Category: First-World Problems

This would be the category in which I bitch about my ridiculously privileged life.

Now It Seems Your Dancin’ Feet Are Always on My Couch

I’ma need you to do something for me.

Wait, let me back up.

I think I’m done teaching fourth grade.

Nine years ago, when I got into the New York City Teaching Fellows program, I intended to teach high school. But I was told I needed a Bachelor’s in my subject area, and I really didn’t want to prod a bunch of adolescents into fulfilling their foreign language requirement. Ándale, muchacho! What I really wanted to do was teach theatre, and I cursed myself for not following my bliss at UNC. My options were limited. There was huge push for us to go into Special Education or English as a Second Language…No phanx. The next highest on the most-likely-to-find-a-job list was elementary.

Now I definitely wouldn’t trade my nine years in third and fourth grades. I’ve learned so much about teaching and learning disabilities and autism and compassion and patience. Moreover, I’ve met some of the world’s dopest people doing it. But I think I’m done.

And in North Carolina, as far as I can tell, you don’t need an undergraduate degree in your subject area to teach high school. You just have to take a certifying exam called the Praxis II. I took this exam for elementary when I was planning to move down here because it was required for my NC certification. Even though I had received a Master of Science in Elementary Education—with a 4.0 and an A+ on my thesis—and taken New York’s certifying exams. Shit, how ’bout some reciprocity, Tar Heel State?!

Anyway.

High school drama teacher jobs are damn near impossible to come by since there’s maybe one at each school, and I’ve realized that I think I’d enjoy teaching English nearly as much.

So! I’m going to take the content knowledge and pedagogy exams for English Language, Literature and Composition, on July 30.

Here’s where you come in.

Wait, let me back up.

In elementary grades, one of the many things we do is help kids find their Just-Right Reading Level. That is, not too easy so they get bored, and not too hard so they get frustrated. Just Right so they learn and grow. Aw.

Well, I don’t know about you, but when I was in high school, we were tracked. Oh-five level classes were for the smarty-pantses, 04 for the kids who did pretty well, 03 the average ones. (No one talked about 02, or 01—you just heard mumblings now and again about remedial classes. They were held in the dungeon or something.)

My older sister and brother were tracked into 05 classes, as was I, but I’m not entirely sure I had an 05 mind. A whole lot of the stuff we read in 05 English was above my Just Right Reading Level.

I resolved this issue by doing a number of things:

  1. Buying the Cliffs Notes.
  2. Having my brother read and summarize it.
  3. Not reading it.

OK, NOW here’s where you come in.

At least four days a week, I write on this blog, which I admit I love doing, but it takes work. If you come here to read, it’s because I, in some way, keep your interest. Maybe I entertain you; perhaps I just push your buttons. Whatever. I serve a purpose. But WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY?

I have three months to read everything I should have read in high school and everything y’all probably did read in high school. So I expect a report of no more than 500 words in the comments from EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU FUCKERS. You may choose your piece of literature, but your report should include a brief synopsis, important themes, literary devices, and historical context. Extra points will be given for information about literary movements, such as New England Puritanism, Naturalism, or Transcendentalism. Or if you write your report as a rap (Dan M).

Go.

Signed,

Ms. Jackson, if you’re nasty

Buy a Honda. And Never Sell It.

In January, I replaced all the belts and hoses and whatnot in my Subaru (to the tune of $1,200), and now it won’t pass inspection. Why? The check-engine light is on. Amongst others, the catalytic converter code pops up on the computer, but whoa, that’s a thousand bucks. My mechanic says the spark plugs blah blah misfiring and the spark plug wires blah, and that could be what’s setting off the alarm, so “Cross your fingers that, when that’s fixed, the cat con code will disappear as well.”

I trudge around Chapel Hill for six and a half hours while they replace that stuff.

$816.

He says, “OK, it needs about seventy miles to reset. If the light doesn’t come on in seventy miles, you’re good to go. Come back and we’ll reinspect it.”

