. We have to upload our lesson plans to the school website so they can be scrutinized or duplicated by whomever wishes to do so.We have to clean our classroom counters, desks, and sinks because all the custodians have to do is clean the floor and empty the trash. We have to get the supplies out for class, be it markers, scissors, protractors, or whatnot. We have to go through the textbooks and erase or white out all the penis drawings, gang tags, and curse words.At least once a week, one of the administrators wants to have a meeting for this or that. We have team meetings with parents whose kids are acting like idiots on a regular basis. There are a thousand other things that teachers need to do. 2 hours and 10 minutes? Yeah, right.
You might be asking, "But what about during class? Can't you get any of this done while the kids are working on their own? Why, when I was a kid, the teacher sat and drank coffee and read the newspaper while we slaving away doing our work." You need to understand this: Teaching is not like that anymore. If EVER an administrator comes in and we are sitting at our desk, we hear about it. We HAVE to be monitoring the kids every single minute of every class. I would be doing that anyway because I teach all the lowest kids, academically speaking. Their level of independence is about zero. At any given time, if I try to have them work on their own, there are about 5 hands in the air. (If you keep your hand up, you have an excuse for not doing any work. "Miss, I was waiting for you to help me!") When they take a test, teachers are expected to be walking around, monitoring. I am not kidding you. If someone walks in and sees you doing anything else, you WILL hear about it. They visit at least once a day, by the way.
I could be a shitty teacher and leave some of this out. But you tell me, what have I said above that isn't required but also isn't necessary in order for me to teach effectively? 
Having unloaded that, here are the rest of the stats for this week:
Tuesday: 7 a.m. - 5 p.m. = 9.5 hours, 2.5 unpaid.
Wednesday: 6:45 a.m. - 5:15 p.m. = 10 hours, 3 hours unpaid. (2 paid hours spent in a stupid meeting with all the math teachers in the school, designing a unit for the district, which they proceeded to throw out yesterday, saying it was inadequate. We're only teachers, what the fuck do we know about what the kids need to learn?)
Thursday: 7 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. = 9 hours, 2 unpaid (15 minute meeting before school about tutoring.)
Friday: 7 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. = 9 hours, 2 unpaid (10 minute meeting before school about how they were throwing out the curriculum unit mentioned above. Great way to start the day.)
Today I need to do my lesson plans and grade homework and quizzes, so it will be about 6 hours but I will have to post on that next time.
Weekly total: 35 paid, 17.75 unpaid = 52.75 hours this week.
Running total: 84 paid, 35.25 unpaid. Keep in mind, this was the 2nd week of school. Teachers got it easy, right?

A Social Experiment

I don't know if that is the right thing to call it, but I am going to start a new project. I am going to try to turn my blog into a running tally of hours actually worked teaching this school year. I am also going to include information about what the unpaid hours were spent doing, and possibly details about why they were necessary.
A few things non-teachers need to be aware of:
1. Our contract provides for 211 paid days of work. The work day is 7 hours and 30 minutes long, including lunch, so each day there are 7 hours of actual paid work.
2. The contract day begins at 7:45 and ends at 3:30. The kids start at 8:10 and leave at 3:30. We have 50 minutes of prep time, leaving us an hour and a half each day to do work non-related to actual teaching.
3. 211 x 7 = 1477, so dividing my annual salary by that number, I make just shy of $23.70/hr. (This is assuming the bond election in November passes, and there are no furlough days added to the calendar. There may be as many as 5.)
Teachers started work on Thursday, August 5th, so that is where I will begin.