So I drive seventy miles. No light. Whew!

Eight miles later, stupid fucking light comes on.

I’m trying to keep this in perspective. Dug told me, when we first met, that his brother had cystic fibrosis and had been in the hospital for months waiting for a lung transplant. He had actually had one already a couple years ago, which seemed to be doing well, for about a year. Can you imagine? Thinking, “Hey, I’ve got working lungs!” for a year. Jesus, what a disappointment when they go on the fritz.

So this is just a car. It’s just a car. It’s just money.

Never should’ve sold my Civic.

(Maybe the problem is that I don't have flames. See, Margo's has flames. Mine, no flames.)

I’m Taking Away Something a Little Different from Your PSA

It’s amazing how much cleaning I can get done when I’m having last-minute company. In half an hour, I tidied the desk, wiped down the kitchen, cleaned the bathroom, took out the recycling, and swept and skated on Clorox wipes. Even changed the sheets! Rowr.

Just kidding.

Not about the sheets. About the getting some.

There’s a billboard on 85 that says, Every 28 minutes, an NC teen gets pregnant. Every time I drive by it, I think, “Man, those teens are getting so much more action than I am.”

I Have Special Skin

Very special skin. It makes me want to kick Mother Nature in the nuts.

As I’ve mentioned, in my teen years, I took meds and smeared creams all over my face. And it helped. Some.

It wasn’t only break-outs, though. Just generally ickiness. Remember those Saturday Night Live “Delta Delta Delta” sketches? In one, the sorority sisters meet a new rushee, and after she leaves, the girls are talking shit about her. Pretty sure it’s Roseanne Barr who says, “Could her pores have been any bigger?” I can’t tell you how aware of my gigantic pores I became in that moment.

My skin got better as I got older. Never beautiful. But tolerable. Zits, yes, but persistent acne? No. Painful blemishes, yes, but eh, I could deal. Especially if it meant not giving up sugar, which those bastards Joe and Terry Graedon told me to do.

Then a few months ago, I started breaking out worse than ever. Like, pimples in the crease of my neck. On my jawline. On that bone behind my ears? On my eyelidsareyoufuckingkiddingme?

I thought, Maybe it’s my face wash, so I tried different ones. No change. Detergent? Went back to Arm & Hammer. No dice. My shampoo or conditioner? Nope.

I finally asked Facebook for dermatologist recommendations. As soon as I booked an appointment with one, I got to thinking. What had I been doing for the last few months that was different from before?

Well, I had been taking fish oil capsules…? Googled ‘fish oil and acne’, and while a lot of the reviews said fish oil could help get rid of acne, a few people said it made things worse.

I stopped taking fish oil, and my skin indeed started looking better.

I decided to keep my appointment to see the dermatologist anyway because my skin was never perfect, and maybe this could help.

Let me ask you, how long after your appointment do you consider it reasonable to be seen by a doctor? Because 20 minutes, I can tolerate, but 45 minutes makes me want to kick somebody in the nuts.

Moreover, the doc started telling me what we were going to do before she even looked at my skin, and then only for—seriously—less than a second. Two topical prescription medications. $25 for one, $30 the other. Copay: $60.

I’m telling you, if I don’t look like Cate Blanchett after this, somebody’s nuts are getting kicked.

Opiner-Buddha

I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversation we had in the comments the other day. You know, about my being judgmental. I’m still a little surprised by Opiner’s reaction. Why did that post in particular offend him so mightily? I felt like that one was kind of a throwaway, actually. I wasn’t thinking horrible thoughts about CaryMale37. I just find unnecessary quotation marks funny. Clearly, I’m not the only one.

Listen, I make joke! (That has to be said with an Eastern European accent.)

I mean, yes, I’m judgmental. But seriously, once I get to know you, I nearly always adore you. I’m going to say 99.64% of the people I get to know? I am almost pathologically admiring of them. I’m arguing a case for their awesomeness inside my head at all times, and they just keep providing me with evidence. (The other 0.36% of the people I meet I think are total douches.)

So, should I judge people I don’t know? Probably not.

Do I do it? Yep.

Is it funny? I think so. Often.

…But I’m coachable. I’ll work on it.

I knew this guy, only peripherally really, when I lived in New York. He was probably in his mid-forties, businessman. At one point, he said to me, “I’ve started looking at all criticism as coaching. Even personal attacks, I just take as something to consider and work on to be more effective with people.”

My Catholic friend Cat frequently listens to a Buddhist podcast. When I told her about remembering what the businessman had said, she mentioned that her podcast monk often says something like: Let everyone be your Buddha. Every person that you meet appears before you to teach you something.

So, from now on, I’ll try to remember to reflect on my judgments of prospective dates.

I’ll probably still make fun of them on the blog, though.

Avid Bruxist Seeks Personal Shopper

I hate clothes shopping. I mean it—I loathe it. I despise it. Just thinking about it makes me put a hand to my forehead and stagger to my fainting couch. And it’s for one reason, and one reason only. Not really. It’s for every reason, but for one huge, major reason.

Pants.

Shirts, I can buy. I don’t love doing it, but it’s one of those chores that just makes life a little easier in the long run. Thinking about all the no-shirt-no-service establishments to which I’m given entrée makes buying shirts tolerable.

Shoes, fine. I have a hierarchy when it comes to shoes: comfort > cost > cuteness. I’ll pay a lot of money for a comfortable pair of shoes. Whether my feet look cute in them is the least important part of the formula. I dig clogs, and I dig flip-flops. You will never find me out on a Friday night in FMPs. Maybe if I lost half my body weight, but would you want to walk around with 170 pounds of pressure funneled into your smooshed-up toes? I thought not. Whatever, shoe shopping is not the problem.

Dresses are all right. I mean, how often do I have to buy a dress? And I can actually look cute in a dress…I just tried to find photographic evidence, but the only full-body shot I could come up with was this:

What am I doing, you ask? I was trying to do this adorable pose my friend Cat does, in which she indeed looks like a cat. I look less like a cat, and more like a dainty, flirtacious hippo.

You’ll have to take my word for it, I can look really cute in a dress. (Sidenote: that flowery, flowy dress up there, I bought that in, like, ’99. No shit. Wore it to my friend Dan’s wedding in October of last year. Probably gonna wear it to your wedding when you invite me.)

Of course, with dresses there’s the chub-rub issue. Chubby girls require

these

or

this

to avoid shredding the insides of their thighs when they walk. But again, how often do I wear a dress? I’m gonna go with twice a year. An average of two people I know get married every year.

Which brings me to pants. First of all, finding pants that fit my ghetto ass requires a tenacity usually found only in the honey badger. Second, remember the chub-rub? Well, that continues with pants, but fortunately, or un-, there’s fabric in between the frictional bodies. Fortunately, because there’s no angry rash. Unfortunately, because I will abrade the living shit out of the inner-thigh part of a pair of jeans. Seriously, if you were stranded on a desert island, you wouldn’t need matches or even two sticks to rub together. All you’d need is me, a pair of size-14 corduroys, and an up-tempo song on your iPod. I would start walking and blaze that motherfucker up.

Now about two years ago, I found a pair of jeans at Marshall’s—Donna Karan jeans (she’s a designer!)—and they fit, and even the social worker at my old school (female, straight, sort of uptight) said, “Wow, Amy, those jeans make your bottom look so cute!” I loved those jeans from the moment I bought them.

Well

shit.

Yep, that’s my fingers sticking through the gaping hole in my DKNYs. But I wasn’t done with those pantaloons yet. Who knew when the next time was that I’d find such a prize. I decided to patch that hole. What could it take? A little fabric, some thread, a little elbow grease.

I am a master seamstress.

Fuck. I have to go buy some pants.