Thursday 8/4: 7:30 - 4:00 = 8 work hours, 1 unpaid traveling from school to the stupid casino and back for the annual kickoff (how did they pay for that??).
Friday 8/5: 7:00 - 4:30 = 8.5 work hours, 1.5 unpaid getting classroom ready.(Working lunch, gee thanks principal. We were excused at 2:30 so that we could come back from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. for the parent-teacher meet and greet.)
Total: 13.5 paid, 2.5 unpaid = 16

Sunday 8/7: 1:00 - 4:00 = 3 unpaid, writing syllabus and week 1 homework.
Monday 8/8: 6:30 - 4:00 = 2 unpaid getting classroom ready, as we were provided 1.5 hours to do so.
Tuesday 8/9: (first day for the kids) 6:30 - 4:00 = 2 unpaid making copies, teaching co-teacher how to do today's math, and trying desperately to finish making the classroom presentable. The custodians left yesterday at 2:00 p.m. and they had not emptied the trash or cleaned the desks, which were still dirty from the end of last school year.
Wednesday 8/10: 7:30 -5:00, 2 unpaid hanging posters (required by principal), finding supplies needed for the rest of the week, doing health forms for nurse, updating website (required by principal), teaching co-teacher tomorrow's math, making copies.
Thursday 8/11: 7:30 - 4:00: Jury duty. Practically a day off.
Friday 8/12: 7:45 - 3:45, 0.5 unpaid updating website, setting up online gradebook (the program went down halfway through and wiped out everything I had done. Gave up and went to the bar.)
Saturday 8/13: Total 8 unpaid spread out through the day. Read and logged information given by parents on syllabus signature form, added parent emails to online address book, tried to set up online gradebook and data was wiped out again when the program went down.The syllabus part takes a long time because we have about 150 students.
Week total: 49 paid, 17.5 unpaid = 66.5

Sunday 8/14: 6 hours throughout the day. Successfully set up grade book, hooray!
Monday 8/15: 7:00 - 4:45 = 9.25 hours, 2.25 unpaid grading papers and organizing signature sheets from each student's agenda (required by principal).

My Daughter, the Free Thinker

My youngest daughter was over recently to get some help with a car deal she has going on. I made her some food, she turned on the nickelodeon cartoons, (I guess they won't outgrow it) and we spent some time together. Sometimes I have conversations with my daughters that make me think, DAMN!!!! I did all right! This is one of those:

E: Mom. Do you think I am weird because I think the Women's Plaza of Honor is a stupid idea?
Me: What the heck is that?
E: We went there during class the other day. It's this plaza, and it has flowers and benches and stuff, and it has stories of women who did different things.
Me: Huh. And you didn't like it?
E: We went to see it and when we were walking away, everyone was saying how great that the U of A did that, and it's so great to see women who did things, and I said Well I think it's stupid. Then everybody looked at me like I was crazy and I said, Why should it have to be because they are women?
Me: That's my girl!! :::clapping:::
E: So I'm not crazy? Because they were all looking at me like I was anti-feminist or something.
Me: No, you are probably the only one that knows what feminism really is.
E: I was trying to explain why I thought it was stupid, and I said that they made it a big deal because they did these great things and EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE WOMEN. (said with eyes wide and dripping with sarcasm.)
Me: That's exactly right. When you single out a group of women and make a big deal about how they made certain accomplishments, that's the patriarchy in action.
E: It's like it was shocking they did important things, we have to make a plaza!
Me: Yep. It is an outright insult, and it's demeaning because what it says is, You are not equal. If you do great things, and you are a woman, you must be recognized separately, because it's not normal for women to do great things. So as long as we keep doing things like this and drawing attention to the fact that these are exceptions to the rule, then our role as women remains "less than."
E: But why didn't anybody else see that? Why were they looking at me like I was crazy?
Me: Because they aren't conscious of the patriarchy. They aren't AWAKE.
E: My professor seemed like he kind of got it. He said hmmm, I see what you are saying.
Me: That's good!

Both of my daughters have told me stories like this - observations they have made that something is ridiculous or insulting, and when they point it out, all they get dumbfounded looks of what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about. So I say keep making those observations! Keep talking them out with people, and keep thinking them through! When you look at something, and your gut says, This isn't right! Keep thinking about it and talking about it until you can articulate what's wrong! If ever there is a time when our culture doesn't notice someone's gender, whether they have or haven't done something remarkable, then we will know we're making progress toward equality.

It's broken, and I can't fix it.

This is an essay I wrote about why I am leaving teaching.

So how'd it go?

I had a job interview yesterday with a company in the private sector, for what seems to be a fairly decent job. It was my first interview in the private sector - I have a ton of interview experience, but it has all been with principals and restaurant managers. I was a little nervous. Six years of teaching + no new clothes = I had better go shopping. I bought a beautiful tan jacket to go with a pair of chocolate brown pants, matching pumps and shell that I already had. I was going to be looking and feeling great!
I went to get ready for the interview, pulled on the beautiful chocolate-brown pants, and the zipper was ripped from top to bottom. My undies were peeking out from either side. Oh boy. I have another pair of brown pants, with ugly copper threads running through them. They are old and worn and 2 sizes too small, but I didn't know what else to do. I squeezed into them and prayed they would stretch out at least enough so that I could breathe.
I finished getting ready right on time. My hair was perfectly coifed, nails trimmed and neat, mascara expertly applied, and with the exception of the pants, I was feeling pretty good. I left the house with my purse, portfolio, keys, and diet coke. I got to the building 5 minutes early for my interview. Perfect. I grabbed my purse and portfolio and reached for my jacket. No jacket.

NO. JACKET.

I can't go in there wearing my spaghetti strap shell, especially since it is holding in a sizable bulge from my pants being too tight.
I panicked for a minute but got it under control. There was a Wal-Mart 3 minutes away. On the drive, I left a message for the interviewer telling him what happened, that I hoped to be back in ten minutes or so, and that I hoped he would still see me. I called my sister and sobbed for a minute and got some reassurance that the world wasn't going to end. I ran into the store, saw a dark brown button-down shirt, yanked it off the hanger and put it on, ripped off the price tag, and RAN to the cashier. She looked at me a little funny, but she rang me up quickly. I RAN back to the car (let's not forget it is 108 degrees outside) and drove back to the building. I was 15 minutes late, but then I couldn't find the suite. A kind gentleman gave me directions, and so all together I was 20 minutes late.
I burst in the door and announced myself. The receptionist gave me a tight, curly smile and said the interviewer had been out a few times to ask for me. Then, the interviewer came around the corner. I can't imagine what I looked like. I had cried off my make-up, and I had been running around in the heat for 20 minutes. I was wearing old, worn-out, too-tight pants and a Wal-mart shirt. Wow. Just.... wow.
The receptionist gave me some paperwork to fill out and offered to get me some cold water. I thanked her, took a fist-full of kleenex off the counter, and sat down to fill out the forms. Sweat was quite literally dripping onto my shirt, my glasses, and the application. I did the best I could to mop it up with the kleenex and tried to slow my breathing. I think the interviewer gave me a couple of extra minutes to compose myself before he called me into his office. I calmed down and finally cooled off, and he started the interview.
He had my resume in front of him and had clearly studied it. His questions were well-thought out and specific to my situation. I've never been good at putting on a show, and when someone asks me a question, I tend to just answer it. This aspect of my personality plus my ability to make sentences out of fancy words makes me a decent interviewee, I think. The guy asked me questions for a good 45 minutes. Some of them were hard questions that really made me think. I had answers for all of them, and he seemed satisfied, so that part was ok.
The next part of the interview was with a panel of 5 people. Two of them were in the position for which I am applying. Then there were some regional managers and I don't know who else. Two people were there in the room with me, and three people were on conference call. Thankfully, the conference room was cool enough to be somewhat chilly after sitting in there for a while. All five people had my resume and the list of questions they wanted to ask. All five had clearly studied the resume. It was shocking. That part of the interview took a full hour. It was absolutely grueling. By the end of the hour, the two people in the room with me had filled up their papers with little scribbles, which is always a good sign. When we were finished, one of them walked me to the lobby and said the main guy wanted to speak with me again.
I waited for a few minutes and the main guy came out to get me. We went back to his office and he asked a couple more questions about restrictions on the hours I work, how I felt about coming in early, etc. He said that he thought I did well and that the team liked me. He had some more candidates to "get through" (his words) and then all the candidates would be ranked, and based on the scores, some would be invited back for a second interview.
I think the interview went well enough to make up for the lateness, and one of my sisters said it was good that I showed up sweaty and panicked because it meant I really did have an emergency. I guess we'll see. Hopefully I will get a call next week and go in for a second interview, because I have a dynamite jacket to wear.