I Got Nothin

A number of people have told me they enjoy my blog. One guy said I’m his favorite blogger (buffs nails on shirt). A couple friends have mentioned they get mad when there are no new posts. This is all flattering, to say the least.

I love writing this blog. I look forward to the time, after work is finished and the dogs are fed and exercised, when I can sit down at my computer and put words into cyberspace.

And, I realized today that when I’m writing is the only time that I don’t think about food at all. So I’d like to do it as much as possible.

But, I have to admit, sometimes I have nothing to say. No—often I have nothing to say.

Part of me worries that I have a finite number of stories knocking around in my brain. Like I’m a vessel, and once I pour out the stories, all done.

And to a certain extent, that’s true. I have a terrible memory. Terrible. I think it’s because I started eating compulsively when I was in second grade, and if there’s one thing addiction does to a person, it robs her of the ability to be in the present moment. I was so fixated on the food that could satiate my demons that I just didn’t encode what was happening around me. So stories from the era when I was frequently and heavily binge-eating? (That would be 7 to 34ish.) Few and far between.

I try to remind myself that new things happen to me all the time, and I can write about those things. And that content on this blog is generated, not unloaded, and I can generate content any time, out of anything.

A lot of the time though, I got nothin. I futz around the house, I peruse only-sort-of friends’ Disney vacation photos on Facebook, I call people and answer emails. And I fret because I have no words.

However.

I’ve found a damn-near foolproof method of sparking an idea. I’ve used it a bunch of times, and it’s always rendered some catalyst for me. Here’s hoping I don’t jinx it. Ready?

I do nothing for two minutes.

Sometimes I have to do nothing for four minutes, but it has never taken more than that. In two to four minutes, something bubbles to the surface, and I start banging away on this keyboard.

So if you’re feeling uninspired, or overwhelmed, or underwhelmed, try it. And let me know what you think. (And if you have other means of inspiration, do tell.)

Yin, Meet Yang, Yang, Yin

Twice when I was growing up, maybe a couple years apart, I choked on food. Both times, it was a navel orange segment that I hadn’t bothered to chew enough. Both times, my mom noticed that I was about to die, reached in the back of my throat, pulled out the offending citrus, and flung it in the trash.

And went back to needle-pointing a Christmas stocking. Or braiding bread dough into Challah loaves.

In my adulthood, I asked her, “Mom, how could you not totally freak out when your baby’s airway was cut off?”

She paused and then said, “Well, I always thought there could be only one drama queen in a relationship, and your father had that pretty much covered.”

There’s something to be said for this. My mom and dad are opposites in many ways. Mom has a sort of practical/functional slant to her smarts (her PhD is in public health); Dad’s brain is more theoretical (his, ancient history). Mom’s never met a stranger; Dad’s a proud misanthrope. Mom’s parenting style was a little more laissez-faire; Dad was always fiercely protective, ready to swoop in and save the day.

My sister and brother-in-law are interesting complements as well. When I didn’t call after meeting FOT the first time, my sister started worrying. “I hope something bad didn’t happen on Amy’s date,” she said to her husband.

He cocked his head at her and said, “Maybe her date went really well.”

One time E got my sister a little figurine of Tigger standing behind Eeyore, the tiger yanking backwards on both of the donkey’s cheeks.

Wait a minute…

There it is. (Man, I love the internet!)

My brother-in-law : Tigger :: my sister : Eeyore.

But you have to have something in common, of course. My parents have been together 40 years, my sister and bro-in-law 21. They didn’t get there being diametrically opposed in every way.

So what do you absolutely have to share with your partner? And how much different is good?

I ask because I’m emailing with a guy from OKCupid right now who claims to be a positive nihilist (that sounds like me), loves food (um, mm-hm), and won’t get out of his car at his destination if Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” is on the radio (whoa! hello, kindred spirit!).

But he smokes “sometimes”, drinks “often”, and doesn’t want children.

I’m thinking I could tolerate (a) and (b), but (c) probably means no-go, right?