Can't you take a joke?

I grew up hearing those words often. I was a buck-toothed, pudgy, redheaded, overly-sensitive child in a large family. I felt then, as I feel now, that words can be very effectively used as weapons, and when that happens, they hurt. Freckle face, Bugs Bunny, fatso, shorty, carrot-top, etc. were some of the words flung at me on a regular basis at home and at school. I'm sure I did my fair share of the flinging, too, picking out things I thought were funny about people and using them as insults. As with most insults, it's not the words themselves, but the way in which they are used. I remember the words with such clarity because they hurt. Sometimes, they hurt enough to make me cry, and that's when I would hear, "Can't you take a joke?" or, "Geez! Stop being so sensitive!" Those words filled me with anger and shame that I could not articulate then, and I find difficult to articulate now. 

Recently, I have come into communication with a friend from my past. My WAY long ago past. As in, my ex-husband and I used to hang out with this person when we were married and my children were very young. He found me on Facebook (fucking facebook, I hate you but I love you) and sent me a friend request. He reminded me of how we knew each other, and we got caught up a little bit on where we are now. I guess I am quite a bit different now than I was then. Raising two kids, going through college, joining the professional workforce... those are all life-changing events that I have gone through in the past 15 years. He, however, has been through... none. 

We have been exchanging messages every few days, and little things he said at first were irritating to me. Things like, "Wow! I can't believe you got a degree!" Actually, I have two. "Wow! You got a Master's too? That is unbelievable! You should be very proud of yourself!" And on, and on.

Now, on the surface, these things seem benign. But they didn't FEEL benign. They felt condescending. I think if he had just said congratulations, or that's great, it would have been fine. The over-enthusiasm of his response bothered me. Had he held the opinion that I was too stupid to do anything besides give birth and change diapers? Why was he so shocked? Irritating. And the praise... like he was patting me on the head. Ew.

Then something a little bigger happened during a discussion we were having about basketball. He asked if I watched the WNBA as well as the NBA and I said yes, but of course not as often because they don't get much media coverage. Then I made a remark about how great it would be if there weren't men's teams and women's teams - just teams. Well, he just about wet his pants laughing at that. Then he realized I hadn't been joking. He proceeded to tell me that he could explain it to me but all I would do is get mad. I had only one question for him - "Does your reasoning have anything to do with the physical differences between the male and female bodies? Yes or no." He wouldn't answer. I ended that conversation and didn't answer the next few messages from him, hoping he would just go away. 

He didn't go away. The next time he messaged me, I was watching my new favorite show, Through the Wormhole and it was about the concept of time. I asked if he knew that the reason the prime meridian goes through Greenwich is because some dudes got together and decided that's where it should go. (Change of subject, right?) The next message he sent was a link to a website about Greenwich Mean Time. (He HAS to make sure he knows more about it than I do.) Then he says, and I quote: "BTW....check out the conference delegates. They were indeed a bunch of men. Thank goodness..........if the conference had been a bunch of women meetiing they would still be trying to make a decision on where to establich the prime meridian!" 

I eventually responded that he really is very sexist, and I didn't write again. I really hoped he would go away. 

He didn't. His next message talked about how fun it is to tease me, and I wasn't mad at him, was I? I thought about it for a while, and I should probably have just deleted him from my friends list and let that speak for itself, but instead I quoted his words back at him - the part about if the conference had been a bunch of women. I have to quote his reply directly, because really there is just no summarizing it: "You are mad about that? Seeiously? Come on now you know I said that jokingly to tease you. Hello.......yes lost and found? I'm looking for Melissa's sense of humor. It is a really great sense of humor, yes it is the A+ model, yes super deluxe that's right...... Oh you have it?! Super I'll be right over to pick it up for her. Thank you so much!" 

I replied one word: Wow. Then, a day or two later, when I still hadn't written:
"Come on didnt that make you smile even a little? Is it cold in here? Brrrrrrrrr  ? -:)"

I can practically hear his thoughts! "Oh, how cute, she is giving me the cold shoulder! Aww. Well, I'll just keep joking around until she gets the bug out of her ass."

So here is my attempt to articulate why the whole "can't you take a joke" thing makes me so angry. What someone is saying, when they come back at you with that phrase or something similar, is this:

"I should be able to point out something about you that is different from me, and I should be able to use that thing to insult you whenever I feel like it. I might be thinking I am funny, I might be angry at you, I might just be talking. The point is, it shouldn't matter what YOU think about it. I should be able to say those things about you, and you should be all right with it. If you aren't, then clearly the problem is yours. Now, not only are you different from me in the first way I pointed out, you are also not even courteous enough to think I am clever/right/superior!"

There is more, I just can't put it into words.

I know there's no sense in putting this all out there for HIM to read, because clearly I will just get more of the same. Actually, if I put that out there, the next thing he would do is probably start calling names like "feminazi" and "angry bitch," etc. "God, what is your PROBLEM?????" he would think. 

I think, it's just not worth the energy, and I'm going to delete him from my friends list. I just really don't like him anymore. I'm not sure I ever did.

"Uh, not so much"

Here's a direct quote from this fantastically misogynist article featuring pictures of celebrities (women) without make-up: "And some of them still look completely stunning without a stitch of makeup, and others ... uh, not so much ..."
How awesome is the self-named BeautyRiot Diva! How great that she wrote a blog entry showing famous women in their natural state, and proceeded to point out every line, pimple, spot, and other so-called imperfection on their faces. The secondary headline reads, "Madonna's greasy look." The photo shows Madonna wearing a baseball cap with hair that is clearly wet, not greasy, and the most logical assumption is that she just came from a workout at the gym, since THAT'S WHAT SHE DOES. In my world of middle-school teaching, this kind of thing is called bullying. Women have enough trouble in our patriarchal society without attacking each other in this manner. Most male celebrities wear make-up for their red carpet appearances and shows as well. They look just as different. Is there a male blogger somewhere posting pictures of men without their stage makeup and making snarky comments? Possibly. Is that type of thing featured on the Yahoo! home page? Certainly not. So, let's think of the general rule for deciding whether something is misogynist and/or sexist. Could you do the same thing with men without appearing ridiculous?
Click here to comment on BeautyRiot Diva's blog.

Frustration!!!!

I want out!! I want out of teaching!!! I can't do it another year! I don't even know if I can do it another week. I'm so fucking sick of being treated like shit. By the parents, by the administration, by the kids. All for the privilege of a $0.10 bank balance. So I am thinking of getting a roommate so I can pay my bills, and I am trying to picture life with a stranger here. I will have to give up a LOT. Such as: cleaning when I fucking feel like it, not when the house is dirty; walking around naked whenever I want, which is always; loud sex; laying around naked on the couch eating, watching TV and farting; basically, everything I enjoy about coming home. Get a roommate and lose my safe haven, so that I can keep the job that I need the safe haven from??? None of this makes any sense!

Linkage

I finally linked my blog on IBTP, so some of y'all feminists might come over here. Be warned. It's boring and stupid. I write about nothing except my struggles with teaching, money, and my bipolar disorder. Read further if you dare, but you WILL lose brain cells.